none the ethical library social rights and duties addresses to ethical societies by leslie stephen in two volumes vol. i. london swan sonnenschein & co., limited new york: macmillan & co. note. the following chapters are chiefly a republication of addresses delivered to the ethical societies of london. some have previously appeared in the _international journal of ethics_, the _national review_, and the _contemporary review_. the author has to thank the proprietors of these periodicals for their consent to the republication. l. s. contents. page the aims of ethical societies, science and politics, the sphere of political economy, the morality of competition, social equality, ethics and the struggle for existence, the aims of ethical societies.[ ] i am about to say a few words upon the aims of this society: and i should be sorry either to exaggerate or to depreciate our legitimate pretensions. it would be altogether impossible to speak too strongly of the importance of the great questions in which our membership of the society shows us to be interested. it would, i fear, be easy enough to make an over-estimate of the part which we can expect to play in their solution. i hold indeed, or i should not be here, that we may be of some service at any rate to each other. i think that anything which stimulates an active interest in the vital problems of the day deserves the support of all thinking men; and i propose to consider briefly some of the principles by which we should be guided in doing whatever we can to promote such an interest. [ ] address to west london ethical society, th december, . we are told often enough that we are living in a period of important intellectual and social revolutions. in one way we are perhaps inclined even to state the fact a little too strongly. we suffer at times from the common illusion that the problems of to-day are entirely new: we fancy that nobody ever thought of them before, and that when we have solved them, nobody will ever need to look for another solution. to ardent reformers in all ages it seems as if the millennium must begin with their triumph, and that their triumph will be established by a single victory. and while some of us are thus sanguine, there are many who see in the struggles of to-day the approach of a deluge which is to sweep away all that once ennobled life. the believer in the old creeds, who fears that faith is decaying, and the supernatural life fading from the world, denounces the modern spirit as materialising and degrading. the conscience of mankind, he thinks, has become drugged and lethargic; our minds are fixed upon sensual pleasures, and our conduct regulated by a blind struggle for the maximum of luxurious enjoyment. the period in his eyes is a period of growing corruption; modern society suffers under a complication of mortal diseases, so widely spread and deeply seated that at present there is no hope of regeneration. the best hope is that its decay may provide the soil in which seed may be sown of a far-distant growth of happier augury. such dismal forebodings are no novelty. every age produces its prophecies of coming woes. nothing would be easier than to make out a catena of testimonies from great men at every stage of the world's history, declaring each in turn that the cup of iniquity was now at last overflowing, and that corruption had reached so unprecedented a step that some great catastrophe must be approaching. a man of unusually lofty morality is, for that reason, more keenly sensitive to the lowness of the average standard, and too easily accepts the belief that the evils before his eyes must be in fact greater, and not, as may perhaps be the case, only more vividly perceived, than those of the bygone ages. a call to repentance easily takes the form of an assertion that the devil is getting the upper hand; and we may hope that the pessimist view is only a form of the discontent which is a necessary condition of improvement. anyhow, the diametrical conflict of prophecies suggests one remark which often impresses me. we are bound to call each other by terribly hard names. a gentleman assures me in print that i am playing the devil's game; depriving my victims, if i have any, of all the beliefs that can make life noble or happy, and doing my best to destroy the very first principles of morality. yet i meet my adversary in the flesh, and find that he treats me not only with courtesy, but with no inconsiderable amount of sympathy. he admits--by his actions and his argument--that i--the miserable sophist and seducer--have not only some good impulses, but have really something to say which deserves a careful and respectful answer. an infidel, a century or two ago, was supposed to have forfeited all claim to the ordinary decencies of life. now i can say, and can say with real satisfaction, that i do not find any difference of creed, however vast in words, to be an obstacle to decent and even friendly treatment. i am at times tempted to ask whether my opponent can be quite logical in being so courteous; whether, if he is as sure as he says that i am in the devil's service, i ought not, as a matter of duty, to be encountered with the old dogmatism and arrogance. i shall, however, leave my friends of a different way of thinking to settle that point for themselves. i cannot doubt the sincerity of their courtesy, and i will hope that it is somehow consistent with their logic. rather i will try to meet them in a corresponding spirit by a brief confession. i have often enough spoken too harshly and vehemently of my antagonists. i have tried to fix upon them too unreservedly what seemed to me the logical consequences of their dogmas. i have condemned their attempts at a milder interpretation of their creed as proofs of insincerity, when i ought to have done more justice to the legitimate and lofty motives which prompted them. and i at least am bound by my own views to admit that even the antagonist from whose utterances i differ most widely may be an unconscious ally, supplementing rather than contradicting my theories, and in great part moved by aspirations which i ought to recognise even when allied with what i take to be defective reasoning. we are all amenable to one great influence. the vast shuttle of modern life is weaving together all races and creeds and classes. we are no longer shut up in separate compartments, where the mental horizon is limited by the area visible from the parish steeple; each little section can no longer fancy, in the old childish fashion, that its own arbitrary prejudices and dogmas are parts of the eternal order of things; or infer that in the indefinite region beyond, there live nothing but monsters and anthropophagi, and men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders. the annihilation of space has made us fellows as by a kind of mechanical compulsion; and every advance of knowledge has increased the impossibility of taking our little church--little in comparison with mankind, be it even as great as the catholic church--for the one pattern of right belief. the first effect of bringing remote nations and classes into closer contact is often an explosion of antipathy; but in the long run it means a development of human sympathy. wide, therefore, as is the opposition of opinions as to what is the true theory of the world--as to which is the divine and which the diabolical element--i fully believe that beneath the war of words and dogmas there is a growth of genuine toleration, and, we must hope, of ultimate conciliation. this is manifest in another direction. the churches are rapidly making at least one discovery. they are beginning to find out that their vitality depends not upon success in theological controversy, but upon their success in meeting certain social needs and aspirations common to all classes. it is simply impossible for any thinking man at the present day to take any living interest, for example, in the ancient controversies. the "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would sound a mere lullaby to us. here and there a priest or a belated dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. there are people who can argue gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. such doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form in which certain still living problems had then to present themselves. they now require to be stated in a totally different shape, before we can even guess why they were once so exciting, or how men could have supposed their modes of attacking the question to be adequate. the pope and general booth still condemn each other's tenets; and in case of need would, i suppose, take down the old rusty weapons from the armoury. but each sees with equal clearness that the real stress of battle lies elsewhere. each tries, after his own fashion, to give a better answer than the socialists to the critical problems of to-day. we ought so far to congratulate both them and ourselves on the direction of their energies. nay, can we not even co-operate, and put these hopeless controversies aside? why not agree to differ about the questions which no one denies to be all but insoluble, and become allies in promoting morality? enormous social forces find their natural channel through the churches; and if the beliefs inculcated by the church were not, as believers assert, the ultimate cause of progress, it is at least clear that they were not incompatible with progress. the church, we all now admit, whether by reason of or in spite of its dogmatic creed, was for ages one great organ of civilisation, and still exercises an incalculable influence. why, then, should we, who cannot believe in the dogmas, yet fall into line with believers for practical purposes? churches insist verbally upon the importance of their dogma: they are bound to do so by their logical position; but, in reality, for them, as for us, the dogma has become in many ways a mere excrescence--a survival of barren formulæ which do little harm to anybody. carlyle, in his quaint phrase, talked about the exodus from houndsditch, but doubted whether it were yet time to cast aside the hebrew old clothes. they have become threadbare and antiquated. that gives a reason to the intelligent for abandoning them; but, also, perhaps a reason for not quarrelling with those who still care to masquerade in them. orthodox people have made a demand that the board schools should teach certain ancient doctrines about the nature of christ; and the demand strikes some of us as preposterous if not hypocritical. but putting aside the audacity of asking unbelievers to pay for such teaching, one might be tempted to ask, what harm could it really do? do you fancy for a moment that you can really teach a child of ten the true meaning of the incarnation? can you give him more than a string of words as meaningless as magical formulæ? i was brought up at the most orthodox of anglican seminaries. i learned the catechism, and heard lectures upon the thirty-nine articles. i never found that the teaching had ever any particular effect upon my mind. as i grew up, the obsolete exuviæ of doctrine dropped off my mind like dead leaves from a tree. they could not get any vital hold in an atmosphere of tolerable enlightenment. why should we fear the attempt to instil these fragments of decayed formulæ into the minds of children of tender age? might we not be certain that they would vanish of themselves? they are superfluous, no doubt, but too futile to be of any lasting importance. i remember that, when the first education act was being discussed, mention was made of a certain jew who not only sent his son to a christian school, but insisted upon his attending all the lessons. he had paid his fees, he said, for education in the gospels among other things, and he meant to have his money's worth. "but your son," it was urged, "will become a christian." "i," he replied, "will take good care of that at home." was not the jew a man of sense? can we suppose that the mechanical repetition of a few barren phrases will do either harm or good? as the child develops he will, we may hope, remember his multiplication table, and forget his fragments of the athanasian creed. let the wheat and tares be planted together, and trust to the superior vitality of the more valuable plant. the sentiment might be expressed sentimentally as easily as cynically. we may urge, like many sceptics of the last century, that christianity should be kept "for the use of the poor," and renounced in the esoteric creed of the educated. or we may urge the literary and æsthetic beauty of the old training, and wish it to be preserved to discipline the imagination, though we may reject its value as a historical statement of fact. the audience which i am addressing has, i presume, made up its mind upon such views. they come too late. it might have been a good thing, had it been possible, to effect the transition from old to new without a violent convulsion: good, if christian conceptions had been slowly developed into more simple forms; if the beautiful symbols had been retained till they could be impregnated with a new meaning; and if the new teaching of science and philosophy had gradually percolated into the ancient formulæ without causing a disruption. possibly the protestant reformation was a misfortune, and erasmus saw the truth more clearly than luther. i cannot go into might-have-beens. we have to deal with facts. a conspiracy of silence is impossible about matters which have been vehemently discussed for centuries. we have to take sides; and we at least have agreed to take the side of the downright thinker, who will say nothing that he does not believe, and hide nothing that he does believe, and speak out his mind without reservation or economy and accommodation. indeed, as things are, any other course seems to me to be impossible. i have spoken, for example, of general booth. many people heartily admire his schemes of social reform, and have been willing to subscribe for its support, without troubling themselves about his theology. i will make no objection; but i confess that i could not therefore treat that theology as either morally or intellectually respectable. it has happened to me once or twice to listen to expositions from orators of the salvation army. some of them struck me as sincere though limited, and others as the victims of an overweening vanity. the oratory, so far as i could hear, consisted in stringing together an endless set of phrases about the blood of christ, which, if they really meant anything, meant a doctrine as low in the intellectual scale as that of any of the objects of missionary enterprise. the conception of the transactions between god and man was apparently modelled upon the dealings of a petty tradesman. the "blood of christ" was regarded like the panacea of a quack doctor, which will cure the sins of anybody who accepts the prescription. for anything i can say, such a creed may be elevating--relatively: elevating as slavery is said to have been elevating when it was a substitute for extermination. the hymns of the army may be better than public-house melodies, and the excitement produced less mischievous than that due to gin. but the best that i can wish for its adherents is, that they should speedily reach a point at which they could perceive their doctrines to be debasing. i hope, indeed, that they do not realise their own meaning: but i could almost as soon join in some old pagan ceremonies, gash my body with knives, or swing myself from a hook, as indulge in this variety of spiritual intoxication. there are, it is true, plenty of more refined and intellectual preachers, whose sentiments deserve at least the respect due to tender and humane feeling. they have found a solution, satisfactory to themselves, of the great dilemma which presses on so many minds. a religion really to affect the vulgar must be a superstition; to satisfy the thoughtful, it must be a philosophy. is it possible to contrive so to fuse the crude with the refined as to make at least a working compromise? to me personally, and to most of us living at the present day, the enterprise appears to be impracticable. my own experience is, i imagine, a very common one. when i ceased to accept the teaching of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that i had never really believed. the contrast between the genuine convictions which guide and govern our conduct, and the professions which we were taught to repeat in church, when once realised, was too glaring. one belonged to the world of realities, and the other to the world of dreams. the orthodox formulæ represent, no doubt, a sentiment, an attempt to symbolise emotions which might be beautiful, or to indicate vague impressions about the tendency of things in general; but to put them side by side with real beliefs about facts was to reveal their flimsiness. the "i believe" of the creed seemed to mean something quite different from the "i believe" of politics and history and science. later experience has only deepened and strengthened that feeling. kind and loving and noble-minded people have sought to press upon me the consolations of their religion. i thank them in all sincerity; and i feel,--why should i not admit it?--that it may be a genuine comfort to set your melancholy to the old strain in which so many generations have embodied their sorrows and their aspirations. and yet to me, its consolation is an invitation to reject plain facts; to seek for refuge in a shadowy world of dreams and conjectures, which dissolve as you try to grasp them. the doctrine offered for my acceptance cannot be stated without qualifications and reserves and modifications, which make it as useless as it is vague and conjectural. i may learn in time to submit to the inevitable; i cannot drug myself with phrases which evaporate as soon as they are exposed to a serious test. you profess to give me the only motives of conduct; and i know that at the first demand to define them honestly--to say precisely what you believe and why you believe it--you will be forced to withdraw, and explain and evade, and at last retire to the safe refuge of a mystery, which might as well be admitted at starting. as i have read and thought, i have been more and more impressed with the obvious explanation of these observations. how should the beliefs be otherwise than shadowy and illusory, when their very substance is made of doubts laboriously and ingeniously twisted into the semblance of convictions? in one way or other that is the characteristic mark of the theological systems of the present day. proof is abandoned for persuasion. the orthodox believer professed once to prove the facts which he asserted and to show that his dogmas expressed the truth. he now only tries to show that the alleged facts don't matter, and that the dogmas are meaningless. nearly two centuries ago, for example, a deist pointed out that the writer of the book of daniel, like other people, must have written after the events which he mentioned. all the learned, down to dr. pusey, denounced his theory, and declared his argument to be utterly destructive of the faith. now an orthodox professor will admit that the deist was perfectly right, and only tries to persuade himself that arguments from facts are superfluous. the supposed foundation is gone: the superstructure is not to be affected. what the keenest disputant now seeks to show is, not that the truth of the records can be established beyond reasonable doubt; but that no absolute contradiction in terms is involved in supposing that they correspond more or less roughly to something which may possibly have happened. so long as a thing is not proved false by mathematical demonstration, i may still continue to take it for a divine revelation, and to listen respectfully when experienced statesmen and learned professors assure me with perfect gravity that they can believe in noah's flood or in the swine of gadara. they have an unquestionable right to believe if they please: and they expect me to accept the facts for the sake of the doctrine. there, unluckily, i have a similar difficulty. it is the orthodox who are the systematic sceptics. the most famous philosophers of my youth endeavoured to upset the deist by laying the foundation of agnosticism, arbitrarily tagged to an orthodox conclusion. they told me to believe a doctrine because it was totally impossible that i should know whether it was true or not, or indeed attach any real meaning to it whatever. the highest altar, as sir w. hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable god. others, seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to find in that the christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment of the highest philosophy. it is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has caught some accretion of human passion and superstition. the popular versions are false and debased; the old versions of the atonement, for example, monstrous; and the belief in the everlasting torture of sinners, a hideous and groundless caricature. with much that such men have said i could, of course, agree heartily; for, indeed, it expresses the strongest feelings which have caused religious revolt. but would it not be simpler to say, "the doctrine is not true," than to say, "it is true, but means just the reverse of what it was also taken to mean"? i prefer plain terms; and "without doubt he shall perish everlastingly" seems to be an awkward way of denying the endlessness of punishment. you cannot denounce the immorality of the old dogmas with the infidel, and then proclaim their infinite value with the believer. you defend the doctrine by showing that in its plain downright sense,--the sense in which it embodied popular imaginations,--it was false and shocking. the proposal to hold by the words evacuated of the old meaning is a concession of the whole case to the unbeliever, and a substitution of sentiment and aspiration for a genuine intellectual belief. explaining away, however dexterously and delicately, is not defending, but at once confessing error, and encumbering yourself with all the trammels of misleading associations. the more popular method, therefore, at the present day is not to rationalise, but to try to outsceptic the sceptic. we are told that we have no solid ground from reason at all, and that even physical science is as full of contradictions as theology. such enterprises, conducted with whatever ingenuity, are, as i believe, hopeless; but at least they are fundamentally and radically sceptical. that, under whatever disguises, is the true meaning of the catholic argument, which is so persuasive to many. to prove the truth of christianity by abstract reasoning may be hopeless; but nothing is easier than to persuade yourself to believe it, if once you will trust instinct in place of reason, and forget that instinct proves anything and everything. the success of such arguments with thoughtful men is simply a measure of the spread of scepticism. the conviction that truth is unattainable is the master argument for submitting to "authority". the "authority," in the scientific sense of any set of men who agree upon a doctrine, varies directly as their independence of each other. their "authority" in the legal sense varies as the closeness of their mutual dependence. as the consent loses its value logically, it gains in power of coercion. and therefore it is easy to substitute drilling for arguing, and to take up a belief as you accept admission to a society, as a matter of taste and feeling, with which abstract logic has nothing to do. the common dilemma--you must be a catholic or an atheist--means, that theology is only tenable if you drill people into belief by a vast organisation appealing to other than logical motives. i do not argue these points: i only indicate what i take to be your own conviction as well as mine. it seems to me, in fact, that the present state of mind--if we look to men's real thoughts and actions, not to their conventional phrases--is easily definable. it is simply a tacit recognition that the old orthodoxy cannot be maintained either by the evidence of facts or by philosophical argument. it has puzzled me sometimes to understand why the churches should insist upon nailing themselves down to the truth of their dogmas and their legendary history. why cannot they say frankly, what they seem to be constantly on the verge of saying--our dogmas and our history are not true, or not "true" in the historical or scientific sense of the word? to ask for such truth in the sphere of theology is as pedantic as to ask for it in the sphere of poetry. poetical truth means, not that certain events actually happened, or that the poetical "machinery" is to be taken as an existing fact; but that the poem is, so to speak, the projection of truths upon the cloudland of imagination. it reflects and gives sensuous images of truth; but it is only the philistine or the blockhead who can seriously ask, is it true? some such position seems to be really conceivable as an ultimate compromise. put aside the prosaic insistence upon literal matter-of-fact truth, and we may all agree to use the same symbolism, and interpret it as we please. this seems to me to be actually the view of many thoughtful people, though for obvious reasons it is not often explicitly stated. one reason is, of course, the consciousness that the great mass of mankind requires plain, tangible motives for governing its life; and if it once be admitted that so much of the orthodox doctrine is mere symbolism or adumbration of truths, the admission would involve the loss of the truths so indicated. moral conduct, again, and moral beliefs are supposed to depend upon some affirmation of these truths; and excellent people are naturally shy of any open admission which may appear to throw doubt upon the ultimate grounds of morality. indeed, if it could be really proved that men have to choose between renouncing moral truths and accepting unproved theories, it might be right--i will not argue the point--to commit intellectual suicide. if the truth is that we are mere animals or mere automata, shall we sacrifice the truth, or sacrifice what we have at least agreed to call our higher nature? for us the dilemma has no force: for we do not admit the discrepancy. we believe that morality depends upon something deeper and more permanent than any of the dogmas that have hitherto been current in the churches. it is a product of human nature, not of any of these transcendental speculations or faint survivals of traditional superstitions. morality has grown up independently of, and often in spite of, theology. the creeds have been good so far as they have accepted or reflected the moral convictions; but it is an illusion to suppose that they have generated it. they represent the dialect and the imagery by which moral truths have been conveyed to minds at certain stages of thought; but it is a complete inversion of the truth to suppose that the morality sprang out of them. from this point of view we must of necessity treat the great ethical questions independently. we cannot form a real alliance with thinkers radically opposed to us. divines tell us that we reject the one possible basis of morality. to us it appears that we are strengthening it, by severing it from a connection with doctrines arbitrary, incapable of proof, and incapable of retaining any consistent meaning. theologians once believed that hell-fire was the ultimate sentence, and persecution the absolute duty of every christian ruler. the churches which once burnt and exterminated are now only anxious to proclaim freedom of belief, and to cast the blame of persecution upon their rivals. divines have discovered that the doctrine of hell-fire deserves all that infidels have said of it; and a member of dante's church was arguing the other day that hell might on the whole be a rather pleasant place of residence. doctrines which can thus be turned inside out are hardly desirable bases for morality. so the early christians, again, were the socialists of their age, and took a view of dives and lazarus which would commend itself to the nihilists of to-day. the church is now often held up to us as the great barrier against socialism, and the one refuge against subversive doctrines. in a well-known essay on "people whom one would have wished to have seen," lamb and his friends are represented as agreeing that if christ were to enter they would all fall down and worship him. it may have been so; but if the man who best represents the ideas of early christians were to enter a respectable society of to-day, would it not be more likely to send for the police? when we consider such changes, and mark in another direction how the dogmas which once set half the world to cut the throats of the other half, have sunk into mere combinations of hard words, can we seriously look to the maintenance of dogmas, even in the teeth of reason, as a guarantee for ethical convictions? what you call retaining the only base of morality, appears to us to be trying to associate morality with dogmas essentially arbitrary and unreasonable. from this point of view it is naturally our opinion that we should promote all thorough discussion of great ethical problems in a spirit and by methods which are independent of the orthodox dogmas. there are many such problems undoubtedly of the highest importance. the root of all the great social questions of which i have spoken lies in the region of ethics; and upon that point, at least, we can go along with much that is said upon the orthodox side. we cannot, indeed, agree that ethics can be adequately treated by men pledged to ancient traditions, employing antiquated methods, and always tempted to have an eye to the interest of their own creeds and churches. but we can fully agree that ethical principles underlie all the most important problems. every great religious reform has been stimulated by the conviction that the one essential thing is a change of spirit, not a mere modification of the external law, which has ceased to correspond to genuine beliefs and powerful motives. the commonest criticism, indeed, of all projectors of new utopias is that they propose a change of human nature. the criticism really suggests a sound criterion. unless the change proposed be practicable, the utopia will doubtless be impossible. and unless some practicable change be proposed, the utopia, even were it embodied in practice, would be useless. if the sole result of raising wages were an increase in the consumption of gin, wages might as well stay at a minimum. but the tacit assumption that all changes of human nature are impracticable is simply a cynical and unproved assertion. all of us here hold, i imagine, that human nature has in a sense been changed. we hold that, with all its drawbacks, progress is not an illusion; that men have become at least more tolerant and more humane; that ancient brutalities have become impossible; and that the suffering of the weaker excites a keener sympathy. to say that, in that sense, human nature must be changed, is to say only that the one sound criterion of all schemes for social improvement lies in their ethical tendency. the standard of life cannot be permanently raised unless you can raise the standard of motive. old-fashioned political theorists thought that a simple change of the constitutional machinery would of itself remedy all evils, and failed to recognise that behind the institutions lie all the instincts and capabilities of the men who are to work them. a similar fallacy is prevalent, i fancy, in regard to what we call social reforms. some scheme for a new mode of distributing the products of industry would, it is often assumed, remedy all social evils. to my thinking, no such change would do more than touch the superficial evils, unless it had also some tendency to call out the higher and repress the lower impulses. unless we can to some extent change "human nature," we shall be weaving ropes of sand, or devising schemes for perpetual motion, for driving our machinery more effectively without applying fresh energy. we shall be falling into the old blunders; approving jack cade's proposal--as recorded by shakespeare--that the three-hooped pot should have seven hoops; or attempting to get rid of poverty by converting the whole nation into paupers. no one, perhaps, will deny this in terms; and to admit it frankly is to admit that every scheme must be judged by its tendency to "raise the manhood of the poor," and to make every man, rich and poor, feel that he is discharging a useful function in society. old robert owen, when he began his reforms, rested his doctrine and his hopes of perfectibility upon the scientific application of a scheme for "the formation of character". his plans were crude enough, and fell short of success. but he had seen the real conditions of success; and when, in after years, he imagined that a new society might be made by simply collecting men of any character in a crowd, and inviting them to share alike, he fell into the inevitable failure. modern socialists might do well to remember his history. now it is, as i understand, primarily the aim of an ethical society to promote the rational discussion of these underlying ethical principles. we wish to contribute to the clearest understanding we can of the right ends to which human energy should be devoted, and of the conditions under which such devotion is most likely to be rewarded with success. we desire to see the great controversy carried on in the nearest possible approach to a scientific spirit. that phrase implies, as i have said, that we must abandon much of the old guidance. the lights by which our ancestors professed to direct their course are not for us supernatural signs, shining in a transcendental region, but at most the beacons which they had themselves erected, and valuable as indications, though certainly not as infallible guides, to the right path. we must question everything, and be prepared to modify or abandon whatever is untenable. we must be scientific in spirit, in so far as we must trust nothing but a thorough and systematic investigation of facts, however the facts may be interpreted. undoubtedly, the course marked out is long and arduous. it is perfectly true, moreover, as our antagonists will hasten to observe, that professedly scientific reasoners are hardly better agreed than their opponents. if they join upon some negative conclusions, and upon some general principles of method, they certainly do not reach the same results. they have at present no definite creed to lay down. i need only refer, for example, to one very obvious illustration. the men who were most conspicuous for their attempt to solve social problems by scientific methods, and most confident that they had succeeded, were, probably, those who founded the so-called "classical" political economy, and represented what is now called the individualist point of view. government, they were apt to think, should do nothing but stand aside, see fair-play, and keep our knives from each other's throats and our hands out of each other's pockets. much as their doctrines were denounced, this view is still represented by the most popular philosopher of the day. and undoubtedly we shall do well to take to heart the obvious moral. if we still believe in the old-fashioned doctrines, we must infer that to work out a scientific doctrine is by no means to secure its acceptance. if we reject them we must argue that the mere claim to be scientific may inspire men with a premature self-confidence, which tends only to make their errors more systematic. when, however, i look at the actual course of controversy, i am more impressed by another fact. "individualism" is sometimes met by genuine argument. more frequently, i think, it is met by simple appeal to sentiment. this kind of thing, we are told, is exploded; it is not up to date; it is as obsolete as the plesiosaurus; and therefore, without bothering ourselves about your reasoning, we shall simply neglect it. talk as much as you please, we can get a majority on the other side. we shall disregard your arguments, and, therefore--it is a common piece of logic at the present day--your arguments must be all wrong. i must be content here with simply indicating my own view. i think, in fact, that, in this as in other cases, the true answer to extreme theorists would be very different. i hold that we would begin by admitting the immense value of the lesson taught by the old individualists, if that be their right name. if they were precipitate in laying down "iron laws" and proclaiming inexorable necessity, they were perfectly right in pointing out that there are certain "laws of human nature," and conditions of social welfare, which will not be altered by simply declaring them to be unpleasant. they did an inestimable service in emphatically protesting against the system of forcibly suppressing, or trying to suppress, deep-seated evils, without an accurate preliminary diagnosis of the causes. and--not to go into remote questions--the "individualist" creed had this merit, which is related to our especial aims. the ethical doctrine which they preached may have had--i think that it had--many grave defects; but at least it involved a recognition of the truth which their opponents are too apt to shun or reject. they, at least, asserted strenuously the cardinal doctrine of the importance of individual responsibility. they might draw some erroneous inferences, but they could not put too emphatically the doctrine that men must not be taught to shift the blame of all their sufferings upon some mysterious entity called society, or expect improvement unless, among other virtues, they will cultivate the virtue of strenuous, unremitting, masculine self-help. if this be at all true, it may indicate what i take to be the aim of our society, or rather of us as members of an ethical society. we hold, that is, that the great problems of to-day have their root, so to speak, in an ethical soil. they will be decided one way or other by the view which we take of ethical questions. the questions, for example, of what is meant by social justice, what is the justification of private property, or the limits of personal liberty, all lead us ultimately to ethical foundations. the same is, of course, true of many other problems. the demand for political rights of women is discussed, rightly no doubt, upon grounds of justice, and takes us to some knotty points. does justice imply the equality of the sexes; and, if so, in what sense of "equality"? and, beyond this, we come to the question, what would be the bearing of our principles upon the institution of marriage, and upon the family bond? no question can be more important, or more vitally connected with ethics. we, at any rate, can no longer answer such problems by any traditional dogmatism. they--and many other questions which i need not specify--have been asked, and have yet to be answered. they will probably not be answered by a simple yes or no, nor by any isolated solution of a metaphysical puzzle. undoubtedly, a vast mass of people will insist upon being consulted, and will adopt methods which cannot be regarded as philosophical. therefore, it is a matter of pressing importance that all people who can think at all should use their own minds, and should do their best to widen and strengthen the influence of the ablest thinkers. the chaotic condition of the average mind is our reason for trying to strengthen the influence, always too feeble, of the genuine thinkers. much that passes itself off for thought is simply old prejudice in a new dress. tradition has always this, indeed, to say for itself: that it represents the product of much unconscious reasoning from experience, and that it is at least compatible with such progress as has been hitherto achieved. progress has in future to take place in the daylight, and under the stress of keen discussion from every possible point of view. it would be rash indeed to assume that we can hope to see the substitution of purely rational and scientific methods for the old haphazard and tentative blundering into slightly better things. it is possible enough that the creed of the future may, after all, be a compromise, admitting some elements of higher truth, but attracting the popular mind by concessions to superstition and ignorance. we can hardly hope to get rid of the rooted errors which have so astonishing a vitality. but we should desire, and, so far as in us lies, endeavour to secure the presence of the largest possible element of genuine and reasoned conviction in the faith of our own and the rising generation. i have not sought to say anything new. i have only endeavoured to define the general position which we, as i imagine, have agreed to accept. we hold in common that the old dogmas are no longer tenable, though we are very far from being agreed as to what should replace them. we have each, i dare say, our own theory; we agree that our theories, whatever they may be, are in need of strict examination, of verification, it may be, but it may be also of modification or rejection. we hope that such societies as this may in the first place serve as centres for encouraging and popularising the full and free discussion of the great questions. we wish that people who have reached a certain stage of cultivation should be made aware of the course which is being taken by those who may rightly claim to be in the van. we often wish to know, as well as we can, what is the direction of the deeper currents of thought; what genuine results, for example, have been obtained by historical criticism, especially as applied to the religious history of the world; we want to know what are the real points now at issue in the world of science; the true bearing of the theories of evolution, and so forth, which are known by name far beyond the circle in which their logical reasoning is really appreciated; we want to know, again, what are the problems which really interest modern metaphysicians or psychologists; in what directions there seems to be a real promise of future achievement, and in what directions it seems to be proved by experience that any further expansion of intellectual energy is certain to result only in the discovery of mares' nests. matthew arnold would have expressed this by saying that we are required to be made accessible to the influence of the zeitgeist. there is a difficulty, no doubt, in discovering by what signs we may recognise the utterances of the zeitgeist; and distinguish between loyalty to the real intellectual leaders and a simple desire to be arrayed in the last new fashion in philosophy. there is no infallible sign; and, yet, a genuine desire to discover the true lines in which thought is developing, is not of the less importance. arnold, like others, pointed the moral by a contrast between england and germany. the best that has been done in england, it is said, has generally been done by amateurs and outsiders. they have, perhaps, certain advantages, as being less afraid to strike into original paths, and even the originality of ignorance is not always, though it may be in nine cases out of ten, a name for fresh blundering. but if sporadic english writers have now and then hit off valuable thoughts, there can be no doubt that we have had a heavy price to pay. the comparative absence of any class, devoted, like german professors, to a systematic and combined attempt to spread the borders of knowledge and speculation, has been an evil which is the more felt in proportion as specialisation of science and familiarity with previous achievements become more important. it would be very easy to give particular instances of our backwardness. how different would have been the course of english church history, said somebody, if newman had only known german! he would have breathed a larger air, and might have desisted--i suppose that was the meaning--from the attempt to put life into certain dead bones. and with equal truth, it may be urged, how much better work might have been done by j. s. mill if he had really read kant! he might not have been converted, but he would have been saved from maintaining in their crude form, doctrines which undoubtedly require modification. under his reign, english thought was constantly busied with false issues, simply from ignorance of the most effective criticism. it is needless to point out how much time is wasted in the defence of positions that have long been turned by the enemy from sheer want of acquaintance with the relevant evidence, or with the logic that has been revealed by the slow thrashing out of thorough controversy. it would be invidious perhaps to insist too much upon another obvious result: the ease with which a man endowed with a gift of popular rhetoric, and a facility for catching at the current phrases, can set up as a teacher, however palpable to the initiated may be his ignorance. scientific thought has perhaps as much to fear from the false prophets who take its name as from the open enemies who try to stifle its voice. i would rather emphasise another point, perhaps less generally remarked. the study has its idols as well as its market-place. certain weaknesses are developed in the academical atmosphere as well as in the arenas of public discussion. freeman used to say that english historians had avoided certain errors into which german writers of far greater knowledge and more thorough scholarship had fallen, simply because points were missed by a professor in a german university which were plain to those who, like many englishmen, had to take a part in actual political work. i think that this is not without a meaning for us. we have learnt, very properly, to respect german research and industry; and we are trying in various directions to imitate their example. perhaps it would be as well to keep an eye upon some german weaknesses. a philosophy made for professors is apt to be a philosophy for pedants. a professor is bound to be omniscient; he has to have an answer to everything; he is tempted to construct systems which will pass muster in the lecture-room, and to despise the rest of their applicability to daily life. i confess myself to be old-fashioned enough to share some of the old english prejudices against those gigantic structures which have been thrown out by imposing philosophers, who evolved complete systems of metaphysics and logic and religion and politics and æsthetics out of their own consciousness. we have multiplied professors of late, and professors are bound to write books, and to magnify the value of their own studies. they must make a show of possessing an encyclopædic theory which will explain everything and take into account all previous theories. sometimes, perhaps, they will lose themselves in endless subtleties and logomachies and construct cobwebs of the brain, predestined to the rubbish-heap of extinct philosophies. it is enough, however, to urge that a mere student may be the better for keeping in mind the necessity of keeping in mind real immediate human interests; as the sentimentalist has to be reminded of the importance of strictly logical considerations. and i think too that a very brief study of the most famous systems of old days will convince us that philosophers should be content with a more modest attitude than they have sometimes adopted; give up the pretensions to framing off-hand theories of things in general, and be content to puzzle out a few imperfect truths which may slowly work their way into the general structure of thought. i wish to speak humbly as befits one who cannot claim any particular authority for his opinion. but, in all humility, i suggest that if we can persuade men of reputation in the regions where subtle thought and accurate research are duly valued, we shall be doing good, not only to ourselves, but, if i may whisper it, to them. we value their attainments so highly that we desire their influence to spread beyond the narrow precinct of university lecture-rooms; and their thoughts be, at the same time, stimulated and vitalised by bringing them into closer contact with the problems which are daily forced upon us in the business of daily life. a divorce between the men of thought and the men of action is really bad for both. whatever tends to break up the intellectual stupor of large classes, to rouse their minds, to increase their knowledge of the genuine work that is being done, to provide them even with more of such recreations as refine and invigorate, must have our sympathy, and will be useful both to those who confer and to those who receive instruction. so, after all, a philosopher can learn few things of more importance than the art of translating his doctrines into language intelligible and really instructive to the outside world. there was a period when real thinkers, as locke and berkeley and butler and hume, tried to express themselves as pithily and pointedly as possible. they were, say some of their critics, very shallow: they were over-anxious to suit the taste of wits and the town: and in too much fear of the charge of pedantry. well, if some of our profounder thinkers would try for once to pack all that they really have to say as closely as they can, instead of trying to play every conceivable change upon every thought that occurs to them, i fancy that they would be surprised both at the narrowness of the space which they would occupy and the comparative greatness of the effect they would produce. an ethical society should aim at supplying a meeting-place between the expert and specialist on one side, and, on the other, with the men who have to apply ideas to the complex concretes of political and social activity. how far we can succeed in furthering that aim i need not attempt to say. but i will conclude by reverting to some thoughts at which i hinted at starting. you may think that i have hardly spoken in a very sanguine or optimistic tone. i have certainly admitted the existence of enormous difficulties and the probabilities of very imperfect success. i cannot think that the promised land of which we are taking a pisgah sight is so near or the view so satisfactory as might be wished. a mirage like that which attended our predecessors may still be exercising illusions for us; and i anticipate less an immediate fruition, than a beginning of another long cycle of wanderings through a desert, let us hope rather more fertile than that which we have passed. if this be something of a confession you may easily explain it by personal considerations. in an old controversy which i was reading the other day, one of the disputants observed that his adversary held that the world was going from bad to worse. "i do not wonder at the opinion," he remarks; "for i am every day more tempted to embrace it myself, since every day i am leaving youth further behind." i am old enough to feel the force of that remark. without admitting senility, i have lived long enough, that is, to know well that for me the brighter happiness is a thing of the past; that i have to look back even to realise what it means; and to feel that a sadder colouring is conferred upon the internal world by the eye "which hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." i have watched the brilliant promise of many contemporaries eclipsed by premature death; and have too often had to apply newton's remark, "if that man had lived, we might have known something". lights which once cheered me have gone out, and are going out all too rapidly; and, to say nothing of individuals, i have also lived long enough to watch the decay of once flourishing beliefs. i can remember, only too vividly, the confident hope with which many young men, whom i regarded as the destined leaders of progress, affirmed that the doctrines which they advocated were going forth conquering and to conquer; and though i may still think that those doctrines had a permanent value, and were far from deserving the reproaches now often levelled at them, i must admit that we greatly exaggerated our omniscience. i am often tempted, i confess, to draw the rather melancholy moral that some of my younger friends may be destined to disillusionment, and may be driven some thirty years hence to admit that their present confidence was a little in excess. i admit all this: but i do not admit that my view could sanction despondency. i can see perhaps ground for foreboding which i should once have rejected. i can realise more distinctly, not only the amount of misery in the world, but the amount of misdirected energy, the dulness of the average intellect, and the vast deadweight of superstition and dread of the light with which all improvement must have to reckon. and yet i also feel that, if a complacent optimism be impossible, the world was never so full of interest. when we complain of the stress and strain and over-excitement of modern society we indicate, i think, a real evil; but we also tacitly admit that no one has any excuse for being dull. in every direction there is abundant opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation for whatever energy they may possess. there is work to be found everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. the fields, surely, are white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated, and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. we know what has been done in the field of physical science. it has made the world infinite. the days of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a star was the chariot of a deity. the poor deity, however, had, in fact, a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the underground railway. to us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe beyond universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange fascination. the prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old figment of the childish imagination. the first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling conception of the universe represented by dante's superlative power; and made incredible the systems based on the conception that man can be the centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of this place. it is enough to point to the similar change due to modern theories of evolution. the impassable barriers of thought are broken down. instead of the verbal explanation, which made every plant and animal an ultimate and inexplicable fact, we now see in each a movement in an indefinite series of complex processes, stretching back further than the eye can reach into the indefinite past. if we are sometimes stunned by the sense of inconceivable vastness, we feel, at least, that no intellectual conqueror need ever be affected by the old fear. for him there will always be fresh regions to conquer. every discovery suggests new problems; and though knowledge may be simplified and codified, it will always supply a base for fresh explanations of the indefinite regions beyond. can that which is true of the physical sciences be applied in any degree to the so-called moral sciences? to bentham, i believe, is ascribed the wish that he could fall asleep and be waked at the end of successive centuries, to take note of the victories achieved in the intervals by his utilitarianism. tennyson, in one of his youthful poems, played with the same thought. it would be pleasant, as the story of the sleeping beauty suggested, to rise every hundred years to mark the progress made in science and politics; and to see the "titanic forces" that would come to the birth in divers climes and seasons; for we, he says-- for we are ancients of the earth, and in the morning of the times. tennyson, if this expressed his serious belief, seems to have lost his illusions; and it is probable enough that bentham's would have had some unpleasant surprises could his wish have been granted. it is more than a century since his doctrine was first revealed, and yet the world has not become converted; and some people doubt whether it ever will be. if, indeed, bentham's speculations had been adopted; if we had all become convinced that morality means aiming at the greatest happiness of the greatest number; if we were agreed as to what is happiness, and what is the best way of promoting it,--there would still have been a vast step to take, no less than to persuade people to desire to follow the lines of conduct which tend to minimise unhappiness. the mere intellectual conviction that this or that will be useful is quite a different thing from the desire. you no more teach men to be moral by giving them a sound ethical theory, than you teach them to be good shots by explaining the theory of projectiles. a religion implies a philosophy, but a philosophy is not by itself a religion. the demand that it should be is, i hold, founded upon a wrong view as to the relation between the abstract theory and the art of conduct. to convert the world you have not merely to prove your theories, but to stimulate the imagination, to discipline the passions, to provide modes of utterance for the emotions and symbols which may represent the fundamental beliefs--briefly, to do what is done by the founders of the great religions. to transmute speculation into action is a problem of tremendous difficulty, and i only glance in the briefest way at its nature. we, i take it, as members of ethical societies, have no claim to be, even in the humblest way, missionaries of a new religion: but are simply interested in doing what we can to discuss in a profitable way the truths which it ought to embody or reflect. but that is itself a work of no trifling importance; and we may imagine that a bentham, refreshed by his century's slumber, and having dropped some of his little personal vanities, would on the whole be satisfied with what he saw. if bacon could again come to life, he too would find that the methods which he contemplated and the doctrines which he preached were narrow and refutive; yet his prophecies of scientific growth have been more than realised by his successors, modifying, in some ways, rejecting his principles. and so bentham might hold to-day that, although his sacred formula was not so exhaustive or precise as he fancied, yet the conscious and deliberate pursuit of the happiness of mankind had taken a much more important place in the aspirations of the time. he would see that the vast changes which have taken place in society, vast beyond all previous conception, were bringing up ever new problems, requiring more elaborate methods, and more systematic reasoning. he would observe that many of the abuses which he denounced have disappeared, and that though progress does not take place along the precise lines which he laid down, there is both a clearer recognition of the great ends of conduct, and a general advance in the direction which he desired. that this can be carried on by promoting a free and full discussion of first principles; that the great social evils which still exist can be diminished, and the creed of the future, however dim its outlines may be to our perception, may be purified as much as possible from ancient prejudice and superstition, is our faith; and however little we can do to help in carrying out that process, we desire to do that little. science and politics.[ ] it is with great pleasure that i address you as president of this society. your main purpose, as i understand, is to promote the serious study of political and social problems in a spirit purged from the prejudice and narrowness of mere party conflict. you desire, that is, to promote a scientific investigation of some of the most important topics to which the human mind can devote itself. there is no purpose of which i approve more cordially: yet the very statement suggests a doubt. to speak of science and politics together is almost to suggest irony. and if politics be taken in the ordinary sense; if we think of the discussions by which the immediate fate of measures and of ministries is decided, i should be inclined to think that they belong to a sphere of thought to which scientific thought is hardly applicable, and in which i should be personally an unwarrantable intruder. my friends have sometimes accused me, indeed, of indifference to politics. i confess that i have never been able to follow the details of party warfare with the interest which they excite in some minds: and reasons, needless to indicate, have caused me to stray further and further away from intercourse with the society in which such details excite a predominant--i do not mean to insinuate an excessive--interest. i feel that if i were to suggest any arguments bearing directly upon home rule or disestablishment, i should at once come under that damnatory epithet "academical," which so neatly cuts the ground from under the feet of the political amateur. moreover, i recognise a good deal of justice in the implied criticism. an active politician who wishes to impress his doctrines upon his countrymen, should have a kind of knowledge to which i can make no pretension. i share the ordinary feelings of awful reverence with which the human bookworm looks up to the man of business. he has faculties which in me are rudimentary, but which i can appreciate by their contrast to my own feebleness. the "knowledge of the world" ascribed to lawyers, to politicians, financiers, and such persons, like the "knowledge of the human heart" so often ascribed to dramatists and novelists, represents, i take it, a very real kind of knowledge; but it is rather an instinct than a set of definite principles; a power of somehow estimating the tendencies and motives of their fellow-creatures in a mass by rule of thumb, rather than by any distinctly assignable logical process; only to be gained by long experience and shrewd observation of men and cities. such a faculty, as it reaches sound results without employing explicit definitions and syllogisms and inductive processes, sometimes inclines its possessors to look down too contemptuously upon the closet student. [ ] address to the social and political education league, th march, . while, however, i frankly confess my hopeless incapacity for taking any part in the process by which party platforms are constructed, i should be ashamed to admit that i was not very keenly interested in political discussions which seem to me to touch vitally important matters. and fully recognising the vast superiority of the practical man in his own world, i also hold that he should not treat me and my like as if we, according to the famous comparison, were black beetles, and he at the opposite pole of the universe. there exists, in books at least, such a thing as political theory, apart from that claiming to underlie the immediate special applications. your practical man is given to appealing to such theories now and then; though i confess that he too often leaves the impression of having taken them up on the spur of the moment to round a peroration and to give dignity to a popular cry; and that, in his lips, they are apt to sound so crude and artificial that one can only wonder at his condescending to notice them. he ridicules them as the poorest of platitudes whenever they are used by an antagonist, and one can only hope that his occasional homage implies that he too has a certain belief that there ought to be, and perhaps may somewhere be, a sound theory, though he has not paid it much attention. well, we, i take it, differ from him simply in this respect, that we believe more decidedly that such theory has at least a potential existence; and that if hitherto it is a very uncertain and ambiguous guide, the mere attempt to work it out seriously may do something to strengthen and deepen our practical political convictions. a man of real ability, who is actively engaged in politics without being submerged by merely political intrigues, can hardly fail to wish at least to institute some kind of research into the principles which guide his practice. to such a desire we may attribute some very stimulating books, such, for example, as bagehot's _physics and politics_ or mr. bryce's philosophical study of the united states. what i propose to do is to suggest a few considerations as to the real value and proper direction of these arguments, which lie, as it were, on the borderland between the immediate "platform" and the abstract theory. philosophers have given us the name "sociology"--a barbarous name, say some--for the science which deals with the subject matter of our inquiries. is it more than a name for a science which may or may not some day come into existence? what is science? it is simply organised knowledge; that part of our knowledge which is definite, established beyond reasonable doubt, and which achieves its task by formulating what are called "scientific laws". laws in this sense are general formulæ, which, when the necessary data are supplied, will enable us to extend our knowledge beyond the immediate facts of perception. given a planet, moving at a given speed in a given direction, and controlled by given attractive forces, we can determine its place at a future moment. or given a vegetable organism in a given environment, we can predict within certain limits the way in which it will grow, although the laws are too obscure and too vague to enable us to speak of it with any approach to the precision of astronomy. and we should have reached a similar stage in sociology if from a given social or political constitution adopted by a given population, we could prophesy what would be the results. i need not say that any approximation to such achievements is almost indefinitely distant. personal claims to such powers of prediction rather tend to bring discredit upon the embryo science. coleridge gives in the _biographia literaria_ a quaint statement of his own method. on every great occurrence, he says, he tried to discover in past history the event that most nearly resembled it. he examined the original authorities. "then fairly subtracting the points of difference from the points of likeness," as the balance favoured the former or the latter, he conjectured that the result would be the same, or different. so, for example, he was able to prophesy the end of the spanish rising against napoleon from the event of the war between philip ii. and the dutch provinces. that is, he cried, "heads!" and on this occasion the coin did not come down tails. but i need hardly point out how impossible is the process of political arithmetic. what is meant by adding or subtracting in this connection? such a rule of three would certainly puzzle me, and, i fancy, most other observers. we may say that the insurrection of a patriotic people, when they are helped from without, and their oppressors have to operate from a distant base and to fight all europe at the same time, will often succeed; and we may often be right; but we should not give ourselves the airs of prophets on that account. there are many superficial analogies of the same character. my predecessor, professor dicey, pointed out some of them, to confirm his rather depressing theory that history is nothing but an old almanac. let me take a common one, which, i think, may illustrate our problem. there is a certain analogy between the cases of cæsar, cromwell, and napoleon. in each case we have a military dictatorship as the final outcome of a civil war. some people imagined that this analogy would apply to the united states, and that washington or grant would be what was called the man on horseback. the reasoning really involved was, in fact, a very simple one. the destruction of an old system of government makes some form of dictatorship the only alternative to chaos. it therefore gives a chance to the one indisputable holder of power in its most unmistakable shape, namely, to the general of a disciplined army. a soldier accordingly assumed power in each of the three first cases, although the differences between the societies ruled by the roman, the english and the french dictators are so vast that further comparison soon becomes idle. neither washington nor grant had the least chance of making themselves dictators had they wished, because the civil wars had left governments perfectly uninjured and capable of discharging all their functions, and had not produced a regular army with interests of its own. in this and other cases, i should say that such an analogy may be to some extent instructive, but i should certainly deny that there was anything like a scientific induction. we, happily, can reason to some extent upon political matters by the help of simple common sense before it has undergone that process of organisation, of reduction to precise measurable statements, which entitles it to be called a scientific procedure. the resemblance of washington to cromwell was of the external and superficial order. it may be compared to those analogies which exist between members of different natural orders without implying any deeper resemblance. a whale, we know, is like a fish in so far as he swims about in the sea, and he has whatever fishlike qualities are implied in the ability to swim. he will die on land, though not from the same causes. but, physiologically, he belongs to a different race, and we should make blunders if we argued from the external likeness to a closer resemblance. or, to drop what may be too fanciful a comparison, it may be observed that all assemblies of human beings may be contrasted in respect of being numerous or select, and have certain properties in consequence. we may therefore make some true and general propositions about the contrasts between the action of small and large consultative bodies which will apply to many widely different cases. a good many, and, i think, some really valuable observations of this kind have been made, and form the substance of many generalisations laid down as to the relative advantages of democracy and aristocracy. now i should be disposed to say that such remarks belong rather to the morphology than the physiology of the social organism. they indicate external resemblances between bodies of which the intimate constitution and the whole mode of growth and conditions of vitality, may be entirely different. such analogies, then, though not without their value, are far from being properly scientific. what remains? there is, shall we say, no science of sociology--merely a heap of vague, empirical observations, too flimsy to be useful in strict logical inference? i should, i confess, be apt to say so myself. then, you may proceed, is it not idle to attempt to introduce a scientific method? and to that i should emphatically reply, no! it is of the highest importance. the question, then, will follow, how i can maintain these two positions at once. and to that i make, in the first place, this general answer: sociology is still of necessity a very vague body of approximate truths. we have not the data necessary for obtaining anything like precise laws. a mathematician can tell you precisely what he means when he speaks of bodies moving under the influence of an attraction which varies inversely as the square of the distance. but what are the attractive forces which hold together the body politic? they are a number of human passions, which even the acutest psychologists are as yet quite unable to analyse or to classify: they act according to laws of which we have hardly the vaguest inkling; and, even if we possessed any definite laws, the facts to which they have to be applied are so amazingly complex as to defy any attempt at assigning results. there is, so far as i can see, no ground for supposing that there is or ever can be a body of precise truths at all capable of comparison with the exact sciences. but this obvious truth, though it implies very narrow limits to our hopes of scientific results, does not force us to renounce the application of scientific method. the difficulty applies in some degree even to physiology as compared with physics, as the vital phenomena are incomparably more complex than those with which we have to deal in the simpler sciences; and yet nobody doubts that a scientific physiology is a possibility, and, to some extent, a reality. now, in sociology, however imperfect it may be, we may still apply the same methods which have been so fruitful in other departments of thought. we may undertake it in the scientific spirit which depends upon patient appeal to observation, and be guided by the constant recollection that we are dealing with an organism, the various relations of whose constituent parts are determined by certain laws to which we may, perhaps, make some approximation. we may do so, although their mutual actions and reactions are so complex and subtle that we can never hope to disentangle them with any approach to completeness. and one test of the legitimacy of our methods will be, that although we do not hope to reach any precise and definitely assignable law, we yet reach, or aim at reaching, results which, while wanting in precision, want precision alone to be capable of incorporation in an ideal science such as might actually exist for a supernatural observer of incomparably superior powers. a man who knows, though he knows nothing more, that the moon is kept in its orbit by forces similar to or identical with those which cause the fall of an apple, knows something which only requires more definite treatment to be made into a genuine theory of gravitation. if, on the contrary, he merely pays himself with words, with vague guesses about occult properties, or a supposed angel who directs the moon's course, he is still in the unscientific stage. his theory is not science still in the vague, but something which stops the way to science. now, if we can never hope to get further than the step which in the problem of gravitation represents the first step towards science, yet that step may be a highly important one. it represents a diversion of the current of thought from such channels as end in mere shifting sands of speculation, into the channel which leads towards some definite conclusion, verifiable by experience, and leading to conclusions, not very precise, but yet often pointing to important practical results. it may, perhaps, be said that, as the change which i am supposing represents only a change of method and spirit, it can achieve no great results in actual assignable truth. well! a change of method and spirit is, in my opinion, of considerable importance, and very vague results would still imply an improvement in the chaos of what now passes for political philosophy. i will try to indicate very briefly the kind of improvement of which we need not despair. first of all, i conceive that, as i have indicated, a really scientific habit of thought would dispel many hopeless logomachies. when burke, incomparably the greatest of our philosophical politicians, was arguing against the american policy of the government, he expressed his hatred of metaphysics--the "serbonian bog," as he called it, in which whole armies had been lost. the point at which he aimed was the fruitless discussion of abstract rights, which prevented people from applying their minds to the actual facts, and from seeing that metaphysical entities of that kind were utterly worthless when they ceased to correspond to the wants and aspirations of the peoples concerned. he could not, as he said, draw up an indictment against a nation, because he could not see how such troubles as had arisen between england and the colonies were to be decided by technical distinctions such as passed current at _nisi prius_. i am afraid that the mode of reasoning condemned by burke has not yet gone out of fashion. i do not wish to draw down upon myself the wrath of metaphysicians. i am perfectly willing that they should go on amusing themselves by attempting to deduce the first principles of morality from abstract considerations of logical affirmation and denial. but i will say this, that, in any case, and whatever the ultimate meaning of right and wrong, all political and social questions must be discussed with a continual reference to experience, to the contents as well as to the form of their metaphysical concepts. it is, to my mind, quite as idle to attempt to determine the value, say, of a political theory by reasoning independent of the character and circumstances of the nation and its constituent members, as to solve a medical question by abstract formulæ, instead of by careful, prolonged, and searching investigation into the constitution of the human body. i think that this requires to be asserted so long as popular orators continue to declaim, for example, about the "rights of man," or the doctrines of political equality. i by no means deny, or rather i should on due occasion emphatically assert, that the demands covered by such formulæ are perfectly right, and that they rest upon a base of justice. but i am forced to think that, as they are generally stated, they can lead to nothing but logomachy. when a man lays down some such sweeping principle, his real object is to save himself the trouble of thinking. so long as the first principles from which he starts are equally applicable,--and it is of the very nature of these principles that they should be equally applicable to men in all times and ages, to englishmen and americans, hindoos and chinese, negroes and australians,--they are worthless for any particular case, although, of course, they may be accidentally true in particular cases. in short, leaving to the metaphysicians--that is, postponing till the greek kalends--any decision as to the ultimate principles, i say that every political theory should be prepared to justify itself by an accurate observation of the history and all the various characteristics of the social organisation to which it is to be applied. this points to the contrast to which i have referred: the contrast between the keen vigorous good sense upon immediate questions of the day, to which i often listen with the unfeigned admiration due to the shrewd man of business, and the paltry little outworn platitudes which he introduces when he wants to tag his arguments with sounding principles. i think, to take an example out of harm's way, that an excellent instance is found in the famous american treatise, the _federalist_. it deserves all the credit it has won so long as the authors are discussing the right way to form a constitution which may satisfy the wants and appease the prejudices then actually existing. in spite of such miscalculations as beset all forecasts of the future, they show admirable good sense and clear appreciation. but when they think it necessary to appeal to montesquieu, to tag their arguments from common sense with little ornamental formulæ learnt from philosophical writings, they show a very amiable simplicity; but they also seem to me to sink at once to the level of a clever prize essay in a university competition. the mischief may be slight when we are merely considering literary effect. but it points to a graver evil. in political discussions, the half-trained mind has strong convictions about some particular case, and then finds it easiest to justify its conviction by some sweeping general principle. it really starts, speaking in terms of logic, by assuming the truth of its minor and takes for granted that any major which will cover the minor is therefore established. nothing saves so much trouble in thinking as the acceptance of a good sounding generality or a self-evident truth. where your poor scientific worker plods along, testing the truth of his argument at every point, making qualifications and reservations, and admitting that every general principle may require to be modified in concrete cases, you can thus both jump to your conclusion and assume the airs of a philosopher. it is, i fancy, for this reason that people have such a tendency to lay down absolute rules about really difficult points. it is so much easier to say at once that all drinking ought to be suppressed, than to consider how, in actual circumstances, sobriety can be judiciously encouraged; and by assuming a good self-evident law and denouncing your opponents as immoral worshippers of expediency, you place yourself in an enviable position of moral dignity and inaccessibility. no argument can touch you. these abstract rules, too, have the convenience of being strangely ambiguous. i have been almost pathetically affected when i have observed how some thoroughly commonplace person plumes himself on preserving his consistency because he sticks resolutely to his party dogmas, even when their whole meaning has evaporated. some english radicals boasted of consistency because they refused to be convinced by experience that republicans under a military dictator could become tyrannous and oppressive. at the present day, i see many worthy gentlemen, who from being thorough-going individualists, have come to swallow unconsciously the first principles of socialism without the least perception that they have changed, simply because a new meaning has been gradually insinuated into the sacred formulæ. scientific habits of thought, i venture to suggest, would tend to free a man from the dominion of these abstract phrases, which sometimes make men push absolute dogmas to extravagant results, and sometimes blind them to the complete transformation which has taken place in their true meaning. the great test of statesmanship, it is said, is the knowledge how and when to make a compromise, and when to hold fast to a principle. the tendency of the thoughtless is to denounce all compromise as wicked, and to stick to a form of words without bothering about the real meaning. belief in "fads"--i cannot avoid the bit of slang--and singular malleability of real convictions are sometimes generated just by want of serious thought; and, at any rate, both phenomena are very common at present. this suggests another aspect of reasoning in a scientific spirit, namely, the importance which it attaches to a right comprehension of the practicable. the scientific view is sometimes described as fatalistic. a genuine scientific theory implies a true estimate of the great forces which mould institutions, and therefore a true apprehension of the limits within which they can be modified by any proposed change. we all remember sydney smith's famous illustration, in regard to the opposition to the reform bill, of mrs. partington's attempt to stop the atlantic with her mop. such an appeal is sometimes described as immoral. many politicians, no doubt, find in it an excuse for immoral conduct. they assume that such and such a measure is inevitable, and therefore they think themselves justified for advocating it, even though they hold it to be wrong. indeed, i observe that many excellent journalists are apparently unable to perceive any distinction between the assertion that a measure will be passed, and that it ought to be passed. undoubtedly, if i think a measure unjust, i ought to say that it is unjust, even if i am sure that it will nevertheless be carried, and, in some cases, even though i may be a martyr to my opposition. if it is inevitable, it can be carried without my help, and my protest may at least sow a seed for future reaction. but this is no answer to the argument of sydney smith when taken in a reasonable sense. the opposition to the reform bill was a particular case of the opposition to the advance of democracy. the statement that democracy has advanced and will advance, is sometimes taken to be fatalistic. people who make the assertion may answer for themselves. i should answer, as i think we should all answer now, that the advance of democracy, desirable or undesirable, depended upon causes far too deep and general to be permanently affected by any reform bill. it was only one aspect of vast social changes which had been going on for centuries; and to propose to stop it by throwing out the reform bill was like proposing to stop a child's growth by forcing him to go on wearing his long clothes. sydney smith's answer might be immoral if it simply meant, don't fight because you will be beaten. it may often be a duty to take a beating. but it was, perhaps, rather a way of saying that if you want to stop the growth of democracy, you must begin by altering the course of the social, intellectual and moral changes which have been operating through many generations, and that unless you can do that, it is idle to oppose one particular corollary, and so to make a revolution inevitable, instead of a peaceful development. to say that any change is impossible in the absolute sense, may be fatalism; but it is simple good sense, and therefore good science, to say that to produce any change whatever you must bring to bear a force adequate to the change. when a man's leg is broken, you can't expect to heal it by a bit of sticking-plaster; a pill is not supposed, now, to be a cure for an earthquake; and to insist upon such facts is not to be fatalistic, but simply to say that a remedy must bear some proportion to an evil. it is a commonplace to observe upon the advantage which would have been gained if our grandfathers would have looked at the french revolution scientifically. a terrible catastrophe had occurred abroad. the true moral, as we all see now, was that england should make such reforms as would obviate the danger of a similar catastrophe at home. the moral which too many people drew was too often, that all reforms should be stopped; with the result that the evils grew worse and social strata more profoundly alienated. it is a first principle of scientific reasoning, that a break-down of social order implies some antecedent defect, demanding an adequate remedy. it is a primary assumption of party argument, that the opposite party is wholly wrong, that its action is perfectly gratuitous, and either causeless or produced by the direct inspiration of the devil. the struggle, upon the scientific theory, represents two elements in an evolution which can be accomplished peacefully by such a reconstruction as will reconcile the conflicting aims and substitute harmony for discord. on the other doctrine, it is a conflict of hopelessly antagonistic principles, one of which is to be forcibly crushed. i hope that i am not too sanguine, but i cannot help believing that in this respect we have improved, and improved by imbibing some of the scientific doctrine. i think that in recent discussions of the most important topics, however bitter and however much distorted by the old party spirit, there is yet a clearer recognition than of old, that widely-spread discontent is not a reason for arbitrary suppression, but for seeking to understand and remove its causes. we should act in the spirit of spinoza's great saying; and it should be our aim, as it was his care, "neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's actions, but to understand them". that is equally true of men's opinions. if they are violent, passionate, subversive of all order, our duty is not bare denunciations, but a clear comprehension of the causes, not of the ostensible reasons, of their opinions, and a resolution to remove those causes. i think this view has made some way: i am sure that it will make more way if we become more scientific in spirit; and it is one of the main reasons for encouraging such a spirit. the most obvious difficulty just now is one upon which i must touch, though with some fear and trembling. a terrible weapon has lately been coming into perfection, to which its inventors have given the elegant name of a "boom". the principle is--so far as i can understand--that the right frame of mind for dealing with the gravest problems is to generate a state of violent excitement, to adopt any remedy, real or supposed, which suggests itself at the moment, and to denounce everybody who suggests difficulties as a cynic or a cold-blooded egoist; and therefore to treat grave chronic and organic diseases of society by spasmodic impulses, to make stringent laws without condescending to ask whether they will work, and try the boldest experiments without considering whether they are likely to increase or diminish the evil. this, as some people think, is one of the inevitable consequences of democracy. i hope that it is not; but if it is, it is one of the inevitable consequences against which we, as cultivators of science, should most seriously protest, in the hope that we may some day find philip sober enough to consider the consequences of his actions under the influence of spiritual intoxication. professor huxley, in one of those smart passages of arms which so forcibly illustrated his intellectual vigour, gave an apologue, which i wish that i could steal without acknowledgment. he spoke of an irish carman who, on being told that he was not going in the right direction, replied that he was at any rate going at a great pace. the scientific doctrine is simply that we should look at the map before we set out for utopia; and i think that a doctrine which requires to be enforced by every means in our power. this tendency, of course, comes out prominently in the important discussions of social and economic problems. that is a matter upon which i cannot now dwell, and which has been sufficiently emphasised by many eminent writers. if modern orators confined themselves to urging that the old economists exaggerated their claims to scientific accuracy, and were, in point of fact, guilty of many logical errors and hasty generalisations, i, at least, could fully agree with them. but the general impression seems to be, that because the old arguments were faulty, all argument is irrelevant: that because the alleged laws of nature were wrongly stated, there are no laws of nature at all; and that we may proceed to rearrange society, to fix the rate of wages or the rent of land or the incomes of capitalists without any reference at all to the conditions under which social arrangements have been worked out and actually carried on. this is, in short, to sanction the most obvious weakness of popular movements, and to assure the ignorant and thoughtless that they are above reason, and their crude guesses infallible guides to truth. one view which tries to give some plausibility to these assumptions is summed up in the now current phrase about the "masses" and the "classes". we all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, _i.e._, thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. the radical calls his opponent tory and reactionary. the wicked tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the house of lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against every attempt at a juster distribution; selfishness is his one motive; repression by brute force his only theory of government; and his views of life in general are those of the wicked cynics who gaze from their windows in pall mall. then we have the roll of all the abuses which have been defended by this miscreant and his like since the days of george iii.--slavery and capital punishment, and pensions and sinecures, and protection and the church establishment. the popular instinct, it is urged, has been in the right in so many cases that there is an enormous presumption in favour of the infallibility of all its instincts. the reply, of course, is equally obvious. your boast, says the conservative, that you please the masses, is in effect a confession that you truckle to the mob. you mean that your doctrines spread in proportion to the ignorance of your constituents. you prove the merits of your theories by showing that they disgust people the more they think. the liberalism of a district, it has been argued, varies with the number of convictions for drunkenness. if it be easy to denounce our ancestors, it is also easy to show how they built up the great empire which now shelters us; and how, if they had truckled, as you would have us truckle, to popular whims, we should have been deprived of our commerce, our manufactures, and our position in the civilised world. and then it is easy to produce a list of all the base demagogues who have misled popular impatience and ignorance from the days of cleon to those of the french convention, or of the last disreputable "boss" bloated with corruption and the plunder of some great american city. this is the result, it is suggested, of pandering to the mob, and generally ostracising the intelligent citizen. i merely sketch the familiar arguments which any journalist has ready at hand, and, by a sufficient spice of references to actual affairs, can work up into any number of pointed leading articles. i will only observe that such arguments seem to me to illustrate that curious unreality of political theories of which i have spoken. it seems to be tacitly assumed on both sides, that votes are determined by a process of genuine reasoning. one side may be ignorant and the other prejudiced; but the arguments i have recapitulated seem to imply the assumption that the constituents really reflect upon the reasons for and against the measures proposed, and make up their minds accordingly. they are spoken of as though they were a body of experts, investigating a scientific doctrine, or at least a jury guided by the evidence laid before them. upon that assumption, as it seems to me, the moral would be that the whole system is a palpable absurdity. the vast majority of voters scarcely think at all, and would be incapable of judging if they did. hundreds of thousands care more for dr. grace's last score or the winner of the derby than for any political question whatever. if they have opinions, they have neither the training nor the knowledge necessary to form any conclusion whatever. consider the state of mind of the average voter--of nine men out of ten, say, whom you meet in the strand. ask yourselves honestly what value you would attach to his opinion upon any great question--say, of foreign politics or political economy. has he ever really thought about them? is he superficially acquainted with any of the relevant facts? is he even capable of the imaginative effort necessary to set before him the vast interests often affected? and would the simple fact that he said "yes" to a given question establish in your mind the smallest presumption against the probability that the right answer would be "no"? what are the chances that a majority of people, of whom not one in a hundred has any qualifications for judging, will give a right judgment? yet that is the test suggested by most of the conventional arguments on both sides; for i do not say this as intending to accept the anti-democratic application. it is just as applicable, i believe, to the educated and the well-off. i need not labour the point, which is sufficiently obvious. i am quite convinced that, for example, the voters for a university will be guided by unreasonable prejudices as the voters for a metropolitan constituency. in some ways they will be worse. to find people who believe honestly in antiquated prejudices, you must go to the people who have been trained to believe them. an ecclesiastical seminary can manage to drill the pupils into professing absurdities from which average common sense would shrink, and only supply logical machinery for warring against reason. the reference to enlightened aristocracies is common enough; but i cannot discover that, "taken in a lump," any particular aristocracy cannot be as narrow-minded, short-sighted, and selfish, as the most rampant democracy. in point of fact, we all know that political action is determined by instinct rather than by reason. i do not mean that instinct is opposed to reason: it is simply a crude, undeveloped, inarticulate form of reason; it is blended with prejudices for which no reason is assigned, or even regarded as requisite. such blind instincts, implying at most a kind of groping after error, necessarily govern the majority of men of all classes, in political as in other movements. the old apologists used to argue on the hypothesis that men must have accepted christianity on the strength of a serious inquiry into the evidences. the fallacy of the doctrine is sufficiently plain: they accepted it because it suited them on the whole, and was fitted, no doubt, to their intellectual needs, but was also fitted to their emotional and moral needs as developed under certain social conditions. the inference from the general acceptance of any theory is not that it is true, but that it is true enough to satisfy the very feeble demand for logic--that it is not palpably absurd or self-contradictory; and that, for some reason or other, it satisfies also the imagination, the affections, and the aspirations of the believers. not to go into other questions, this single remark indicates, i think, the attitude which the scientific observer would adopt in regard to this ancient controversy. he would study the causes as well as the alleged reasons assignable for any general instinct, and admit that its existence is one of the primary data which have to be taken into account. to denounce democracy or aristocracy is easy enough; and it saves trouble to assume that god is on one side and the devil on the other. the true method, i take it, is that which was indicated by tocqueville's great book upon democracy in america; a book which, if i may trust my own impressions, though necessarily imperfect as regards america, is a perfectly admirable example of the fruitful method of studying such problems. though an aristocrat by birth and breeding, tocqueville had the wisdom to examine democratic beliefs and institutions in a thoroughly impartial spirit; and, instead of simply denouncing or admiring, to trace the genesis of the prevalent ideas and their close connection with the general state of social development. an inquiry conducted in that spirit would not lead to the absolute dogmatic conclusions in which the superficial controversialist delights. it would show, perhaps, that there was at least this much truth in the democratic contention, that the masses are, by their position, exempt from some of the prejudices which are ingrained in the members of a smaller caste; that they are therefore more accessible to certain moral considerations, and more anxious to promote the greatest happiness of the greater number. but it might also show how the weakness of the ignorant and untrained mind produces the characteristic evils of sentimentalism and impatience, of a belief in the omnipotence of legislation, and an excessive jealousy of all superiorities; and might possibly, too, exhibit certain merits which are impressed upon the aristocrat by his sense of the obligations of nobility. i do not in the least mean to express any opinion about such questions; i desire only to indicate the temper in which i conceive that they should be approached. i have lived long enough to be utterly unable to believe--though some older politicians than i seem still to believe, especially on the eve of a dissolution--that any of our party lines coincide with the lines between good and bad, wise and foolish. every one, of course, will repudiate the abstract theory. yet we may notice how constantly it is assumed; and can see to what fallacies it leads when we look for a moment at the historical questions which no longer unite party feeling. few, indeed, even of our historians, can write without taking party views of such questions. even the candid and impartial seem to deserve these epithets chiefly because they want imagination, and can cast blame or applaud alternately, because they do not enter into the real spirit of either party. their views are sometimes a medley of inconsistent theories, rather than a deeper view which might reconcile apparent inconsistencies. i will only mention one point which often strikes me, and may lead to a relevant remark. every royalist historian, we all know, labours to prove that charles i. was a saint, and cromwell a hypocrite. the view was natural at the time of the civil wars; but it now should suggest an obvious logical dilemma. if the monarchical theory which charles represented was sound, and charles was also a wise and good man, what caused the rebellion? a perfect man driving a perfect engine should surely not have run it off the rails. the royalist ought to seek to prove that charles was a fool and a knave, to account for the collapse of royalty; and the case against royalty is all the stronger, if you could show that charles, in spite of impeccable virtue, was forced by his position to end on the scaffold. choose between him and the system which he applied. so catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing henry viii. and the french revolutionists. so far as i can guess (i know very little about it), their case is a very strong one. i somehow believe, in spite of froude, that henry viii. was a tyrant; and eulogies upon the reign of terror generally convince me that a greater set of scoundrels seldom came to the surface, than the perpetrators of those enormities. but then the real inference is, to my mind, very different. henry viii. was the product of the previous time; the ultimate outcome of that ideal state of things in which the church had its own way during the ages of truth. must not the system have been wrong, when it had so lost all moral weight as to be at the mercy of a ruffianly plunderer? and so, as we all admit now, the strongest condemnation of the old french _régime_ is the fact that it had not only produced such a set of miscreants as those who have cast permanent odium even upon sound principles; but that its king and rulers went down before them without even an attempt at manly resistance. a revolution does not, perhaps, justify itself; it does not prove that its leaders judged rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the previous order which brought it about. what a horrid thing is the explosion! why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? the greatest blot upon burke, i need hardly say, is that his passions blinded him in his age, to this, as we now see, inevitable conclusion. the old-fashioned view, i fancy, is a relic of that view of history in which all the great events and changes were personified in some individual hero. the old "legislators," lycurgus and solon and the like, were supposed to have created the institutions which were really the products of a slow growth. when a favourable change due to economical causes took place in the position of the french peasantry, the peasants, says michelet somewhere, called it "good king henry". carlyle's theory of hero worship is partly an application of the same mode of thought. you embody your principle in some concrete person; canonise him or damn him, as he represents truth or error; and take credit to yourself for insight and for a lofty morality. it becomes a kind of blasphemy to suggest that your great man, who thus stands for an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a producer. the crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its morality. your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he labels the adherents and opponents of his party. and yet we know as a fact, how absurd are such judgments. we know how men are betrayed into bad causes from good motives, or put on the right side because it happens to harmonise with their lower interests. saints--so we are told--have been the cruellest persecutors; and kings, acting from purely selfish ambition, have consolidated nations or crushed effete and mischievous institutions. if we can make up our minds as to which was, on the whole, the best cause,--and, generally speaking, both sides represented some sound principle,--it does not follow that it was also the cause of all the best men. before we can judge of the individual, we must answer a hundred difficult questions: if he took the right side, did he take it from the right motives? was it from personal ambition or pure patriotism? did he see what was the real question at issue? did he foresee the inevitable effect of the measures which he advocated? if he did not see, was it because he was human, and therefore short-sighted; or because he was brutal, and therefore wanting in sympathy; or because he had intellectual defects, which made it impossible for him to escape from the common illusions of the time? these, and any number of similar difficulties, arise when we try to judge of the great men who form landmarks in our history, from the time of boadicea to that of queen victoria. they are always amusing, and sometimes important; but there is always a danger that they may warp our views of the vital facts. the beauty of mary queen of scots still disqualifies many people from judging calmly the great issues of a most important historical epoch. i will leave it to you to apply this to our views of modern politics, and judge the value of the ordinary assumption which assumes that all good men must be on one side. now we may say that the remedy for such illusions points to the importance of a doctrine which is by no means new, but which has, i think, bearings not always recognised. we have been told, again and again, since plato wrote his _republic_, that society is an organism. it is replied that this is at best an analogy upon which too great stress must not be laid; and we are warned against the fanciful comparisons which some writers have drawn between the body corporate and the actual physical body, with its cells, tissues, nervous system, and so forth. now, whatever may be the danger of that mode of reasoning, i think that the statement, properly understood, corresponds to a simple logical canon too often neglected in historical and political reasonings. it means, i take it, in the first place, that every man is a product as well as a producer; that there is no such thing as the imaginary individual with fixed properties, whom theorists are apt to take for granted as the base of their reasoning; that no man or group of men is intelligible without taking into account the mass of instincts transmitted through their predecessors, and therefore without referring to their position in the general history of human development. and, secondly, it is essential to remember in speaking of any great man, or of any institution, their position as parts of a complicated system of actions and emotions. the word "if," i may say, changes its meaning. "if" harold had won the battle of hastings, what would have been the result? the answer would be comparatively simple, if we could, in the old fashion, attribute to william the conqueror all the results in which he played a conspicuous part: if, therefore, we could make out a definite list of effects of which he was the cause, and, by simply "deducting" them, after coleridge's fashion, from the effects which actually followed, determine what was the precise balance. but when we consider how many causes were actually in operation, how impossible it is to disentangle and separate them, and say this followed from that, and that other from something else, we have to admit that the might have been is simply indiscoverable. the great man may have hastened what was otherwise inevitable; he may simply have supplied the particular point, round which a crystallisation took place of forces which would have otherwise discovered some other centre; and the fact that he succeeded in establishing certain institutions or laws may be simply a proof that he saw a little more clearly than others the direction towards which more general causes were inevitably propelling the nation. briefly, we cannot isolate the particular "cause" in this case, and have to remember at every moment that it was only one factor in a vast and complex series of changes, which would no doubt have taken a different turn without it, but of which it may be indefinitely difficult to say what was the precise deflection due to its action. in trying to indicate the importance, i have had to dwell upon the difficulty, of applying anything like scientific methods to political problems. i shall conclude by trying once more to indicate why, in spite of this, i hold that the attempt is desirable, and may be fruitful. people sometimes say that scientific methods are inapplicable because we cannot try experiments in social matters. i remember being long ago struck by a remark of dr. arnold, which has some bearing upon this assertion. he observed upon the great advantage possessed by aristotle in the vast number of little republics in his time, each of which was virtually an experiment in politics. i always thought that this was fallacious somehow, and i fancy that it is not hard to indicate the general nature of the fallacy. freeman, upon whose services to thorough and accurate study of history i am unworthy to pronounce an eulogy, fell into the same fallacy, i fancy, when he undertook to write a history of federal governments. he fancied that because the achæan league and the swiss cantons and the united states of america all had this point in common, and that they represented the combinations of partially independent states, their history would be in a sense continuous. the obvious consideration that the federations differed in every possible way, in their religions and state of civilisation and whole social structure, might be neglected. freeman's tendency to be indifferent to everything which was not in the narrowest sense political led him to this--as it seems to me--pedantic conception. if the prosperity of a nation depended exclusively upon the form of its government, aristotle, as arnold remarks, would have had before him a greater number of experiments than the modern observer. but the assumption is obviously wrong. every one of these ancient states depended for its prosperity upon a vast number of conditions--its race, its geographical position, its stage of development, and so forth, quite impossible to tabulate or analyse; and the form of government which suited one would be entirely inapplicable to another. to extricate from all these conflicting elements the precise influence due to any institutions would be a task beyond the powers of any number of philosophers; and indeed the perplexity would probably be increased by the very number of experiments. to make an experiment fruitful, it is necessary to eliminate all the irrelevant elements which intrude into the concrete cases spontaneously offered by nature, and, for example, to obtain two cases differing only in one element, to which we may therefore plausibly attribute other contrasts. now, the history of a hundred or a thousand small states would probably only present the introduction of new and perplexing elements for every new case. the influence, again, of individuals, or accident of war, or natural catastrophes, is greater in proportion as the state is smaller, and therefore makes it more difficult to observe the permanent and underlying influences. it seems to me, therefore, that the study, say of english history, where we have a continuous growth over many centuries, where the disturbing influences of individuals or chance are in a greater degree cancelled by the general tendencies working beneath them, we have really a far more instructive field for political observation. this may help us to see what are the kinds of results which may be anticipated from sociological study undertaken in a serious spirit. the growth, for example, of the industrial system of england is a profoundly interesting subject of inquiry, to which we are even now only beginning to do justice. historians have admitted, even from the time of hume, that the ideal history should give less of mere battles and intrigues, and more account of those deeper and more continuous processes which lie, so to speak, beneath the surface. they have hardly, i think, even yet realised the full bearing and importance of this observation. yet, of late, much has been done, though much still remains to do, in the way of a truly scientific study of the development of institutions, political, ecclesiastical, industrial, and so forth, of this and other countries. as this tendency grows, we may hope gradually to have a genuine history of the english people; an account--not of the virtues and vices of mary queen of scots, or arguments as to the propriety of cutting off charles i.'s head--but a trustworthy account of the way in which the actual structure of modern society has been developed out of its simpler germs. the biographies of great kings and generals, and so forth, will always be interesting; but to the genuine historian of the future they will be interesting not so much as giving room for psychological analyses or for dramatic portraits, but as indications of the great social forces which produced them, and the direction of which at the moment may be illustrated by their cases. i have spoken of the history of our industrial system. to know what was the position of the english labourer at various times, how it was affected by the political changes or by the great mechanical discoveries, to observe what grievances arose, what remedies were applied or sought to be applied, and with what result,--to treat all this with due reference to the whole social and intellectual evolution of which it formed a part, may well call forth the powers of our acutest and most thoroughgoing inquirers, and will, when it is done, give essential data for some of the most vitally important problems of the day. this is what i understand by an application of the scientific spirit to social and political problems. we cannot try experiments, it is said, in historical questions. we cannot help always trying experiments, and experiments of vast importance. every man has to try an experiment upon himself when he chooses his career; and the results are frequently very unpleasant, though very instructive. we have to be our own experiments. every man who sets up in business tries an experiment, ending in fortune or in bankruptcy. every strike is an experiment, and generally a costly one. every attempt at starting a new charitable organisation, or a new system of socialism or co-operation, is an experiment. every new law is an experiment, rash or otherwise. and from all these experiments we do at least collect a certain number of general observations, which, though generally consigned to copybooks, are not without value. what is true, however, is that we cannot try such experiments as a man of science can sometimes try in his laboratory, where he can select and isolate the necessary elements in any given process, and decide, by subjecting them to proper conditions, how a definite question is to be answered. our first experiments are all in the rough, so to speak, tried at haphazard, and each involving an indefinite number of irrelevant conditions. but there is a partial compensation. we cannot tabulate the countless experiments which have been tried with all their distracting varieties. yet in a certain sense the answer is given for us. for the social structure at any period is in fact the net product of all the experiments that have been made by the individuals of which it is and has been composed. therefore, so far as we can obtain some general views of the successive changes in social order which have been gradually and steadily developing themselves throughout the more noisy and conspicuous but comparatively superficial political disturbances, we can detect the true meaning of some general phenomena in which the actors themselves were unconscious of the determining causes. we can see more or less what were the general causes which have led to various forms of associations, to the old guilds, or the modern factory system, to the trades unions or the co-operative societies; and correcting and verifying our general results by a careful examination of the particular instances, approximate, vaguely it may be and distantly, to some such conception of the laws of development of different social tissues as, if not properly scientific, may yet belong to the scientific order of thought. thus, when distracted by this or that particular demand, by promises of the millennium to be inaugurated to-morrow by an act of parliament, or threats of some social cataclysm to overwhelm us if we concede an inch to wicked agitators, we may succeed in placing ourselves at a higher point of view, from which it is possible to look over wider horizons, to regard what is happening to-day in its relations to slow processes of elaboration, and to form judgments based upon wide and systematic inquiry, which, if they do not entitle us to predict particular events, as an astronomer predicts an eclipse, will at least be a guide to sane and sober minds, and suggest at once a humbler appreciation of what is within our power, and--i think also--a more really hopeful anticipation of genuine progress in the future. all scientific inquiry is an interrogation of nature. we have, in bacon's grand sententious phrase, to command nature by obeying. we learn what are the laws of social growth by living them. the great difficulty of the interrogation is to know what questions we are to put. under the guidance of metaphysicians, we have too often asked questions to which no answer is conceivable, like children, who in first trying to think, ask, why are we living in the nineteenth century, why is england an island, or why does pain hurt, or why do two and two make four? the only answer is by giving the same facts in a different set of words, and that is a kind of answer to which metaphysical dexterity sometimes gives an air of plausibility. more frequently our ingenuity takes the form of sanctioning preconceived prejudices, by wrapping up our conclusion in our premisses, and then bringing it out triumphantly with the air of a rigorous deduction. the progress of social science implies, in the first place, the abandonment of the weary system of hunting for fruitful truths in the region of chimeras, and trying to make empty logical concepts do the work of observation of facts. it involves, again, a clear perception of the kind of questions which can be profitably asked, and the limits within which an answer, not of the illusory kind, can really be expected. and then we may come to see that, without knowing it, we have really been trying a vast and continuous experiment, since the race first began to be human. we have, blindly and unconsciously, constructed a huge organism which does, somehow or other, provide a great many millions of people with a tolerable amount of food and comfort. we have accomplished this, i say, unconsciously; for each man, limited to his own little sphere, and limited to his own interests, and guided by his own prejudices and passions, has been as ignorant of more general tendencies as the coral insect of the reef which it has helped to build. to become distinctly conscious of what it is that we have all been doing all this time, is one step in advance. we have obeyed in ignorance; and as obedience becomes conscious, we may hope, within certain narrow limits, to command, or, at least, to direct. an enlarged perception of what have been the previous results may enable us to see what results are possible, and among them to select what may be worthy ends. it is not to be supposed that we shall ever get beyond the need of constant and careful experiment. but, in proportion as we can cultivate the right frame of mind, as each member of society requires wider sympathies and a larger horizon, it is permissible to hope that the experiments may become more intelligent; that we shall not, as has so often been done, increase poverty by the very remedies which are intended to remove it, or diverge from the path of steady progressive development, into the chase of some wild chimera, which requires for its achievement only the radical alteration of all the data of experience. "annihilate space and time, and make two lovers happy," was the modest petition of an enthusiast; and he would probably have been ready to join in the prayer, "make all men angels, and then we shall have a model society". although in saying this my immediate moral is to preach sobriety, i do not intend to denounce enthusiasm, but to urge a necessity of organising enthusiasm. i only recommend people not to venture upon flying machines before they have studied the laws of mechanics; but i earnestly hope that some day we may be able to call a balloon as we now call a cab. to point out the method, and to admit that it is not laborious, is not to discourage aspiration, but to look facts in the face: not to preach abandonment of enthusiasm, but to urge that enthusiasm should be systematic, should lead men to study the conditions of success, and to make a bridge before they leap the gulf. the sphere of political economy. there seem to be at present many conflicting views as to the nature of political economy. there is a popular impression that political economy, or, at any rate, the so-called "classical" doctrine, the doctrine which was made most definite by ricardo, and accepted with modifications by j. s. mill, is altogether exploded. their main doctrines, it is suggested, were little better than mares' nests, and we may set aside their pretensions to have founded an exact science. what, then, is to come in its place? are we simply to admit that there is no certainty about economical problems, and to fall back upon mere empiricism? everything,--shall we say?--is to be regarded as an open question. that is, perhaps, a common impression in the popular mind. yet, on the other hand, we may find some very able thinkers applying mathematical formulæ to economics; and that seems to suppose, that within a certain region they obtain results comparable in precision and accuracy to those of the great physical sciences. the topic is a very wide one; and it would be presumptuous in me to speak dogmatically. i wish, however, to suggest certain considerations which may, perhaps, be worth taking into account; and, as i must speak briefly, i must not attempt to supply all the necessary qualifications. i can only attempt to indicate what seems to me to be the correct point of view, and apologise if i appear to speak too dogmatically, simply because i cannot waste time by expressions of diffidence, by reference to probable criticisms, or even by a full statement of my own reasons. a full exposition would have to define the sphere of political economy by describing its data and its methods. what do we assume, and how do we reason? a complete answer to these questions would indicate the limits within which we can hope for valid conclusions. i will first refer, briefly, to a common statement of one theory advocated by the old-fashioned or classical school. economic doctrine, they have said, supposes a certain process of abstraction. we have to do with what has been called the "economic man". he is not, happily, the real man. he is an imaginary being, whose sole principle of action is to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market: a man, more briefly, who always prefers a guinea--even a dirty guinea--to a pound of the cleanest. economists reply to the remonstrances of those who deny the existence of such a monster, by adding that they do not for a moment suppose that men in general, or even tradesmen or stockbrokers, are in reality such beings,--mere money-making machines, stripped bare of all generous or altruistic sentiment--but simply that, as a matter of fact, most people do, _ceteris paribus_, prefer a guinea to a pound; and that so large a part of our industrial activity is carried on from motives of this kind, that we may obtain a fair approximation to the actual course of affairs by considering them as the sole motives. we shall not go wrong, for example, in financial questions, by assuming that the sole motive of speculators in the stock exchange is the desire to make money. now, it is possible, perhaps, to justify this way of putting the case, by certain qualifications. i think, however, that, if strictly interpreted, it is apt to cover a serious fallacy. the "economic man" theory, we may say, assumes too much in one direction, and too little in another. it assumes too much if it is understood as implying that the desire for wealth is a purely selfish desire. a man may desire to make money in order simply to gratify his own sensual appetites. but he may also desire to be independent; and that may include a desire to do his part in the work of society, and probably does include some desire to relieve others of a burden. the wish to be self-supporting is not necessarily or purely "selfish". and obviously, too, one great motive in all such occupations is the desire to support a family, and one main inducement to saving is the desire to support it after your own death. remove such motives, and half the impulses to regular industrial energy of all kinds would be destroyed. we must, therefore, give our "economic man" credit for motives referring to many interests besides those which he buttons into his own waistcoat. and therefore, too, as i have said, the assumption is insufficient. the very conception of economic science supposes all that is supposed, in the growth of a settled order of society. the purest type of the "economic man," as he is sometimes described, would be realised in the lowest savage, as sometimes described, who is absolutely selfish, who knocks his child on the head because it cries, and eats his aged parent if he cannot find a supply of roots. but such a being could only form herds, not societies. political economy only becomes conceivable when we suppose certain institutions to have been developed. it assumes, obviously, and in the first place, the institution of property; it becomes applicable, with less qualification, in proportion to the growth of the corresponding sentiments; it takes for granted all that highly elaborate set of instincts which induce me, when i want something, to produce an equivalent in exchange for it, instead of going out to take it by force. the more thorough the respect for property, the more applicable are rules of economics; and that respect implies a long training in that sense of other people's rights, which, unfortunately, is by no means so perfect as might be desired. it follows, then, that the economist really assumes more--and rightly assumes more--than he sometimes claims. he assumes what adam smith assumed at the opening of his great treatise: that is, the division of labour. but the division of labour implies the organisation of society. it implies that one man is growing corn while another is digging gold, because each is confident that he will be able to exchange the products of his own labour for the products of the other man's labour. this, of course, implies settled order, respect for contracts, the preservation of peace, and the abolition of force throughout the area occupied by the society. and this, again, is only possible in so far as certain political and ecclesiastical and military institutions have been definitely constructed. the economic assumption is really an assumption--not of a certain psychological condition of the average man, but--of the existence of a certain social mechanism. a complete science would clear up fully a problem which must occur often to all of us: how do you account for london? how is it that four or five millions of people manage to subsist on an area of a few square miles, which itself produces nothing? that other millions all over the world are engaged in providing for their wants? that food and clothes and fuel, in sufficient quantities to preserve life, are being distributed with tolerable regularity to each unit in this vast and apparently chaotic crowd? and that, somehow or other, we struggle on, well or ill, by the help of a gigantic commissariat, performing functions incomparably more complex than were ever needed for military purposes? the answer supposes that there is, as a matter of fact, a great industrial organisation which discharges the various functions of producing, exchanging, distributing, and so forth; and that its mutual relations are just as capable of being investigated and stated as the relations between different parts of an army. the men and officers do not wear uniforms; they are not explicitly drilled or subject to a definite code of discipline; and their rates of pay are not settled by any central authority. but there are capitalists, "undertakers" and labourers, merchants and retail dealers and contractors, and so forth, just as certainly as there are generals and privates, horse, foot, and artillery; and their mutual relations are equally definable. the economist has to explain the working of this industrial mechanism; and the thought may sometimes occur to us, that it is strange that he should find the task so difficult. since we ourselves have made, or at any rate constitute, the mechanism, why should it be so puzzling to find out what it is? we are cooperating in a systematic production and distribution of wealth, and we surely ought not to find any impenetrable mystery in discovering what it is that we are doing every day of our lives. certain economists writing within this century have often been credited with the discovery of the true theory of rent, or, which is equally good for my purpose, of starting a false theory. yet landowners and agents had been letting farms and houses for generations; and surely they ought to have known what it was that they were themselves doing. one explanation of the difficulty is, that whereas an army is constituted by certain regulations of a central authority, the industrial army has grown up unconsciously and spontaneously. its multitudinous members have only looked each at his own little circle; the labourer only thinks of his wages, and the capitalist of his profits, without considering his relations to the whole system of which he forms a part. the peasant drives his plough for wages, and buys his tea as if the tea fell like manna from the skies, without thinking of the curious relation into which he is thus brought with the natives of another hemisphere. the order which results from all these independent activities appeared to the older economists as an illustration of the doctrine of final causes. providence had so ordered things that each man, by pursuing his own interests, pursued the interests of all. to a later school it appears rather as an illustration of the doctrine by which organisms are constructed through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. in either case, it seems as though the mechanism were made rather for us than by us; that it is the product of conditions which we cannot control, instead of being an arrangement put together by conscious volitions. and, therefore, when the economist shows us what in fact are the existing arrangements and their mutual relations, he appears to be making a discovery of a scientific fact as much as if he were describing the anatomy of some newly-discovered animal or plant. the real assumption of the economist therefore is, as i think, simply the existence of a certain industrial organisation, which has a real existence as much as an army or a church; and there is no reason why his description should not be as accurate as the complexity of the facts allows. he is giving us the anatomy of society considered as a huge mechanism for producing and distributing wealth, and he makes an abstraction only in the sense that he is considering one set of facts at a time. the military writer would describe the constitution of an army without going into the psychological or political conditions which are of course implied, and without considering the soldiers in any other relations than those implied in their military services. in the same way, the economist describes the army of industry, and classifies its constituent parts. in order to explain their mutual relations, he has to make certain further assumptions, of which it would be rash to attempt a precise summary. he assumes as a fact, what has of course always been known, that scarcity implies dearness and plenty cheapness; that commodities flow to the markets where they will fetch the highest prices; that there is a certain gravitation towards equalisation of profits among capitalists, and of wages among labourers; so that capital or labour will flow towards the employments in which they will secure the highest reward. he endeavours to give the greatest accuracy to such formulæ, of which nobody, so far as i know, denies a certain approximate truth. so long as they hold good, his inferences, if logically drawn, will also hold good. they take for granted certain psychological facts, such as are implied in all statements about human nature. but the economist, as an economist, is content to take them for granted without investigating the ultimate psychological laws upon which they depend. those laws, or rather their results, are a part of his primary data, although he may go so far into psychological problems as to try to state them more accurately. the selfishness or unselfishness of the economic man has to be considered by the psychologist or by the moralist; but the economist has only to consider their conclusions so far as they affect the facts. so long as it is true, for example, that scarcity causes dearness, that profits attract capital, that demand and supply tend to equalise each other, and so forth, his reasonings are justified; and the further questions of the ethical and psychological implications of these facts must be treated by a different science. the question of the play of economic forces thus generally reduces itself to a problem which may be thus stated: what are the conditions of industrial equilibrium? how must prices, rates of wages, and profit be related in order that the various classes concerned may receive such proportions of produce as are compatible with the maintenance of the existing system of organisation? if any specified change occurs, if production becomes easier or more difficult, if a tax be imposed, or a regulation of any kind affects previous conditions, what changes will be necessary to restore the equilibrium? these are the main problems of political economy. to solve, or attempt to solve them, we have to describe accurately the existing mechanism, and to suppose that it will regulate itself on the assumption which i have indicated as to demand and supply, the flow of capital and labour, and so forth. to go beyond these assumptions, and to justify them by psychological and other considerations, may be and is a most interesting task, but it takes us beyond the sphere of economics proper. i must here diverge for a little, to notice the view of the school of economists which seems to regard scientific accuracy as attainable by a different path. jevons, its most distinguished leader in england, says roundly, that political science must be a "mathematical science," because "it deals throughout with quantities"; and we have been since provided with a number of formulæ, corresponding to this doctrine. the obvious general reply would be, that political economy cannot be an exact science because it also deals throughout with human desires. the objection is not simply that our data are too vague. that objection, as jevons says, would, perhaps, apply to meteorology, of which nobody doubts that it is capable of being made an exact science. but why does nobody doubt that meteorology might become an exact science? because we are convinced that all the data which would be needed are expressible in precise terms of time and space; we have to do with volumes, and masses, and weights, and forces which can be exactly measured by lines; and, in short, with things which could be exactly measured and counted. the data are, at present, insufficiently known, and possibly the problems which would result might be too complex for our powers of calculation. still, if we could once get the data, we could express all relevant considerations by precise figures and numbers. now, is this true of economic science? within certain limits, it is apparently true: ricardo used mathematical formulæ, though he kept to arithmetic, instead of algebra. when malthus spoke of arithmetical and geometrical ratios, the statement, true or false, was, of course, capable of precise numerical expression, so soon as the ratios were assigned. so there was the famous formula proving a relation between the number of quarters of corn produced by a given harvest, and the number of shillings that would be given for a quarter of corn. if, again, we took the number of marriages corresponding to a given price of corn, we should obtain a formula connecting the number of marriages with the number of quarters of corn produced. the utility of statistics, of course, depends upon the fact that we do empirically discover some tolerably constant and simple numerical formulæ. such statistical statements are useful, indeed, not only in economical, but in other inquiries, which are clearly beyond the reach of mathematics. the proportion of criminals in a given population, the number of suicides, or of illegitimate births, may throw some light upon judicial and political, and even religious or ethical problems. nor are such formulæ useless simply because empirical. the law of gravitation, for example, is empirical. nobody knows the cause of the observed tendency of bodies to gravitate to each other, and therefore no one can say how far the law which represents the tendency must be universal. still, the fact that, so far as we have observed, it is invariably verified, and that calculations founded upon it enable us to bring a vast variety of phenomena under a single rule, is quite enough to justify astronomical calculation. if, therefore, we could find a mathematical formula which was, as a matter of fact, verifiable in economical problems about prices, and so forth, we should rightly apply to mathematicians to help us with their methods. but, not only do we not find any such simple relations, but we can see conclusive reasons for being sure that we can never find them. take, for example, the case of the number of marriages under given conditions. i need hardly say that it is impossible for the ablest mathematician to calculate whether the individual a will marry the individual b. but, by taking averages, and so eliminating individual eccentricities, he might discover that, in a given country and at a given time, a rise of prices will diminish marriages in certain proportion. our knowledge of human nature is sufficient to make that highly probable. but our knowledge also shows that such a change will act differently in different cases: there will be one formula for france, and another for england; one for lancashire, and another for cornwall; one for the rich, and another for the poor; and both the total wealth of a country and its distribution will affect the rule. differences of national temperament, of political and social constitution, of religion and ecclesiastical organisation, will all have an effect; and, therefore, a formula true here and now must, in all probability, fail altogether elsewhere. the formula is, in the mathematical phrase, a function of so many independent variables, that it must be complex beyond all conception, if it takes them all into account; while it must yet be necessarily inaccurate if it does not take them into account. but, besides this, the conditions upon which the law obviously depends are not themselves capable of being accurately defined, and still less of being numerically stated. ingenious thinkers have, indeed, tried to apply mathematical formulæ to psychology; but they have not got very far; and it may, i think, be assumed, without further argument, that while you have to deal both with psychological and sociological elements, with human desires, and with those desires modified by social relations, it is impossible to find any data which can be mathematically stated. there is no arithmetical measure of the forces of love, or hunger, or avarice, by which (among others) the whole problem is worked out. it seems to me, therefore, that we must accept the alternative which is only mentioned to be repudiated by jevons, namely, that political economy, if not a "mathematical science," must be part of sociology. i should say that it clearly is so; for if we wish to investigate the cause of any of the phenomena concerned, and not simply to tabulate from observations, we are at once concerned with the social structure and with the underlying psychology. the mathematical methods are quite in their place when dealing with statistics. the rise and fall of prices, and so forth, can be stated precisely in figures; and, whenever we can discover some approximation to a mathematical law (as in the cases i have noticed) we may work out the results. if, for example, the price of a commodity under certain conditions bears a certain relation to its scarcity, we can discover the one fact when the other fact is given, remembering only that our conclusions are not more certain than our premisses, and that the observed law depends upon unknown and most imperfectly knowable conditions. such results, again, may be very useful in various ways, as illustrative of the way in which certain laws will work if they hold good; and, again, as testing many of our general theories. if you have argued that the price of gold or silver cannot be fixed, the fact that it has been fixed under certain conditions will of course lead to a revision of your arguments. but i cannot help thinking that it is an illusion to suppose that such methods can justify the assertion that the science as a whole is "mathematical". nothing, indeed, is easier than to speak as if you had got a mathematical theory. let _x_ mean the desire for marriage and _y_ the fear of want, then the number of marriages is a function of _x_ and _y_, and i can express this by symbols as well as by ordinary words. but there is no magic about the use of symbols. mathematical inquiries are not fruitful because symbols are used, but because the symbols represent something absolutely precise and assignable. the highest mathematical inquiries are simply ingenious methods of counting; and till you have got something precise to count, they can take you no further. i cannot help thinking that this fallacy imposes upon some modern reasoners; that they assume that they have got the data because they have put together the formulæ which would be useful if they had the data; and, in short, that you can get more out of a mill than you put into it; or, in other words, that more conclusions than really follow can be got out of premisses, simply because you show what would follow if you had the required knowledge. when the attempt is made, as it seems to me to be made sometimes, to deduce economical laws from some law of human desire--as from the simple theorem that equal increments of a commodity imply diminishing amounts of utility--i should reply not only that the numerical data are vaguely defined and incapable of being accurately stated, but that the attempt must be illusory because the conclusions are not determinable from the premisses. the economic laws do not follow from any simple rule about human desires, because they vary according to the varying constitution of human society; and any conclusion which you could obtain would be necessarily confined to the abstract man of whom the law is supposed to hold good. every such method, therefore, if it could be successful, could only lead to conclusions about human desire in general, and could throw no light upon the special problems of political economy, which essentially depend upon varying industrial organisation. i will not, however, go further. you must either, i hold, limit political economy to the field of statistical inquiry, or admit that, as a part of sociology, it deals with questions altogether beyond the reach of mathematics. like physiology, it is concerned with results capable of numerical statement. the number of beats of the pulse, or the number of degrees of temperature of the body, are important data in physiological problems. they may be counted, and may give rise to mathematically expressible formulæ. but the fact does not excuse us from considering the physical conditions of the organs which are in some way correlated with these observed phenomena; and, in the case of political economy, we have to do with the social structure, which is dependent upon forces altogether incapable of precise numerical estimates. that, at least, is my view; and i shall apply it to illustrate one remark, which must, i think, have often occurred to us. political economy, that is, often appears to have a negative rather than a positive value. it is exceedingly potent--so, at least, i think--in dispersing certain popular fallacies; but it fails when we regard it as a science which can give us positive concrete "laws". the general reason is, i should say, that although its first principles may be true descriptions of facts, and any denial of them, or any inconsistent applications of them, may lead us into error, they are yet far from sufficient descriptions. they omit some considerations which are relevant in any concrete case; and the facts which they describe are so complex that, even when we look at them consistently and follow the right clue, we cannot solve the complicated problems which occur. it may be worth while to insist a little upon this, and to apply it to one or two peculiar problems. let me start from the ordinary analogy. economic inquiry, i have suggested, describes a certain existing mechanism, which exists as really as the physical structure described by an anatomist. the industrial organism has, of course, many properties of which the economist, as such, does not take account. the labourer has affections, and imaginations, and opinions outside of his occupation as labourer; he belongs to a state, a church, a family, and so forth, which affect his whole life, including his industrial life. is it therefore impossible to consider the industrial organisation separately? not more impossible, i should reply, than to apply the same method in regard to the individual body. were i to regard my stomach simply as a bag into which i put my food, i should learn very little about the process of digestion. still, it is such a bag, and it is important to know where it is, and what are its purely mechanical relations to other parts of the body. my arms and legs are levers, and i can calculate the pressure necessary to support a weight on the hand, as though my bones and muscles were made of iron and whipcord. i am a piece of mechanism, though i am more, and all the principles of simple mechanics apply to my actions, though they do not, by themselves, suffice to explain the actions. the discovery of the circulation of the blood explained, as i understand, my structure as a hydraulic apparatus; and it was of vast importance, even though it told us nothing directly of the other processes necessarily involved. in this case, therefore, we have an instance of the way in which a set of perfectly true propositions may, so to speak, be imbedded in a larger theory, and may be of the highest importance, though they are not by themselves sufficient to solve any concrete problem. we cannot, that is, deduce the physiological principles from the mechanical principles, although they are throughout implied. but those principles are not the less true and useful in the detection of fallacies. they may enable us to show that an argument supposes facts which do not exist; or, perhaps, that it is, at any rate, inconsistent because it assumes one structure in its premisses, and another in its conclusions. i state this by way of illustration: but the value of the remark may be best tested by applying it to some economical doctrines. let us take, for example, the famous argument of adam smith against what he called the mercantile theory. that theory, according to him, supposed that the wealth of nations, like the wealth of an individual, was in proportion to the amount of money in their possession. he insisted upon the theory that money, as it is useful solely for exchange, cannot be, in itself, wealth; that its absolute amount is a matter of indifference, because if every coin in existence were halved or doubled, it would discharge precisely the same function; and he inferred that the doctrine which tested the advantages of foreign commerce by the balance of trade or the net return of money, was altogether illusory. his theory is expounded in every elementary treatise on the subject. it may be urged that it was a mere truism, and therefore useless; or, again, that it does not enable us to deduce a complete theory of the functions of money. in regard to the first statement, i should reply that, although smith probably misrepresented some of his antagonists, the fallacy which he exposed was not only current at the time, but is still constantly cropping up in modern controversies. so long as arguments are put forward which implicitly involve an erroneous, because self-contradictory, conception of the true functions of money, it is essential to keep in mind these first principles, however obvious they may be in an abstract statement. euclid's axioms are useful because they are self-evident; and so long as people make mistakes in geometry, it will be necessary to expose their blundering by bringing out the contradictions involved. as hobbes observed, people would dispute even geometrical axioms if they had an interest in doing so; and, certainly, they are ready to dispute the plainest doctrines about money. the other remark, that we cannot deduce a complete theory from the axiom is, of course, true. thus, for example, although the doctrine may be unimpeachable, there is a difficulty in applying it to the facts. as gold has other uses besides its use as money, its value is not regulated exclusively by the principle assigned; as other things, again, such as bank-notes and cheques, discharge some of the functions of money, we have all manner of difficult problems as to what money precisely is, and how the most elementary principles will apply to the concrete facts. a very shrewd economist once remarked, listening to a metaphysical argument, "if there had been any money to be made out of it, we should have solved that question in the city long ago". yet, there is surely money to be made out of a correct theory of the currency; and people in the city do not seem to have arrived at a complete agreement. in fact, such controversies illustrate the extreme difficulty which arises out of the complexity of the phenomena, even where the economic assumption of the action of purely money-loving activity is most nearly verified. the moral is, i fancy, that while inaccurate conclusions are extremely difficult, we can only hope to approach them by a firm grasp of the first principles revealed in the simplest cases. even in such a case, we have also to notice how we have to make allowance for the intrusion of other than purely economic cases. the doctrine just noticed is, of course, closely connected with the theory of free trade. the free trade argument is, i should mention, perfectly conclusive in a negative sense. it demonstrates, that is, the fallacy which lurks in the popular argument for protection. that argument belongs to the commonest class of economic fallacies, which consists in looking at one particular result without considering the necessary implications. the great advantage of any rational theory is, that it forces us to look upon the industrial mechanism as a whole, and to trace out the correlative changes involved in any particular operation. it disposes of the theories which virtually propose to improve our supply of water by pouring a cup out of one vessel into another; and such theories have had considerable success in economy. so far, in short, as a protectionist really maintains that the advantage consists in accumulating money, without asking what will be the effect upon the value of money, or that it consists in telling people to make for themselves what they could get on better terms by producing something to exchange for it, his arguments may be conclusively shown to be contradictory. such arguments, at least, cannot be worth considering. but, to say nothing of cases which may be put by an ingenious disputant in which this may not quite apply, we have to consider reasons which may be extra-economical. when it is suggested, for example, that the economic disadvantage is a fair price for political independence; or, on the other hand, that the stimulus of competition is actually good for the trade affected; or, again, that protection tends naturally to corruption; we have arguments which, good or bad, are outside the sphere of economics proper. to answer them we have to enter the field of political or ethical inquiry, where we have to take leave of tangible facts and precise measures. this is a more prominent element as we approach the more human side (if i may so call it) of political economy. consider, for example, the doctrine which made so profound an impression upon the old school--malthus's theory of population. it was summed up in the famous--though admittedly inaccurate--phrase, that population had a tendency to increase in a geometrical ratio, while the means of subsistence increased only in an arithmetical ratio. the food available for each unit would therefore diminish as the population increased. the so-called law obviously states only a possibility. it describes a "tendency," or, in other words, only describes what would happen under certain, admittedly variable, conditions. it showed how, in a limited area and with the efficiency of industry remaining unaltered, the necessary limits upon the numbers of the population would come into play. if, then, the law were taken, or in so far as it was taken, to assert that, in point of fact, the population must always be increasing in civilised countries to the stage at which the lowest class would be at starvation level, it was certainly erroneous. there are cases in which statesmen are alarmed by the failure of population to show its old elasticity, and beginning to revert to the view that an increased rate is desirable. it cannot be said to be even necessarily true that in all cases an increased population implies, of necessity, increased difficulty of support. there are countries which are inadequately peopled, and where greater numbers would be able to support themselves more efficiently because they could adopt a more elaborate organisation. nor can it be said with certainty that some pressure may not, within limits, be favourable to ultimate progress by stimulating the energies of the people. in a purely stationary state people might be too content with a certain stage of comfort to develop their resources and attain a permanently higher stage. whatever the importance of such qualifications of the principle, there is a most important conclusion to be drawn. malthus or his more rigid followers summed up their teaching by one practical moral. the essential condition of progress was, according to them, the discouragement of early marriages. if, they held, people could only be persuaded not to produce families until they had an adequate prospect of supporting their families, everything would go right. we shall not, i imagine, be inclined to dispute the proposition, that a certain degree of prudence and foresight is a quality of enormous value; and that such a quality will manifest itself by greater caution in taking the most important step in life. what such reasoners do not appear to have appreciated was, the immense complexity and difficulty of the demand which they were making. they seem to have fancied that it was possible simply to add another clause--the clause "thou shalt not marry"--to the accepted code of morals; and that, as soon as the evil consequences of the condemned behaviour were understood,--properly expounded, for example, in little manuals for the use of school children,--obedience to the new regulation would spontaneously follow. what they did not see, or did not fully appreciate, was the enormous series of other things--religious, moral, and intellectual--which are necessarily implied in altering the relation of the strongest human passion to the general constitution, and the impossibility of bringing home such an alteration, either by an act of legislation or by pointing out the bearing of a particular set of prudential considerations. political economy might be a very good thing; but its expositors were certainly too apt to think that it could by itself at once become a new gospel for mankind. should we then infer from such criticisms that the doctrine of malthus was false, or was of no importance? nothing would be further from my opinion. i hold, on the contrary, that it was of the highest importance, because it drew attention to a fact, the recognition of which was essential to all sound reasoning on social questions. the fact is, that population is not to be treated as a fixed quantity, but as capable of rapid expansion; and that this elasticity may at any moment require consideration, and does in fact give the explanation of many important phenomena. the main fact which gave importance to malthus's writings was the rapid and enormous increase of pauperism during the first quarter of this century. the charitable and sentimental writers of the day were alarmed, but proposed to meet the evil by a reckless increase of charity, either of the official or the private variety. pitt, we know, declared (though he qualified the statement) that to be the father of a large family should be a source of honour, not of obloquy; and the measures adopted under the influence of such notions did in fact tend to diminish all sense of responsibility, encouraged people to rely upon the parish for the support of their children, and brought about a state of things which alarmed all intelligent observers. the greatest check to the evil was given by the new poor-law, adopted under the influence of the principles advocated by malthus and his friends. his achievement, then, was not that he laid down any absolutely correct scientific truth, or even said anything which had not been more or less said by many judicious people before his time; but that he encouraged the application of a more systematic method of reasoning upon the great problem of the time. instead of simply giving way to the first kindly impulse, abolishing a hardship here and distributing alms elsewhere, he substantially argued that society formed a complex organism, whose diseases should be considered physiologically, their causes explained, and the appropriate remedies considered in all their bearings. we must not ask simply whether we were giving a loaf to this or that starving man, or indulge in _à priori_ reasoning as to the right of every human being to be supported by others; but treat the question as a physician should treat a disease, and consider whether, on the whole, the new regulations would increase or diminish the causes of the existing evils. he did not, therefore, so much proclaim a new truth, as induce reformers to place themselves at a new and a more rational point of view. the so-called law of population which he announced might be in various ways inaccurate, but the announcement made it necessary for rational thinkers to take constantly into account considerations which are essential in any satisfactory treatment of the great problems. if it were right to consider pauperism as a gulf of fixed dimensions, we might hope to fill it by simply taking a sufficient quantity of wealth from the richer classes. if, as malthus urged, this process had a tendency to enlarge the dimensions of the gulf itself, it was obvious that the whole problem required a more elaborate treatment. by impressing people with this truth, and by showing how, in a great variety of cases, the elasticity of the population was a most important factor in determining the condition of the people, malthus did a great service, and introduced a more systematic and scientific method of discussing the immensely important questions involved. i will very briefly try to indicate one further application of economic principles. a critical point in the modern development of the study was marked by mill's abandonment of the so-called "wage fund theory". that doctrine is now generally mentioned with contempt, as the most conspicuous instance of an entirely exploded theory. it is often said that it is either a falsity, or a barren truism. i am not about to argue the point, observing only that some very eminent economists consider that it was rather inadequate than fallacious; and that to me it has always seemed that the theory which has really been confuted is not so much a theory which was ever actually held by economists, as a formula into which they blundered when they tried to give a quasi-scientific definition of their meaning. it is common enough for people to argue sensibly, when the explicit statements of their argument may be altogether erroneous. at any rate, i think it has been a misfortune that a good phrase has been discredited; and that mill's assailants, in exposing the errors of that particular theory of a "wage fund," seemed to imply that the whole conception of a "wage fund" was a mistake. for the result has been, that the popular mind seems to regard the amount spent in wages as an arbitrary quantity; as something which, as malthus put it, might be fixed at pleasure by her majesty's justices of the peace. because the law was inaccurately stated, it is assumed that there is no law at all, and that the share of the labourers in the total product of industry might be fixed without reference to the effect of a change upon the general organisation. now, if the wage fund means the share which, under existing circumstances, actually goes to the class dependent upon wages, it is of the highest importance to discover how that share is actually determined; and it does not even follow that a doctrine which is in some sense a truism may not be a highly important doctrine. one of the ablest of the old economists, nassan senior, after laying down his version of the theory, observes that it is "so nearly self-evident" that if political economy were a new science, it might be taken for granted. but he proceeds to enumerate seven different opinions, some of them held by many people, and others by writers of authority, with which it is inconsistent. and, without following his arguments, this statement suggests what i take to be a really relevant defence of his reasons. at the time when the theory was first formulated, there were many current doctrines which were self-contradictory, and which could, therefore, best be met by the assertion of a truism. when the peace of brought distress instead of plenty, some people, such as southey, thought it a sufficient explanation to say that the manufacturer had lost his best customer, because the government wanted fewer guns and less powder. they chose to overlook the obvious fact that a customer who pays for his goods by taking money out of the pockets of the seller, is not an unmixed blessing. then, there was the theory of general "gluts," and of what is still denounced as over-production. the best cure for commercial distress would be, as one disputant asserted, to burn all the goods in our warehouses. it was necessary to point out that this theory (when stated in superficial terms) regarded superabundance of wealth as the cause of universal poverty. another common theory was the evil effect of manufacturers in displacing work. the excellent robert owen stated it as an appalling fact, that the cotton manufacture supplanted the labour of a hundred (perhaps it was two hundred) millions of men. he seems to assume that, if the machinery had not been there, there would still have been wages for the hundred millions. the curious confusion, indeed, which leads us to speak of men wanting work, when what we really mean is that they want wages, shows the tenacity of an old fallacy. mandeville argued long ago that the fire of london was a blessing, because it set at work so many carpenters, plumbers, and glaziers. the protestant reformation had done less good than the invention of hooped petticoats, which had provided employment for so many milliners. i shall not insult you by exposing fallacies; and yet, so long as they survive, they have to be met by truisms. while people are proposing to lengthen their blankets by cutting off one end to sew upon the other, one has to point out that the total length remains constant. now, i fancy that, in point of fact, these fallacies are often to be found in modern times. i read, the other day, in the papers, an argument, adduced by some advocate, on behalf of the eight hours bill. he wished, he said, to make labour dear, and would therefore make it scarce. this apparently leads to the conclusion that the less people work the more they will get, which i take to be a fallacy. so, to mention nothing else, it is still apparently a common argument in favour of protection in america, that the native labourer requires to be supported against the pauperised labour of europe. americans in general are to be made richer by paying higher prices, and by being forced to produce commodities which they could get with less labour employed on the production of other things in exchange. i will not go further; for i think that no one who reads the common arguments can be in want of sufficient illustrations of popular fallacies. this, i say, is some justification for dwelling upon the contrary truisms. i admit, indeed, that even these fallacies may apply to particular cases in which they may represent partial truths; and i also agree that, as sometimes stated, the wage fund theory was not only a truism, but a fruitless truism. it was, however, as i believe, an attempt to generalise a very pertinent and important doctrine, as to the way in which the actual competition in which labourers and employers are involved, actually operates. if so, it requires rather modification than indiscriminate denunciation; and it is, i believe, so treated by the best modern economists. i consider, then, that the economists were virtually attempting to describe systematically the main relations of the industrial mechanism. they showed what were the main functions which it, in fact, discharges. their theory was sufficient to expose many errors, especially those which arise from looking solely at one part of a complex process, and neglecting the implied reactions. it enabled them to point out the inconsistencies and actual contradictions involved in many popular arguments, which are still very far from being destroyed. their main error--apart from any particular logical slips--was, namely, that when they had laid down certain principles which belong properly to the prolegomena of the science, and which are very useful when regarded as providing logical tests of valid reasoning, they imagined that they had done a great deal more, and that the desired science was actually constituted. they laid down three or four primary axioms, such as the doctrine that men desire wealth, and fancied that the whole theory could be deduced from them. this, if what i have said be true, was really to misunderstand what they were really doing. it was to suppose that you could obtain a description of social phenomena without examining the actual structure of society; and was as erroneous as to suppose that you could deduce physiological truths from a few general propositions about the mechanical relations of the skeleton. such criticisms have been made by the historical school of economists; and i, at least, can fully accept their general view. i quite agree that the old assumptions of the older school were frequently unjustifiable; nor can i deny that they laid them down with a tone of superlative dogmatism, which was apt to be very offensive, and which was not justified by their position. moreover, i entirely agree that the progress of economic science, and of all other moral sciences, requires a historical basis; and that we should make a very great blunder if we thought that the creation of an economic man would justify us in dispensing with an investigation of concrete facts, both of the present day and of earlier stages of industrial evolution. but to this there is an obvious qualification. what do we mean by investigating facts? it seems to be a very simple rule, but it leads us at once to great difficulties. so, as mill and later writers have very rightly asked, how are we to settle even the most obvious questions in inquiries where, for obvious reasons, we cannot make experiments, and where we have not such a set of facts as would spontaneously give us the truths which we might seek by experiment? take, as mill suggested, such a question as free trade. we cannot get two countries alike in all else, and differing only in respect to their adoption or rejection of a protective tariff. anything like a thoroughgoing system of free trade has been tried in england alone; and the commercial prosperity of the country since its adoption has been affected by innumerable conditions, so that it is altogether impossible to isolate the results which are to be attributed to the negative condition of the absence of protection. briefly, the result is that the phenomena with which we have to deal are so complex, and our power of arranging them so as to unravel the complexity is so limited, that the direct method of observation breaks down altogether. mill confessed the necessity of applying a different method, which he described with great ability, and which substantially amounts to the method of the older economists. if, with some writers of the historical school, we admit the objections which apply to this method, we seem to be reduced to a hopeless state of uncertainty. a treatise on political economy becomes nothing but a miscellaneous collection of facts, with no definite clue or uniform method of reasoning. i must beg, in conclusion, to indicate what, so far as i can guess, seems to be the view suggested in presence of this difficulty. if i am asked whether political economy, understood, for example, as mill understood it, is to be regarded as a science, i should have to admit that i could not simply reply, yes. to say nothing of any errors in his logic, i should say that i do not believe that it gives us sufficient guidance even in regard to economic phenomena. we could not, that is, deduce from the laws accepted by economists the necessary working of any given measure--say, the effect of protection or free trade, or, still more, the making of a poor-law system. such problems involve elements of which the economist, purely as an economist, is an incompetent judge; and the further we get from those questions in which purely economical considerations are dominant, towards those in which other factors become relevant,--from questions as to currency, for example, to questions as to the relations of capitalists and labourers,--the greater the inadequacy of our methods. but i also hold that political economists may rightly claim a certain scientific character for their speculations. if their ultimate aim is to frame a science of economics which shall be part of the science--not yet constituted--of sociology, then i should say that what they have really done--so far as they have reasoned accurately--has been to frame an essential part of the prolegomena to such a science. the "laws" which they have tried to formulate are not laws which, even if established, would enable us to predict the results of any given action; but they are laws which would have to be taken into account in attempting any such prediction. and this is so, i think, because the laws are descriptions--within limits accurate descriptions--of actually existing facts as to the social mechanism. they are not mere abstract hypotheses, in the sense sometimes attached to that phrase; but accounts of the plan upon which the industrial arrangements of civilised countries are, as a matter of fact, constructed. such a classification and systematic account of facts is, as i should suggest, absolutely necessary for any sound historical method. facts are not simply things lying about, which anybody can pick up and describe for the mere pains of collecting them. we cannot even see a fact without reflection and observation and judgment; and to arrange them in an order which shall be both systematic and fruitful, to look at them from that point of view in which we can detect the general underlying principles, is, in all cases, an essential process before we can begin to apply a truly historical method. anything, it is said, may be proved by facts; and that is painfully true until we have the right method of what has been called "colligating" facts. the catholic and the protestant, the conservative and the radical, the individualist and the socialist, have equal facility in proving their own doctrines with arguments, which habitually begin, "all history shows". printers should be instructed always to strike out that phrase as an erratum; and to substitute, "i choose to take for granted". in order to judge between them we have to come to some conclusion as to what is the right method of conceiving of history, and probably to try many methods before reaching that which arranges the shifting and complicated chaos of phenomena in something like an intelligible order. a first step and a necessary basis, as i believe, for all the more complex inquiries will have to be found by disentangling the various orders of laws (if i may so speak), and considering by themselves those laws of industrial growth which are nearest to the physical sciences in certain respects, and which, within certain limits, can be considered apart, inasmuch as they represent the working of forces which are comparatively independent of forces of a higher order. what i should say for political economists is that they have done a good deal in this direction; that they have explained, and, i suppose, with considerable accuracy, what is the actual nature of the industrial mechanism; that they have explained fairly its working in certain cases where the economic are practically also the sole or dominant motives; and that they have thus laid down certain truths which require attention even when we take into account the play of other more complex and, as we generally say, higher motives. we may indeed hope and believe that society will ultimately be constituted upon a different system; and that for the organisation which has spontaneously and unconsciously developed itself, another will be substituted which will correspond more closely to some principles of justice, and give freer scope for the full development of the human faculties. that is a very large question: i only say that, in any case, all genuine progress consists in a development of institutions already existing, and therefore that a full understanding of the working of the present system is essential to a rational consideration of possible improvements. the socialist may look forward to a time--let us hope that it may come soon!--when nobody will have any grievances. but his schemes will be the better adapted for the realisation of his hopes in proportion as he has fully understood what is the part played by each factor of the existing system; what is its function, and how that function may be more efficiently discharged by any substitute. only upon that condition can he avoid the common error of inventing some scheme which is in sociology what schemes for perpetual motion are in mechanics; plans for making everything go right by condemning some existing portion of the system without fully understanding how it has come into existence, and what is the part which it plays in the whole. i think myself that a study of the good old orthodox system of political economy is useful in this sense, even where it is wrong; because at least it does give a system, and therefore forces its opponents to present an alternative system, instead of simply cutting a hole in the shoe when it pinches, or striking out the driving wheel because it happens to creak unpleasantly. and i think so the more because i cannot but observe that whenever a real economic question presents itself, it has to be argued on pretty much the old principles, unless we take the heroic method of discarding argument altogether. i should be the last to deny that the old political economy requires careful revision and modification, and equally slow to deny that the limits of its applicability require to be carefully defined. but, with these qualifications, i say, with equal conviction, that it does lay down principles which require study and consideration, for the simple reason that they assert the existence of facts which are relevant and important in all the most vitally interesting problems of to-day. the morality of competition. when it has occurred to me to say--as i have occasionally said--that, to my mind, the whole truth lies neither with the individualist nor with his antagonist, my friends have often assured me that i was illogical. of two contradictory principles, they say, you must take one. there are cases, i admit, in which this remark applies. it is true, or it is not true, that two and two make four. we cannot, in arithmetic, adopt sir roger de coverley's conciliatory view, that there is much to be said on both sides. but this logical rule supposes that, in point of fact, the two principles apply to the same case, and are mutually exclusive. i also think that the habit of taking for granted that social problems are reducible to such an alternative, is the source of innumerable fallacies. i hold that, as a rule, any absolute solution of such problems is impossible; and that a man who boasts of being logical, is generally announcing his deliberate intention to be one-sided. he is confusing the undeniable canon that of two contradictory propositions one must be true, with the assumption that two propositions are really contradictory. the apparent contradiction may be illusory. society, says the individualist, is made up of all its members. certainly: if all englishmen died, there would be no english race. but it does not follow that every individual englishman is not also the product of the race. society, says the socialist, is an organic whole. i quite admit the fact; but it does not follow that, as a whole, it has any qualities or aims independent of the qualities and aims of the constituent parts. metaphysicians have amused themselves, in all ages, with the puzzle about the many and the one. perhaps they may find contradictions in the statement that a human society is both one and many; a unit and yet complex; but i am content to assume that unless we admit the fact, we shall get a very little way in sociology. society, we say, is an organism. that implies that every part of a society is dependent upon the other parts, and that although, for purposes of argument, we may find it convenient to assume that certain elements remain fixed while others vary, we must always remember that this is an assumption which, in the long run, never precisely corresponds to the facts. we may, for example, in economical questions, attend simply to the play of the ordinary industrial machinery, without taking into account the fact that the industrial machinery is conditioned by the political and ecclesiastical constitution, by the whole social order, and, therefore, by the acceptance of corresponding ethical, or philosophical or scientific creeds. the method is justifiable so long as we remember that we are using a logical artifice; but we blunder if we take our hypothesis for a full statement of the actual facts. we are then tempted, and it is, perhaps, the commonest of all sources of error in such inquiries, to assume that conditions are absolute which are really contingent; or, to attend only to the action, without noticing the inevitable reactions of the whole system of institutions. and i would suggest, that from this follows a very important lesson in such inquiries. to say that this or that part of a system is bad, is to say, by implication, that some better arrangement is possible consistently with our primary assumptions. in other words, we cannot rationally propose simply to cut out one part of a machine, dead or living, without considering the effect of the omission upon all the other dependent parts. the whole system is necessarily altered. what, we must therefore ask, is the tacit implication as well as what is the immediate purpose of a change? may not the bad effect be a necessary part of the system to which we also owe the good; or necessary under some conditions? it is always, therefore, a relevant question, what is the suggested alternative? we can then judge whether the removal of a particular evil is or is not to be produced at a greater cost than it is worth; whether it would be a process, say, of really curing a smoky chimney or of stopping the chimney altogether, and so abolishing not only the smoke but the fire. i propose to apply this to the question of "competition". competition is frequently denounced as the source of social evils. the complaint is far from a new one. i might take for my text a passage from j. s. mill's famous chapter on the probable future of the labouring classes. mill, after saying that he agrees with the socialists in their practical aims, declares his utter dissent from their declamations against competition. "they forget," he says, "that where competition is not, monopoly is; and that monopoly, in all its forms, is the taxation of the industrious for the support of indolence, if not of plunder." that suggests my question: if competition is bad, what is good? what is the alternative to competition? is it, as mill says, monopoly, or is any third choice possible? if it is monopoly, do you defend monopoly, or only monopoly in some special cases? i opened, not long ago, an old book of caricatures, in which the revolutionary leader is carrying a banner with the double inscription, "no monopoly! no competition!" the implied challenge--how can you abolish both?--seemed to me to require a plain answer. directly afterwards i then took up the newspaper, and read the report of an address upon the prize-day of a school. the speaker dwelt in the usual terms upon the remorseless and crushing competition of the present day, which he mentioned as an incitement to every boy to get a good training for the struggle. the moral was excellent; but it seemed to me curious that the speaker should be denouncing competition in the very same breath with proofs of its influence in encouraging education. when i was a lad, a clever boy and a stupid boy had an equal chance of getting an appointment to a public office. the merit which won a place might be relationship to a public official, or perhaps to a gentleman who had an influence in the constituency of the official. the system was a partial survival of the good old days in which, according to sam weller, the young nobleman got a position because his mother's uncle's wife's grandfather had once lighted the king's pipe. the nobleman, i need hardly add, considered this as an illustration of the pleasant belief, "whatever is, is right". as we had ceased to accept that opinion in politics, offices were soon afterwards thrown open to competition, with the general impression that we were doing justice and opening a career to merit. that the resulting system has grave defects is, i think, quite undeniable; but so far as it has succeeded in determining that the men should be selected for public duty, for their fitness, and for nothing else, it is surely a step in advance which no one would now propose to retrace. and yet it was simply a substitution of competition for monopoly. as it comes into wider operation, some of us begin to cry out against competition. the respectable citizen asks, what are we to do with our boys? the obvious reply is, that he really means, what are we to do with our fools? a clever lad can now get on by his cleverness; and of course those who are not clever are thrust aside. that is a misfortune, perhaps, for them; but we can hardly regard it as a misfortune for the country. and clearly, too, pressure of this kind is likely to increase. we have come to believe that it is a main duty of the nation to provide general education. when the excellent miss hannah more began to spread village schools, she protested warmly that she would not teach children anything which would tend to make the poor discontented with their station. they must learn to read the bible, but she hoped that they would stop short of such knowledge as would enable them to read tom paine. now, hannah more deserves our gratitude for her share in setting the ball rolling; but it has rolled far beyond the limits she would have prescribed. we now desire not only that every child in the country should be able to acquire the elements of learning at least; but, further, we hope that ladders may be provided by which every promising child may be able to climb beyond the elements, and to acquire the fullest culture of which his faculties are capable. there is not only no credit at the present day in wishing so much, but it is discreditable not to do what lies in one's power to further its accomplishment. but, then, is not that to increase enormously the field of competition? i, for example, am a literary person, after a fashion; i have, that is, done something to earn a living by my pen. i had the advantage at starting of belonging to the small class which was well enough off to send its children to the best schools and universities. that is to say, i was one of the minority which had virtually a monopoly of education, and but for that circumstance i should in all probability have taken to some possibly more honest, but perhaps even worse paid, occupation. every extension of the margin of education, everything which diffuses knowledge and intellectual training through a wider circle, must increase the competition among authors. if every man with brains, whether born in a palace or a cottage is to have a chance of making the best of them, the capacity for authorship, and therefore the number of competitors, will be enormously spread. it may also, we will hope, increase the demand for their work. the same remark applies to every profession for which intellectual culture is a qualification. do we regret the fact? would we sentence three-quarters of the nation to remain stupid, in order that the fools in the remaining quarter may have a better chance? that would be contrary to every democratic instinct, to the highest as well as the lowest. but if i say, every office and every profession shall be open to every man; success in it shall depend upon his abilities and merits; and, further, every child in the country shall have the opportunity of acquiring the necessary qualifications, what is that but to accept and to stimulate the spirit of competition? what, i ask, is the alternative? should people be appointed by interest? or is nobody to be anxious for official or professional or literary or commercial success, but only to develop his powers from a sense of duty, and wait till some infallible observer comes round and says, "friend, take this position, which you deserve"? somehow i do not think that last scheme practicable at present. but, even in that case, i do not see how the merits of any man are to be tested without enabling him to prove by experiment that he is the most meritorious person; and, if that be admitted, is not every step in promoting education, in equalising, therefore, the position from which men start for the race, a direct encouragement to competition? carlyle was fond of saying that napoleon's great message to mankind was the declaration that careers should be open to talent, or the tools given to him who could use them. surely that was a sound principle; and one which, so far as i can see, cannot be applied without stimulating competition. the doctrine, indeed, is unpalatable to many socialists. to me, it seems to be one to which only the cowardly and the indolent can object in principle. will not a society be the better off, in which every man is set to work upon the tasks for which he is most fitted? if we allowed our teaching and our thinking to be done by blockheads; our hard labour to be done by men whose muscles were less developed than their brains; made our soldiers out of our cowards, and our sailors out of the sea-sick,--should we be better off? it seems, certainly, to me, that whatever may be the best constitution of society, one mark of it will be the tendency to distribute all social functions according to the fitness of the agents; to place trust where trust is justifiable, and to give the fullest scope for every proved ability, intellectual, moral, and physical. of course, such approximation to this result, as we can observe in the present order of things, is very imperfect. many of the most obvious evils in the particular system of competition now adopted, may be summed up in the statement, that the tests according to which success is awarded, are not so contrived as to secure the success of the best competitors. some of them, for example, are calculated to give an advantage to the superficial and the showy. but that is to say that they are incompatible with the true principle which they were intended to embody; and that we should reform our method, not in the direction of limiting competition, but in the direction of so framing our system that it may be a genuine application of carlyle's doctrine. in other words, in all the professions for which intellectual excellence is required, the conditions should be such as to give the best man the best chance, as far as human arrangements can secure that object. what other rule can be suggested? competition, in this sense, means the preservation of the very atmosphere which is necessary to health; and to denounce it is either to confirm the most selfish and retrograde principles, or to denounce something which is only called competition by a confusion of ideas. how easy such a confusion may be, is obvious when we look at the ordinary language about industrial competition. we are told that wages are kept down by competition. to this mill replied in the passage i have quoted, and, upon his own theory, at any rate, replied with perfect justice, that they were also kept up by competition. the common language upon the subject is merely one instance of the fallacies into which men fall when they personify an abstraction. competition becomes a kind of malevolent and supernatural being, to whose powers no conceivable limits are assigned. it is supposed to account for any amount of degradation. yet if, by multiplying their numbers, workmen increase supply, and so lower the price of labour, it follows, conversely, by the very same reasoning, that if they refused to multiply, they would diminish the supply and raise the price. the force, by its very nature, operates as certainly in one direction as in the other. if, again, there is competition among workmen, there is competition among capitalists. in every strike, of course, workmen apply the principle, and sometimes apply it very effectually, in the attempt to raise their wages. it was often argued, indeed, that in this struggle, the employer possessed advantages partly due to his power of forming tacit combinations. the farmers in a parish, or the manufacturers in a business, were pledged to each other not to raise the rate of wages. if that be so, you again complain, not of competition, but of the want of competition; and you agree that the labourer will benefit, as in fact, i take it, he has undoubtedly benefited, by freer competition among capitalists, or by the greater power of removing his own labour to better markets. in such cases, the very meaning of the complaint is not that there is competition, but that the competition is so arranged as to give an unfair advantage to one side. and a similar misunderstanding is obviously implied in other cases. the australian or american workman fears that his wages will be lowered by the competition of the chinese; and the englishman protests against the competition of pauper aliens. let us assume that he is right in believing that such competition will tend to lower his wages, whatever the moral to be drawn from the fact. briefly, denunciations of "competition" in this sense are really complaints that we do not exclude the chinese immigrant and therefore give a monopoly to the native labourer. that may be a good thing for him, and if it be not a good thing for the chinaman who is excluded from the field, we perhaps do not care very much about the results to china. we are so much better than the heathen that we need not bother about their interests. but, of course, the english workman, when he complains of the intensity of competition, does not propose to adopt the analogous remedy of giving a monopoly to one section of our own population. the english pauper is here; we do not want to suppress him, but only to suppress his pauperism; and he certainly cannot be excluded from any share in the fund devoted to the support of labour. the evil, therefore, of which we complain is primarily the inadequacy of the support provided, not,--though that may also be complained of,--the undesirable method by which those funds are distributed. in other words, the complaint may so far be taken to mean that there are too many competitors, not that, given the competitors, their shares are determined by competition, instead of being determined by monopoly or by some other principle. we have therefore to inquire whether any principle can be suggested which will effect the desired end, and which will yet really exclude competition. the popular suggestion is that the remedy lies in suppressing competition by equalising the prizes. if no prizes are to be won, there will so far be less reason for competing. enough may be provided for all by simply taking something from those who have too much. now, i may probably assume that we all agree in approving the contemplated end--a greater equality of wealth, and especially an elevation of the lower classes to a higher position in the scale of comfort. every social reformer, whatever his particular creed, would probably agree that some of us are too rich, and that a great many are too poor. but we still have to ask, in what sense it is conceivable that a real suppression of competition can contribute to the desired end. it is obvious that when we denounce competition we often mean not that it is to be abolished, but that it is to be regulated and limited in its application. so, for example, people sometimes speak as if competition were the antithesis to co-operation. but i need hardly say that individualists, as well as their opponents, may legitimately sing the praises of co-operation. nobody was more forward than mill, for example, and mill's followers, in advocating the principles of the early co-operative societies. he and they rejoiced to believe that the co-operative societies had revealed unsuspected virtues and capacities in the class from which they sprang; that they had done much to raise the standard of life and to extend sympathy and human relations among previously disconnected units of society. but it is, of course, equally obvious that they have grown up in a society which supposes free competition in every part of its industrial system; that co-operative societies, so far as the outside world is concerned, have to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market; that the rate of wages of their members is still fixed by competition; and that they encourage habits of saving and forethought which presuppose that each man is to have private ends of his own. in what sense, then, can co-operation ever be regarded as really opposed to competition? competition may exist among groups of men just as much as among individuals: a state of war is not less a state of war if it is carried on by regiments and armies, instead of by mere chaotic struggles in which each man fights for his own hand. competition does not mean that there should be no combination, but that there should be no monopoly. so long as a trade or a profession is open to every one who chooses to take it up, its conduct will be equally regulated by competition, whether it be competition as between societies or individuals, or whether its profits be divided upon one system or another between the various classes concerned. co-operators, of course, may look forward to a day in which society at large will be members of a single co-operative society; or, again, to a time in which every industrial enterprise may be conducted by the state. supposing any such aspiration to be realised, the question still remains, whether they would amount to the abolition or still only to the shifting of the incidence of competition. socialists tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the produce of industry. the existing system has sanctioned a complicated chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. property is the result of theft, instead of being, as economists used to assure us, the reward of thrift. it is hoped that these evils may be remedied by a reconstruction of society, in which the means of production shall all be public property, and every man's income be simply a salary in proportion to the quantity of his labour. if we, then, ask how far competition would be abolished, we may first make one remark. such a system, like every other system, requires, for its successful working, that the instincts and moral impulses should correspond to the demands of the society. absolute equality of property is just as compatible with universal misery as with universal prosperity. a population made up of thoroughly lazy, sensual, stupid individuals could, if it chose, work such a machinery so as to suppress all who were industrious, refined and intelligent. however great may be the revenue of a nation, it is a very simple problem of arithmetic to discover how many people could be supported just above the starvation level. the nation at large would, on the supposed system, have to decide how its numbers and wants are to be proportioned to its means. if individuals do not compete, the whole society has, presumably, to compete with other societies; and, in every case whatever, with the general forces of nature. an indolent and inefficient majority might decide, if it pleased, that the amount of work to be exacted should be that which would be just enough to provide the simplest material necessities. if, again, the indolent and inefficient are to exist at all,--and we can scarcely count upon their disappearance,--and if further, they are to share equally with the industrious and the efficient, we must, in some way, coerce them into the required activity. if every industrial organisation is to be worked by the state, the state, it would seem, must appeal to the only means at its disposal,--namely, the prison and the scourge. if, moreover, the idle and sensual choose to multiply, the state must force them to refrain, or the standard of existence will be lowered. and, therefore, as is often argued, socialism logically carried out would, under such conditions, lead to slavery; to a state in which labour would be enforced, and the whole system of life absolutely regulated by the will of the majority; and, in the last resort, by physical force. that seems, i confess, to be a necessary result, unless you can assume a moral change, which is entirely different from the mere change of machinery, and not necessarily implied, nor even made probable, by the change. the intellectual leaders of socialism, no doubt, assume that the removal of "injustice" will lead to the development of a public spirit which will cause the total efficiency to be as great as it is at present, or perhaps greater. but the mass who call themselves socialists take, one suspects, a much simpler view. they are moved by the very natural, but not especially lofty, desire to have more wages and less work. they take for granted that if their share of the total product is increased, they will get a larger dividend; and do not stop to inquire whether the advantage may be not more than counterbalanced by the diminution of the whole product, when the present incitements to industry are removed. they argue,--that is, so far as they argue at all,--as though the quantity to be distributed were a fixed quantity, and regard capitalists as pernicious persons, somehow intercepting a lion's share of the stream of wealth which, it is assumed, would flow equally if they were abolished. that is, of course, to beg the whole question. i, however, shall venture to assume that the industrial machinery requires a corresponding moral force to work it; and i, therefore, proceed to ask how such a force can be supposed to act without some form of competition. nothing, as a recent writer suggests,--ironically, perhaps,--could be easier than to secure an abolition of competition. you have only to do two things: to draw a "ring-fence" round your society, and then to proportion the members within the fence to the supplies. the remark suggests the difficulty. a ring-fence, for example, round london or manchester would mean the starvation of millions in a month; or, if round england, the ruin of english commerce, the enormous rise in the cost of the poor man's food, and the abolition of all his little luxuries. but, if you include even a population as large as london, what you have next to do is to drill some millions of people--vast numbers of them poor, reckless, ignorant, sensual, and selfish--to regulate their whole mode of life by a given code, and refrain from all the pleasures which they most appreciate. the task is a big one, and not the less if you have also to undertake that everybody, whatever his personal qualities, shall have enough to lead a comfortable life. i do not suppose, however, that any rational socialist would accept that programme of isolation. he would hold that, in his utopia, we can do more efficiently all that is done under a system which he regards as wasteful and unjust. the existing machinery, whatever else may be said of it, does, in fact, tend to weld the whole world more and more into a single industrial organism. english workmen are labouring to satisfy the wants of other human beings in every quarter of the world; while chinese, and africans, and europeans, and americans are also labouring to satisfy theirs. this vast and almost inconceivably complex machinery has grown up in the main unconsciously, or, at least, with a very imperfect anticipation of the ultimate results, by the independent efforts of innumerable inventors, and speculators, and merchants, and manufacturers, each of them intent, as a rule, only upon his own immediate profits and the interests of the little circle with which he is in immediate contact. the theory is not, i suppose, that this gigantic system of mutual interdependence should be abolished or restricted, but that it should be carried on consciously, with definite and intelligible purpose, and in such a way as to promote the interests of every fraction of society. the whole organism should resemble one worked by a single brain, instead of representing the resultant of a multitude of distracted and conflicting forces. the difficulties are obvious enough, nor need i dwell upon them here. i will not inquire whether it does not suppose something like omniscience in the new industrial leaders; and whether the restless and multifarious energy now displayed in discovering new means of satisfying human wants could be supplied by a central body, or a number of central bodies, made up of human beings, and, moreover, official human beings, reluctant to try experiments and strike into new courses, and without the present motives for enterprise, "individualists" have enlarged sufficiently upon such topics. what i have to note is that, in any case, the change supposes the necessity of a corresponding morality in the growth of the instincts, the public spirit, the hatred of indolence, the temperance and self-command which would be requisite to work it efficiently. the organisation into which we are born presupposes certain moral instincts, and, moreover, necessarily implies a vast system of moral discipline. our hopes and aspirations, our judgments of our neighbours and of ourselves, are at every moment guided and moulded by the great structure of which we form a part. whenever we ask how our lives are to be directed, what are to be the terms on which we form our most intimate ties, whom we are to support or suppress, how we are to win respect or incur contempt, we are profoundly affected by the social relations in which we are placed at our birth, and the corresponding beliefs or prejudices which we have unconsciously imbibed. such influences, it may perhaps be said, are of incomparably greater importance than the direct exhortations to which we listen, or than the abstract doctrines which we accept in words, but which receive their whole colouring from the concrete facts to which they conform. now, i ask how such discipline can be conceived without some kind of competition; or, rather, what would be the discipline which would remain if, in some sense, competition could be suppressed? if in the ideal society there are still prizes to be won, positions which may be the object of legitimate desire, and if those positions are to be open to every one, whatever his circumstances, we might still have the keenest competition, though carried on by different methods. if, on the other hand, no man's position were to be better than another's, we might suppress competition at the price of suppressing every motive for social as well as individual improvement. in any conceivable state of things, the welfare of every society, the total means of enjoyment at its disposal, must depend upon the energy, intelligence, and trustworthiness of its constituent members. such qualities, i need hardly say, are qualities of individuals. unless john and peter and thomas are steady, industrious, sober, and honest, the society as a whole will be neither honest nor sober nor prosperous. the problem, then, becomes, how can you ensure the existence of such qualities unless john and peter and the rest have some advantage in virtue of possessing them? somehow or other, a man must be the better off for doing his work well and treating his neighbour fairly. he ought surely to hold the positions in which such qualities are most required, and to have, if possible, the best chance of being a progenitor of the rising generation. a social condition in which it made no difference to a man, except so far as his own conscience was concerned, whether he were or were not honest, would imply a society favourable to people without a conscience, because giving full play to the forces which make for corruption and disintegration. if you remove the rewards accessible to the virtuous and peaceful, how are you to keep the penalties which restrain the vicious and improvident? a bare repeal of the law, "if a man will not work, neither shall he eat," would not of itself promote industry. you would at most remove the compulsion which arises from competition, to introduce the compulsion which uses physical force. you would get rid of what seems to some people the "natural" penalty of want following waste, and be forced to introduce the "artificial" or legislative penalty of compulsory labour. but, otherwise, you must construct your society so that, by the spontaneous play of society, the purer elements may rise to the surface, and the scum sink to the bottom. so long as human nature varies indefinitely, so long as we have knaves and honest men, sinners and saints, cowards and heroes, some process of energetic and active sifting is surely essential to the preservation of social health; and it is difficult to see how that is conceivable without some process of active and keen competition. the socialist will, of course, say, and say with too much truth, that the present form of competition is favourable to anti-social qualities. if, indeed, a capitalist is not a person who increases the productive powers of industry, but a person who manages simply to intercept a share produced by the industry of others, there is, of course, much to be said for this view. i cannot now consider that point, for my subject to-day is the moral aspect of competition considered generally. and what i have just said suggests what is, i think, the more purely moral aspect of the question. a reasonable socialist desires to maintain what is good in the existing system, while suppressing its abuses. the question, what is good? is partly economical; but it is partly also ethical: and it is with that part that i am at present concerned. any system of competition, any system which supposes a reward for virtue other than virtue itself, may be accused of promoting selfishness and other ugly qualities. the doctrine that virtue is its own reward is very charming in the mouth of the virtuous man; but when his neighbours use it as an excuse for not rewarding him, it becomes rather less attractive. it saves a great deal of trouble, no doubt, and relieves us from an awkward responsibility. i must, however, point out, in the first place, that a fallacy is often introduced into these discussions which mr. herbert spencer has done a great deal to expose. he has dwelt very forcibly, for example, on the fact that it is a duty to be happy and healthy; and that selfishness, if used in a bad sense, should not mean simply regard for ourselves, but only disregard for our neighbours. we ought not, in other words, to be unjust because we ourselves happen to be the objects of injustice. the parable of the good samaritan is generally regarded as a perfect embodiment of a great moral truth. translated from poetry into an abstract logical form, it amounts to saying that we should do good to the man who most needs our services, whatever be the accidents which alienate ordinary sympathies. now, suppose that the good samaritan had himself fallen among thieves, what would have been his duty? his first duty, i should say, would have been, if possible, to knock down the thief; his second, to tie up his own wounds; and his third, to call in the police. we should not, perhaps, call him virtuous for such conduct; but we should clearly think him wrong for omitting it. not to resist a thief is cowardly; not to attend to your own health is to incapacitate yourself for duty; not to apply to the police is to be wanting in public spirit. assuming robbery to be wrong, i am not the less bound to suppress it because i happen to be the person robbed; i am only bound not to be vindictive--that is, not to allow my personal feelings to make me act otherwise than i should act if i had no special interest in the particular case. adam smith's favourite rule of the "indifferent spectator" is the proper one in the case. i should be impartial, and incline no more to severity than to lenity, because i am forced by circumstances to act both as judge and as plaintiff. so, in questions of self-support, it is obviously a fallacy to assume that an action, directed in the first instance to a man's own benefit, is therefore to be stigmatised as selfish. on the good samaritan's principle, a person should be supported, _ceteris paribus_, by the person who can do it most efficiently, and in nine cases out of ten that person is himself. if self-support is selfish in the sense that the service is directly rendered to self, it is not the less unselfish in so far as it is necessarily also a service to others. if i keep myself by my labour, i am preventing a burden from falling upon my fellows. and, of course, the case is stronger when i include my family. we were all impressed the other day by the story of the poor boy who got some wretchedly small pittance by his work, spent a small portion of it upon his own needs, and devoted the chief part of it to trying to save his mother and her other children from starvation. was he selfish? was he selfish even in taking something for himself, as the only prop of his family? what may be the immediate motive of a man when he is working for his own bread and the bread of his family may often be a difficult question; but as, in point of fact, he is helping not only himself and those who depend on him, but also in some degree relieving others from a burden, his conduct must clearly not be set down as selfish in any sense which involves moral disapproval. let us apply this to the case of competition. the word is generally used to convey a suggestion of selfishness in a bad sense. we think of the hardship upon the man who is ousted, as much as of the benefit to the man who gets in; or perhaps we think of it more. it suggests to us that one man has been shut out for the benefit of his neighbour; and that, of course, suggests envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. we hold that such competition must generate ill-will. i used--when i was intimately connected with a competitive system at the university--to hear occasionally of the evil influences of competition, as tending to promote jealousy between competitors. i always replied that, so far as my experience went, the evil was altogether imaginary. so far from competition generating ill-will, the keenest competitors were, as a rule, the closest friends. there was no stronger bond than the bond of rivalry in our intellectual contests. one main reason was, of course, that we had absolute faith in the fairness of the competition. we felt that it would be unworthy to complain of being beaten by a better man; and we had no doubt that, in point of fact, the winners were the better men; or, at any rate, were honestly believed to be the better men by those who distributed honours. the case, though on a small scale, may suggest one principle. so far as the end of such competitions is good, the normal motives cannot be bad. the end of a fair competition is the discovery of the ablest men, with a view to placing them in the position where their talents may be turned to most account. it can only be achieved so far as each man does his best to train his own powers, and is prepared to test them fairly against the powers of others. to work for that end is, then, not only permissible, but a duty. the spirit in which the end is pursued may be bad, in so far as a man pursues it by unfair means; in so far as he tries to make sham performance pass off for genuine; or, again, in so far as he sets an undue value upon the reward, as apart from the qualities by which it is gained. but if he works simply with the desire of making the best of himself, and if the reward is simply such a position as may enable him to be most useful to society, the competition which results will be bracing and invigorating, and will appeal to no such motives as can be called, in the bad sense, selfish. he is discharging a function which is useful, it is true, to himself; but which is also intrinsically useful to the whole society. the same principle applies, again, to intellectual activity in general. all genuine thought is essentially useful to mankind. in the struggle to discover truth, even our antagonists are, necessarily, our co-operators. a philosopher, as a man of science, owes, at least, as much to those who differ from him, as to those who agree with him. the conflict of many minds, from many sides, is the essential condition of intellectual progress. now, if a man plays his part manfully and honourably in such a struggle, he deserves our gratitude, even if he takes the wrong side. if he looks forward to the recognition by the best judges as one motive for his activity, i think that he is asking for a worthy reward. he deserves blame, only so far as his motives have a mixture of unworthy personal sentiment. obviously, if he aims at cheap fame, at making a temporary sensation instead of a permanent impression, at flattering prejudices instead of spreading truth; or, if he shows greediness of notoriety, by trying to get unjust credit, as we sometimes see scientific people squabbling over claims to the first promulgation of some trifling discovery, he is showing paltriness of spirit. the men whom we revere are those who, like faraday or darwin, devoted themselves exclusively to the advancement of knowledge, and would have scorned a reputation won by anything but genuine work. the fact that there is a competition in such matters implies, no doubt, a temptation,--the temptation to set a higher value upon praise than upon praiseworthiness; but i think it not only possible that the competitors in such rivalries may keep to the honourable path, but probable that, as a matter of fact, they frequently,--i hope that i may say generally,--do so. if the fame at which a man aims be not that which "in broad rumour lies," but that which "lives and spreads aloft in those pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging jove," then i think that the desire for it is scarcely to be called a last infirmity--rather, it is an inseparable quality of noble minds. we wish to honour men who have been good soldiers in that warfare, and we can hardly wish them to be indifferent to our homage. we may add, then, that a competition need not be demoralising when the competitors have lofty aims and use only honourable means. when, passing from purely intellectual aims, we consider the case, say, of the race for wealth, we may safely make an analogous remark. if a man's aim in becoming rich is of the vulgar kind; if he wishes to make an ostentatious display of wealth, and to spend his money upon demoralising amusement; or if, again, he tries to succeed by quackery instead of by the production of honest work, he is, of course, so far mischievous and immoral. but a man whose aims are public-spirited, nay, even if they be such as simply tend to improve the general comfort; who develops, for example, the resources of the country, and introduces new industries or more effective modes of manufacture, is, undoubtedly, in fact conferring a benefit upon his fellows, and may, so far, be doing his duty in the most effectual way open to him. if he succeeds by being really a more efficient man of business than his neighbours, he is only doing what, in the interests of all, it is desirable that he should do. he is discharging an essential social function; and what is to be desired is, that he should feel the responsibility involved, that he should regard his work as on one side the discharge of a social function, and not simply as a means of personal aggrandisement. it is not the fact that he is competing that is against him; but the fact, when it is a fact, that there is something discreditable about the means which he adopts, or the reward that he contemplates. this, indeed, suggests another and a highly important question--the question, namely, whether, in our present social state, his reward may not be excessive, and won at too great a cost to his rivals. and, without going into other questions involved, i will try to say a little, in conclusion, upon this, which is certainly a pressing problem. competition, i have suggested, is not immoral if it is a competition in doing honest work by honourable means, and if it is also a fair competition. but it must, of course, be added, that fairness includes more than the simple equality of chances. it supposes, also, that there should be some proportion between the rewards and the merits. if it is simply a question between two men, which shall be captain of a ship, and which shall be mate, then the best plan is to decide by their merits as sailors; and, if their merits be fairly tried, the loser need bear no grudge against the winner. but when we have such cases as sometimes occur, when, for example, the ship is cast away, and it becomes a question whether i shall eat you or you shall eat me, or, let us say, which of us is to have the last biscuit, we get one of those terrible cases of temptation in which the strongest social bonds sometimes give way under the strain. the competition, then, becomes, in the highest degree, demoralising, and the struggle for existence resolves itself into a mere unscrupulous scramble for life, at any sacrifice of others. that, it is sometimes said, is a parallel to our social state at present. if i gave an excessive prize to the first boy in a school and flogged the second, i should not be doing justice. if one man is rewarded for a moderate amount of forethought by becoming a millionaire, and his unsuccessful rivals punished by starvation or the workhouse, the lottery of life is not arranged on principles of justice. a man must be a very determined optimist if he denied the painful truth to be found in such statements. he must be blind to many evils if he does not perceive the danger of dulling his sympathies by indifference to the fate of the unsuccessful. the rich man in clough's poem observes that, whether there be a god matters very little-- for i and mine, thank somebody, manage to get our victual. but, even if we are not very rich, we must often, i think, doubt whether we are not wrapping ourselves in a spirit of selfish complacency when we are returning to a comfortable home and passing outcasts of the street. we must sometimes reflect that our comfort is not simply a reward for virtue or intelligence, even if it be not sometimes the prize of actual dishonesty. to shut our eyes to the mass of wretchedness around us is to harden our hearts, although to open our hands is too often to do more harm than good. it is no wonder that we should be tempted to declaim against competition, when the competition means that so many unfortunates are to be crowded off their narrow standing-ground into the gulf of pauperism. this may suggest the moral which i have been endeavouring to bring out. looking at society at large, we may surely say that it will be better in proportion as every man is strenuously endeavouring to play his part, and in which the parts are distributed to those best fitted to play them. we must admit, too, that for any period to which we can look forward, the great mass of mankind will find enough to occupy their energies in labouring primarily for their own support, and so bearing the burden of their own needs and the needs of their families. we may infer, too, that a society will be the better so far as it gives the most open careers to all talents, wherever displayed, and as it shows respect for the homely virtues of industry, integrity, and forethought, which are essential to the whole body as to its constituent members. and we may further say that the corresponding motives in the individual cannot be immoral. a desire of independence, the self-respect which makes a man shrink from accepting as a gift what he can win as a fair reward, the love of fairplay, which makes him use only honest means in the struggle, are qualities which can never lose their value, and which are not the less valuable because in the first instance they are most profitable to their possessors. nothing which tends to weaken such motives can be good; but while they preserve their intensity, they necessarily imply the existence of competition in some form or other. it is equally clear that competition by itself is not a sufficient panacea. whenever we take an abstract quality, personify it by the help of capital letters, and lay it down as the one principle of a complex system, we generally blunder. competition is as far as possible from being the solitary condition of a healthy society. it must be not only a competition for worthy ends by honourable means, but should be a competition so regulated that the reward may bear some proportion to the merit. monopoly is an evil in so far as it means an exclusive possession of some advantages or privileges, especially when they are given by the accidents of birth or position. it is something if they are given to the best and the ablest; but the evil still remains if even the best and ablest are rewarded by a position which cramps the energies and lowers the necessity of others. competition is only desirable in so far as it is a process by which the useful qualities are encouraged by an adequate, and not more than an adequate, stimulus; and in which, therefore, there is not involved the degradation and the misery on the one side, the excessive reward on the other, of the unsuccessful and the successful in the struggle. competition, therefore, we might say, could be unequivocally beneficial only in an ideal society; in a state in which we might unreservedly devote ourselves to making the best of our abilities and accepting the consequent results, without the painful sense in the background that others were being sacrificed and debased; crushed because they had less luck in the struggle, and were, perhaps, only less deserving in some degree than ourselves. so long as we are still far enough from having realised any such state; so long as we feel, and cannot but feel, that the distribution of rewards is so much at the mercy of chance, and so often goes to qualities which, in an ideal state, would deserve rather reprobation than applause, we can only aim at better things. we can do what in us lies to level some inequalities, to work, so far as our opportunities enable us, in the causes which are mostly beneficial for the race, to spread enlightenment and good feeling, and to help the unfortunate. but it is also incumbent upon us to remember carefully, what is so often overlooked in the denunciations of competition, that the end for which we must hope, and the approach to which we must further, is one in which the equivocal virtue of charity shall be suppressed; that is, in which no man shall be dependent upon his neighbour in such a sense as to be able to neglect his own duties; in which there may be normally a reciprocity of good services, and the reciprocity not be (as has been said) all on one side. there is a very explicable tendency at present to ask for such one-sided reciprocity. it is natural enough, for reasons too obvious to be mentioned, that reformers should dwell exclusively upon the right of every one to support, and neglect to point out the correlative duty of every one to do his best to support himself. the popular arguments about "old-age pensions" may illustrate the general state of mind. it is disgraceful, people say, that so large a proportion of the aged poor should come to depend upon the rates. undoubtedly it is disgraceful. then upon whom does the disgrace fall? it sounds harsh to say that it falls upon the sufferers. we shrink from saying to a pauper, "it serves you right". that sounds brutal, and is only in part true. still, we should not shrink from stating whatever is true, painful though it may be. it sounds better to lay all the blame upon the oppressor than to lay it upon the oppressed; and yet, as a rule, the cowardice or folly of the oppressed has generally been one cause of their misfortunes, and cannot be overlooked in a true estimate of the case. that drunkenness, improvidence, love of gambling, and so forth, do in fact lead to pauperism is undeniable; and that they are bad, and so far disgraceful, is a necessary consequence. in such cases, then, pauperism is a proof of bad qualities; and the fact, like all other facts, must be recognised. the stress of argument, therefore, is laid upon the hardships suffered by the honest and industrious poor. the logical consequence should be, that the deserving poor should become pensioners, and the undeserving paupers. this at once opens the amazingly difficult question of moral merit, and the power of poor-law officials to solve problems which would certainly puzzle the keenest psychologists. suppose, for example, that a man, without being definitely vicious, has counted upon the promised pension, and therefore neglected any attempts to save. if you give him a pension, you virtually tell everybody that saving is a folly; if you don't, you inflict upon him the stigma which is deserved by the drunkard and the thief. so difficult is it to arrange for this proposed valuation of a man's moral qualities that it has been proposed to get rid of all stigma by making it the right and duty of every one to take a pension. that might conceivably alter the praise, but it would surely not alter the praiseworthiness. it must be wrong in me to take money from my neighbours when i don't want it; and, if wrong, it surely ought to be disgraceful. and this seems to indicate the real point. we may aim at altering the facts, at making them more conducive to good qualities; but we cannot alter or attempt to decide by laws the degree of praise or blame to be attached to individuals. it would be very desirable to bring about a state of things in which no honest and provident man need ever fall into want; and, in that state, pauperism would be rightly discreditable as an indication of bad qualities. but to say that nobody shall be ashamed of taking support would be to ruin the essential economic virtues, and to pauperise the nation; and to try to lay down precise rules as to the distribution of honour and discredit, seems, to me, to be a problem beyond the power of a legislature. i express no opinion upon the question itself, because i am quite incompetent to do so. i only refer to it as illustrating the difficulties which beset us when we try to remove the evils of the present system, and yet to preserve the stimulus to industry, which is implied in competition. the shortest plan is to shut one's eyes to the difficulty, and roundly deny its existence. i hope that our legislators may hit upon some more promising methods. the ordinary mode of cutting the knot too often suggests that the actually contemplated ideal is the land in which the chickens run about ready roasted, and the curse of labour is finally removed from mankind. the true ideal, surely, is the state in which labour shall be generally a blessing; in which we shall recognise the fact--disagreeable or otherwise--that the race can only be elevated by the universal diffusion of public spirit, and a general conviction that it is every man's first duty to cultivate his own capacities, to turn them to the best possible account, and to work strenuously and heartily in whatever position he has been placed. it is because i cannot help thinking that when we attack competition in general terms, we are, too often, blinding ourselves to those homely and often-repeated, and, as i believe, indisputable truths, that i have ventured to speak to-day, namely, on the side of competition--so far, at least, on the side of competition as to suggest that our true ideal should be, not a state, if such a state be conceivable, in which there is no competition, but a state in which competition should be so regulated that it should be really equivalent to a process of bringing about the best possible distribution of the whole social forces; and should be held to be, because it would really be, not a struggle of each man to seize upon a larger share of insufficient means, but the honest effort of each man to do the very utmost he can to make himself a thoroughly efficient member of society. social equality. the problem of which i propose to speak is the old dispute between dives and lazarus. lazarus, presumably, was a better man than dives. how could dives justify himself for living in purple and fine linen, while lazarus was lying at the gates, with the dogs licking his sores? the problem is one of all ages, and takes many forms. when the old puritan saw a man going to the gallows, "there," he said, "but for the grace of god, goes john bradford". when the rich man, entering his club, sees some wretched tatterdemalion, slouching on the pavement, there, he may say, goes sir gorgius midas, but for--what? i am here and he there, he may say, because i was the son of a successful stock-jobber, and he the son of some deserted mother at the workhouse. that is the cause, but is it a reason? suppose, as is likely enough, that lazarus is as good a man as midas, ought they not to change places, or to share their property equally? a question, certainly, to be asked, and, if possible, to be answered. it is often answered, and is most simply answered, by saying that all men ought to be equal. dives should be cut up and distributed in equal shares between lazarus and his brethren. the dogma which embodies this claim is one which is easily refuted in some of the senses which it may bear, though in spite of such refutations it has become an essential part of the most genuine creed of mankind. the man of science says, with perfect truth, that so far from men being born equal, some are born with the capacity of becoming shakespeares and newtons, and others with scarcely the power of rising above sally the chimpanzee. the answer would be conclusive, if anybody demanded that we should all be just six feet high, with brains weighing sixty ounces, neither more nor less. it is also true, and, i conceive, more relevant, that, as the man of science will again say, all improvement has come through little groups of men superior to their neighbours, through races or through classes, which, by elevating themselves on the shoulders of others, have gained leisure and means for superior cultivation. but equality may be demanded as facilitating this process, by removing the artificial advantages of wealth. it may be taken as a demand for a fair start, not as a demand that the prizes shall be distributed irrespectively of individual worth. and, whether the demand is rightly or wrongly expressed, we must, i think, admit that the real force with which we have to reckon is the demand for justice and for equality as somehow implied by justice. it is easy to browbeat a poor man who wants bread and cheese for himself and his family, by calling his demands materialistic, and advising him to turn his mind to the future state, where he will have the best of dives. it is equally easy to ascribe the demands to mere envy and selfishness, or to those evil-minded agitators who, for their own wicked purposes, induce men to prefer a guinea to a pound of wages. but, after all, there is something in the demand for fair play and for the means of leading decent lives, which requires a better answer. it is easy, again, to say that all socialists are utopian. make every man equal to-day, and the old inequalities will reappear to-morrow. pitch such a one over london bridge, it was said, with nothing on but his breeches, and he will turn up at woolwich with his pockets full of gold. it is as idle to try for a dead level, when you work with such heterogeneous materials, as to persuade a homogeneous fluid to stand at anything but a dead level. but surely it may be urged that this is as much a reason for declining to believe that equal conditions of life will produce mere monotony, as for insisting that equality in any state is impossible. the present system includes a plan for keeping the scum at the surface. one of the few lessons which i have learnt from life, and not found already in copy-books, is the enormous difficulty which a man of the respectable classes finds in completely ruining himself, even by vice, extravagance, and folly; whereas, there are plenty of honest people who, in spite of economy and prudence, can scarcely keep outside of the workhouse. admitting the appeal to justice, it is, again, often urged that justice is opposed to the demand for equality. property is sacred, it is said, because a man has (or ought to have) a right to what he has made either by labour or by a course of fair dealings with other men. i am not about to discuss the ultimate ground on which the claim to private property is justified, and, as i think, satisfactorily established. a man has a right, we say, to all that he has fairly earned. has he, then, a right to inherit what his father has earned? a man has had the advantage of all that a rich father can do for him in education, and so forth. why should he also have the father's fortune, without earning it? are the merits of making money so great that they are transmissible to posterity? should a man who has been so good as to become rich, be blessed even to the third and fourth generation? why, as a matter of pure justice, should not all fortunes be applied to public uses, on the death of the man who made them? such a law, however impolitic, would not be incompatible with the moral principle to which an appeal is made. there are, of course, innumerable other ways in which laws may favour an equality of property, without breaking any of the fundamental principles. what, for example, is the just method of distributing taxation? a rich man can not only pay more money than a poor man, in proportion to his income, but he can, with equal ease, pay a greater proportion. to double the income of a labourer may be to raise him from starvation to comfort. to double the income of a millionaire may simply be to encumber him with wealth by which he is unable to increase his own pleasure. there is a limit beyond which it is exceedingly difficult to find ways of spending money on one's own enjoyment--though i have never been able to fix it precisely. on this ground, such plans as a graduated income-tax are, it would seem, compatible with the plea of justice; and, within certain limits, we do, in fact, approve of various taxes, on the ground, real or supposed, that they tend to shift burdens from the poor to the rich, and, so far, to equalise wealth. in fact, this appeal to justice is a tacit concession of the principle. if we justify property on the ground that it is fair that a man should keep what he has earned by his own labour, it seems to follow that it is unjust that he should have anything not earned by his labour. in other words, the answer admits the ordinary first principle from which socialism starts, and which, in some socialist theories, it definitely tries to embody. all that i have tried to do, so far, is to show that the bare doctrine of equality, which is in some way connected with the demand for justice, is not, of necessity, either unjust or impracticable. it may be used to cover claims which are unjust, to sanction bare confiscation, to take away motives for industry, and, briefly, may be a demand of the drones to have an equal share of the honey. from the bare abstract principle of equality between men, we can, in my own opinion, deduce nothing; and, i do not think that the principle can itself be established. that is why it is made a first principle, or, in other words, one which is not to be discussed. the french revolutionists treated it in this way as _à priori_ and self-evident. no school was in more deadly opposition to such _à priori_ truths than the school of bentham and the utilitarians. yet, bentham's famous doctrine, that in calculating happiness each man is to count for one, and nobody for more than one, seems to be simply the old principle in a new disguise. james mill applied the doctrine to politics. j. s. mill again applied it, with still more thoroughness, especially in his doctrine of representation and of the equality of the sexes. accordingly, various moralists have urged that this was an inconsistency in utilitarian doctrine, implying that they, too, could make _à priori_ first principles when they wanted them. it has become a sort of orthodox dogma with radicals, who do not always trouble themselves about a philosophical basis, and is applied with undoubting confidence to many practical political problems. "one man, one vote" is not simply the formulation of a demand, but seems to intimate a logical ground for the demand. if, in politics, one man is rightfully entitled to one vote, is it not also true that, in economics, one man should have a right to one income, or, that money, like political power, should be distributed into precisely equal shares? yet, why are we to take for granted the equality of men in the sense required for such deductions? since men are not equally qualified for political power, it would seem better _primâ facie_ that each man should have the share of power and wealth which corresponds to his powers of using, or, perhaps, to his powers of enjoying. why should we not say, "to each man according to his deserts"? one practical reason, of course, is the extreme difficulty of saying what are the deserts, and how they are to be ascertained. undoubtedly, equality is the shortest and simplest way but, if we take it merely as the most convenient assumption, it loses its attractive appearance of abstract justice or _à priori_ self-certainty. do a common labourer and mr. gladstone deserve the same share of voting power? if not, how many votes should mr. gladstone possess to give him his just influence? to ask such questions is to show that answering is impossible, though political theorists have, now and then, tried to put together some ostensible pretext for an answer. what, let us ask, is the true relation between justice and equality? a judge, to take the typical case, is perfectly just when he ascertains the facts by logical inferences from the evidence, and then applies the law in the spirit of a scientific reasoner. given the facts, what is the rule under which they come? to answer that question, generally speaking, is his whole duty. in other words, he has to exclude all irrelevant considerations, such as his own private interests or affections. the parties are to be to him merely a and b, and he has to work out the result as an arithmetician works out a sum. among the irrelevant considerations are frequently some moral aspects of the case. a judge, for example, decides a will to be valid or invalid without asking whether the testator acted justly or unjustly in a moral sense, but simply whether his action was legal or illegal. he cannot go behind the law, even from motives of benevolence or general maxims of justice, without being an unjust judge. cases may arise, indeed, as i must say in passing, in which this is hardly true. a law may be so flagrantly unjust that a virtuous judge would refuse to administer it. one striking case was that of the fugitive slave law in the united states, where a man had to choose between acting legally and outraging humanity. so we consider a parent unjust who does not leave his fortune equally among his children. unless there should be some special reason to the contrary, we shall hold him to be unfair for making distinctions out of mere preference of one child to another. yet in the case of primogeniture our opinion would have to be modified. supposing, for example, a state of society in which primogeniture was generally recognised as desirable for public interests, we could hardly call a man unjust for leaving his estates to his eldest son. if, in such a state, a man breaks the general rule, our judgment of his conduct would be determined perhaps by considering whether he was before or behind his age, whether he was acting from a keener perception of the evils of inequality or actuated by spite or regardless of the public interests which he believed to be concerned. a parent treats his children equally in his will in regard to money; but he does not, unless he is a fool, give the same training or the same opening to all his children, whether they are stupid or clever, industrious or idle. but what i wish to insist upon is, that justice implies essentially indifference to irrelevant considerations, and therefore, in many cases, equality in the treatment of the persons concerned. a judge has to decide without reference to bribes, and not be biassed by the position of an accused person. in that sense he treats the men equally, but of course he does not give equal treatment to the criminal and innocent, to the rightful and wrongful claimant. the equality implied in justice is therefore to be understood as an exclusion of the irrelevant, and thus supposes an understanding as to what is irrelevant. it is not a mere abstract assertion of equality; but the assertion that, in a given concrete case, a certain rule is to be applied without considering anything outside of the rule. an ideally perfect rule would contain within itself a sufficient indication of what is to be relevant. all men of full age, sound mind, and so forth, are to be treated in such and such a way. then all cases falling within the rule are to be decided on the same principles, and in that sense equally. but the problem remains, what considerations should be taken into account by the rule itself? let us put the canon of equality in a different shape, namely, that there should always be a sufficient reason for any difference in the treatment of our fellows. this rule does not imply that i should act in all cases as though all men were equal in character or mind, but that my action should in all cases be justified by some appropriate consideration. it does not prove that every man should have a vote, but that if one man has a vote and another has not, there should be some adequate reason for the difference. it does not prove that every man should work eight hours a day and have a shilling an hour; but that differences of hours or of pay and, equally, uniformity of hours and pay, should have some sufficient justification. this is a deeper principle, which in some cases justifies and in others does not justify the rule of equality. the rule of equality follows from it under certain conditions, and has gained credit because, in point of fact, those conditions have often been satisfied. the revolutionary demand for equality was, historically speaking, a protest against arbitrary inequality. it was a protest against the existence of privileges accompanied by no duties. when the rich man could only answer the question, "what have you done to justify your position?" by the famous phrase of beaumarchais, "i took the trouble to be born," he was obviously in a false position. the demand for a society founded upon reason, in this sense that a sufficient reason should be given for all differences, was, it seems to me, perfectly right; and, moreover, was enough to condemn the then established system. but when this demand has been so constructed as to twist a logical rule, applicable to all scientific reasoning, into a dogmatic assertion that certain concrete beings were in fact equal, and to infer that they should have equal rights, it ceased to be logical at all, and has been a fruitful parent of many fallacies. reasonable beings require a sufficient reason for all differences of conduct, for the difference between their treatment of a man and a monkey or a white man and a black, as well as for differences between treatment of rich and poor or wise men and fools; and there must, as the same principle implies, be also a sufficient reason for treating all members of a given class equally. we have to consider whether, for any given purpose, the differences between human beings and animals, englishmen and negroes, men and women, are or are not of importance for our purpose. when the differences are irrelevant we neglect them or admit the claim to equality of treatment. but the question as to relevance is not to be taken for granted either way. it would be a very convenient but a very unjustifiable assumption in many cases, as it might save an astronomer trouble if he assumed that every star was equal to every other star. the application of this is, i think, obvious. the _â priori_ assumption of the equality of men is, in some sense, easily refuted. but the refutation does not entitle us to assume that arbitrary inequality, inequality for which no adequate ground can be assigned, is therefore justifiable. it merely shows that the problem is more complex than has been assumed at first sight. "all men ought to be equal." if you mean equal in natural capacity or character, it is enough to say that what is impossible cannot be. if you propose that the industrious and idle, the good and bad, the wise and foolish, should share equally in social advantages, the reply is equally obvious, that such a scheme, if possible, would be injurious to the qualities on which human welfare depends. if you say that men should be rewarded solely according to their intrinsic merits, we must ask, do you mean to abstract from the adventitious advantages of education, social surroundings, and so forth, or to take men as they actually are, whatever the circumstances to which their development is owing? to ask what a man would have been had he been in a different position from his youth, is to ask for an impossible solution, and one, moreover, of no practical bearing. i shall not employ a drunkard if i am in want of a butler, whether he has become a drunkard under overpowering temptation or become a drunkard from inherited dipsomania. but if, on the other hand, i take the man for what he is, without asking how he has come to be what he is, i leave the source at least of all the vast inequalities of which we complain. the difficulty, which i will not try to develop further, underlies, as i think, the really vital difference of method by which different schools attempt to answer the appeal for social justice. the school of so-called individualists finds, in fact, that equality in their sense is incompatible with the varied differences due to the complete growth of the social structure. they look upon men simply as so many independent units of varying qualities, no doubt, but still capable of being considered for political and social purposes as equal. they ask virtually what justice would demand if we had before us a crowd of independent applicants for the good things of the world, and the simplest answer is to distribute the good things equally. if it is replied that the idle and the industrious should not be upon the same footing, they are ready to agree, perhaps, that men should be rewarded according to their services to society, however difficult it may be to arrange the proportions. but it soon appears that the various classes into which society is actually divided imply differences not due to the individual and his intrinsic merits, but to the varying surroundings in which he is placed. to do justice, then, it becomes necessary to get rid of these differences. the extreme case is that of the family. every one probably owes more to his mother and to his early domestic environment than to any other of the circumstances which have influenced his development. if you and i started as perfectly equal babies, and you have become a saint and i a sinner, the divergence probably began when our mothers watched our cradles, and was made inevitable before we had left their knees. consequently, the more thorough-going designers of utopia have proposed to abolish this awkward difference. men must be different at their birth; but we might conceivably arrange public nurseries which should place them all under approximately equal conditions. then any differences would result from a man's intrinsic qualities, and he might be said to be rewarded simply according to his own merits. the plan may be tempting, but has its disadvantages. there are injustices, if we call all inequality injustice, which we can only attribute to nature or to the unknown power which makes men and monkeys, shakespeares and stephens. and one result is that the character and conduct of human beings depend to a great extent upon circumstances, which are accidental in the sense that they are circumstances other than the original endowment of the individual. in this sense, maternal love, for example, is unjust. the mother loves her child because it is her own, not because it is better (though of course it is better) than other children. so, as adam smith, i think, observed, we are more moved by our neighbour's suffering from a corn on his great toe than by the starvation of millions in china. in other words, the affections, which are the great moving forces of society, are unjust in so far as they cause us to be infinitely more interested in our own little circle than in the remoter members of humanity known to us only by report. without discussing the "justice" of this arrangement, we shall have, i think, to admit that it is inevitable. for i, at least, hold that the vague and vast organism of humanity depends for its cohesion upon the affinities and attractions, and not _vice versâ_. my interests are strongest where my power of action is greatest. the love of mothers for children is a force of essential value, and therefore to be cultivated rather than repressed, for no force known to us could replace it. and what is pre-eminently true in this case is, of course, true to a degree in others. burke stated this with admirable force in his attack upon the revolutionists who expounded the opposite principle of abstract equality. "to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle," he says, "the germ, as it were, of public affections. it is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind." the assertion that they desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment against the french "metaphysical" revolutionists. they had perverted the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of concrete units. they fell into the fallacy of which i have spoken; and many radicals, utilitarians, and others have followed them. they assumed that all the varieties of human character, or all those due to the influence of the social environment, through whose structure and inherited instincts every full-grown man has been moulded, might be safely disregarded for the purpose of political and social construction. they have spoken, in brief, as if men were the equal and homogeneous atoms of physical inquiry and social problems capable of solution by a simple rearrangement of the atoms in different orders, instead of remembering that they are dealing with a complex organism, in which not only the whole order but every constituent atom is also a complex structure of indefinitely varying qualities. in the recognition of this truth lies, as i believe, the true secret of any satisfactory method of treatment. does this fact justify inequality in general? or does not the principle of equality still remain as essentially implied in the utopia which we all desire to construct? we have to take it for granted that to each man the first and primary moving instinct is and must be the love of the little "platoon" of which he is a member; that the problem is, not to destroy all these minor attractions, to obliterate the structure and replace society by a vast multitude of independent atoms, each supposed to aim directly at the good of the whole, but so to harmonise and develop or restrain the smaller interests of families, of groups and associations, that they may spontaneously co-operate towards the general welfare. it is a long and difficult task to which we have to apply ourselves; a task not to be effected by the demonstration or application of a single abstract dogma, but to be worked out gradually by the co-operation of many classes and of many generations. if it is fairly solved in the course of a thousand years or so, i for one shall be very fairly satisfied. but distant as the realisation may be, we may or rather ought to consider seriously the end to which we should be working. the conception implies a distinction of primary importance towards any clear treatment of the problem. we have, that is, two different, though not altogether distinct, provinces of what i may, perhaps, call organic and functional morality. we may take the existing order for granted, and ask what is then our duty; or we may ask how far the structure itself requires modification, and, if so, what kind of modification. a man who assumes the existence of the present structure may act justly or unjustly within the limits so prescribed. he must generally be guided in a number of cases by some principle of equality. the judge should endeavour to give the same law to rich and poor; the parent should not make arbitrary distinctions between his children; the statesman should try to distribute his burdens without favouring one particular class, and so forth. a man who, in such a sense, acts justly may be described as up to the level of his age and its accepted established moral ideas, and is, therefore, entitled at least to the negative praise of not being corrupt or dishonest. he fulfils accurately the functions imposed upon him, and is not governed by what bentham called the sinister interests which would prevent them from being effectually discharged for the welfare of the community. but the problem which we have to consider is the deeper and more difficult one of organic justice; and our question is what justice means in this case, or what are the irrelevant considerations to be excluded from our motives of conduct. between these two classes of justice there are distinctions which it is necessary to state briefly. justice, as we generally use the word, implies that the unjust man deserves to be hanged, or, at least, is responsible for his actions. what "responsibility" precisely implies is, of course, a debatable question. i only need assume that, in any case, it implies that somebody is guilty of wrong-doing, for which he should receive an appropriate penalty. but in organic questions it is not the individual, but the race which is responsible; and we require a reform, not a penalty. an impatient temper leads us to generalise too hastily from the case of the individual to that of the country. we bestow the blame for all the wrongs of an oppressed nation, for example, upon the nation which oppresses. but in simple point of fact, the oppressed nation generally deserves (if the word can be fairly used) to share the blame. the trodden worm would not have been trodden upon if it had been a bit of a viper. whatever the duty of turning the second cheek, it is clearly not a national duty. if we admire a tell or robert bruce for resisting oppressors, we implicitly condemn those who submitted to oppressors. if a nation is divided or wanting in courage, public spirit, and independence, it will be trampled down; and though we may most rightfully blame the tramplers, it is idle to exonerate the trampled. it is easy, in the same way, to make the rich solely responsible for all the misery of the poor. the man who has got the booty is naturally regarded as the robber. but, speaking scientifically, that is, with the desire to state the plain facts, we must admit that if the poor are those who have gone to the wall in the struggle for wealth; then, whatever unjust weapons have been used in that struggle, the improvidence and vice and idleness have certainly been among the main causes of defeat. here, as before, the question is not, who is to be punished? we can only settle that when dealing with individual cases. it is the question, what is the cause of certain evils? and here we must resist the temptation of supposing that the class which in some sense appears to profit by them, or, at least, to be exempt from them, has, therefore, any more to do with bringing them about than the class which suffers from them. the reflection may put us in mind of what seems to be a general law. the ultimate cause of the adoption of institutions and rules of conduct is often the fact of their utility to the race; but it is only at a later period that their utility becomes the conscious or avowed reason for maintaining them. the political fabric has been clearly built up, in great part, by purely selfish ambition. nations have been formed by energetic rulers, who had no eye for anything beyond the gratification of their own ambition, although they were clear-headed enough to see that their own ambition could best secure its objects by taking the side of the stronger social forces, and by giving substantial benefit to others. the same holds good pre-eminently of industrial relations. we all know how adam smith, sharing the philosophical optimism of his time, showed how the pursuit of his own welfare by each man tended, by a kind of pre-ordained harmony, to contribute to the welfare of all. since his time we have ceased to be so optimistic, and have recognised the fact that the building up of modern industrial systems has involved much injury to large classes. and yet we may, i think, in great measure adopt his view. the fact that each man was rogue enough to think first of himself and of his own wife and family is not a proof or a presumption that he did not flourish because, in point of fact, he was contributing (quite unintentionally perhaps) to the comforts of mankind in general. what we have to reflect is that, while the bare existence of certain institutions gives a strong presumption of their utility, there is also a probability that when the utility becomes a conscious aim or a consciously adopted criterion of their advantage, they will require a corresponding modification intended to secure the advantages at a minimum cost of evil. premising these remarks as to the meaning of organic justice, we can now come to the question of equality. justice in its ordinary sense may be regarded from one point of view as the first condition of the efficiency of the social organ. in saying that a judge is just, we imply that he is so far efficiently discharging his part in society--the due application of the law--without reference to irrelevant considerations. he is a machine which rightly parts the sheep and goats--taking the legal definition of goats and sheep--instead of putting some goats into the sheepfold, and _vice versâ_. that is, he secures the accurate application of the purely legal rule. organic justice involves an application of the same principle because it equally depends upon the exclusion of irrelevant considerations. it implies such a distribution of functions and of maintenance as may secure the greatest possible efficiency of society towards some end in itself good. society of course may be organised with great efficiency for bad or doubtful ends. a purely military organisation, however admirable for its purpose, may imply a sacrifice of the highest welfare of the nation. assuming, however, the goodness of the end, the greatest efficiency is of course desirable. we may, for our purposes, assume that the efficiency of a nation regarded as a society for the production of wealth is a desirable end. there are, of course, many other purposes which must not be sacrificed to the production of wealth. but power of producing wealth, meaning roughly whatever contributes to the physical support and comfort of the nation, is undoubtedly a necessary condition of all other happiness. if we all starve we can have neither art nor science nor morality. what i mean, therefore, is that a nation is so far better as it is able to raise all necessary supplies with the least expenditure of labour, leaving aside the question how far the superfluous forces should be devoted to raising comparative luxuries or to some purely religious or moral or intellectual purposes. the perfect industrial organisation is, i shall assume, compatible with or rather a condition of a perfect organisation of other kinds. in the most general terms we have to consider what are the principles of social organisation, which of course implies a certain balance between the various organs and a thorough nutrition of all, while yet we may for a moment confine our attention to the purely industrial or economic part of the question. how, if at all, does the principle of equality or of social justice enter the problem? we may assume, in the first place, from this point of view, that one most obvious condition is the absence of all purely useless structures, whether of the kind which we call "survivals" or such as may be called parasitic growths. the organ which has ceased to discharge corresponding functions is simply a drag upon the vital forces. when a class, such as the old french aristocracy, ceases to perform duties while retaining privileges, it will be removed,--too probably, as in that case, it will be removed by violent and mischievous methods,--if the society is to grow in vigour. the individuals, as i have said, may or may not deserve punishment, for they are not personally responsible for the general order of things; but they are not unlikely to incur severe penalties, and what we should really hope is that they may be in some way absorbed by judicious medical treatment, instead of extirpated by the knife. at the other end of the scale, we have the parasitic class of the beggars or thieves. they, too, are not personally responsible for the conditions into which they are born. but they are not only to be pitied individually, but to be regarded, in the mass, as involving social disease and danger. more words upon that topic are quite superfluous, but i may just recall the truth that the two evils are directly connected. we hear it often said, and often denied, that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. so far, however, as it is true, it is one version of the very obvious fact that where there are many careless rich people, there will be the best chance for the beggars. the thoughtless expenditure of the rich without due responsibilities, provides the steady stream of so-called charity,--the charity which, as shakespeare (or somebody else) observes, is twice cursed, which curses him that gives and him that receives; which is to the rich man as a mere drug to still his conscience and offer a spurious receipt in full for his neglect of social duties, and to the poor man an encouragement to live without self-respect, without providence, a mere hanger-on and dead-weight upon society, and a standing injury and source of temptation to his honest neighbours. briefly, a wholesome social condition implies that every social organ discharges a useful function; it renders some service to the community which is equivalent to the support which it derives; brain and stomach each get their due share of supply; and there is a thorough reciprocity between all the different members of the body. but what kind of equality should be desired in order to secure this desirable organic balance? we have to do, i may remark, with the case of a homogeneous race. by this i mean not only that there is no reason to suppose that there is any difference between the innate qualities of rich and poor, but that there is the strongest reason for believing in an equality; that is to say, more definitely, that if you took a thousand poor babies and a thousand rich babies, and subjected them to the same conditions, they would show great individual differences, but no difference traceable to the mere difference of class origin. i therefore may leave aside such problems as might arise in the southern states of america, or even in british india, where two different races are in presence; or, again, the case of the sexes, where we cannot assume as self-evident, that the organic differences are irrelevant to political or social ends. so far as we are concerned, we may take it for granted that the differences which emerge are not due to any causes antecedent to and overriding the differences due to different social positions. if we can say justly (as has been said) that a poor man is generally more charitable in proportion to his means, or, again, that he is, as a rule, a greater liar or a greater drunkard than the rich man, the difference is not due to a difference of breed, but to the education (in the widest sense) which each has received. so long as that difference remains, we must take account of it for purposes of obtaining the maximum efficiency. we must not make the poor man a professor of mathematics, or even manager of a railway, because he has talents which, if trained, would have qualified him for the post; but we may and must assume that an equal training would do as much for the poor man as for the rich; and the question is, how far it is desirable or possible to secure such equality. now, from the point of view of securing a maximum efficiency, it seems to be a clearly desirable end that the only qualities which should indisputably help to determine a man's position in life, should also be those which determine his fitness for working in it efficiently. in utopia, it should be the rule that each man shall do what he can do best. if one man is a gamekeeper and another a prime minister, it should be because one has the gifts of a gamekeeper and the other the gifts of a prime minister: whereas, in the actual state, as we all know, the gamekeeper often becomes the prime minister, while the potential prime minister is limited to looking after poachers. but i also urge that we must take into account the actual and not the potential qualities at any given moment. the inequality may be obviated by raising the grade of culture in all classes; but we must not assume that there is an actual equality where, in fact, there is the widest possible difference. in short, i assert that it is our duty to try to make men equal; though i deny that we are clearly justified in assuming an equality. by making them equal, i do not, of course, mean that we should try to make them all alike. i recognise, with mill and every sensible writer on the subject, that such a consummation represents rather a danger than an advantage. i wish to see individuality strengthened, not crushed, to encourage men to develop the widest possible diversity of tastes, talents, and pursuits, and to attain unity of opinion, not by a calm assumption that this or that creed is true, but by encouraging the sharpest and freest collision of opinions. the equality of which i speak is that which would result, if the distinction into organs were not of such a nature as to make one class more favourable than another to the full development of whatever character and talents a man may possess. in other words, the distribution into classes would correspond purely and simply to the telling off of each man to the duties which he is best fitted to discharge. the position into which he is born, the class surroundings which determine his development, must not carry with them any disqualification for his acquiring the necessary aptitude for any other position. it was, i think, fourier who argued that a man ought to be paid more highly for being a chimney-sweep than for being a prime minister, because the duties of a sweep are the more disagreeable,--a position which some prime ministers may, perhaps, see reason to doubt. my suggestion is, that in utopia every human being would be so placed as to be capable of preparing himself for any other position, and should then go to the work for which he is best fitted. the equality as thus defined would, i submit, leave no room for a sense of injustice, because the qualities which determine a man's position would be the qualities for which he deserves the position, desert in this sense being measurable by fitness. discontent with class distinctions must arise so long as a man feels that his position in a class limits and cramps his capacities below the level of happier fortunes. discontent is not altogether a bad thing, for it is often an _alias_ for hope; remove all discontent and you remove all guarantee for improvement. but discontent is of the malignant variety when it is allied with a sense of injustice; that is, of restrictions imposed upon one class for no assignable reason. the only sufficient reason for classes is the efficient discharge of social functions. the differences between the positions of men in social strata, supply some of the most effective motives for the struggle of life; and the effort of men to rise into the wealthy or the powerful class is not likely to cease so long as men are men; but they take an unworthy form so long as the ambition is simply to attain privileges unconnected with or disproportioned to the duties involved, and which therefore generate hatred to the social structure. if a class could be simply an organ for the discharge of certain functions, and each man in the whole body politic able to fit himself for that class, the injustice, and therefore the malignant variety of discontent, would disappear. of course, i am speaking only of justice. i do not attempt to define the proper ends of society, or regard justice in itself as a sufficient guarantee for all desirable results. such justice may exist even in a savage tribe or a low social type. there may be a just distribution of food among a shipwrecked crew, but the attainment of such justice would not satisfy all their wants. the abolition of misery, the elevation of a degraded class to a higher stage is a good thing in itself, unless it can be shown to involve some counterbalancing evil. i only argue that the ideal society would have this, among other attributes, and, therefore, that to secure such equality is a legitimate object of aspiration. i am speaking of "utopia". the time is indefinitely distant when a man will choose to be a sweep or a prime minister according to his aptitudes, and be equally able to learn his trade whether he is the son of a prime minister or a sweep. i only try to indicate the goal to which our efforts should be directed. but the goal thus defined implies methods different from that of some advocates of equality. they propose at once to assume the non-existence of a disagreeable difficulty, and to take men as equal in a sense in which they are not, in fact, equal. to me the problem appears to be, not the instant introduction of a new system, but a necessarily long and very gradual process of education directed towards the distant goal of making men equal in the desirable sense; and that problem, i add, is in the main a moral problem. it is idle to make institutions without making the qualities by which they must be worked. i do not say--far from it--that we are not to propose what may roughly be called external changes: new regulations and new forms of association, and so forth. on the contrary, i believe, as i have intimated, that this method corresponds to the normal order of development. the new institution protects and stimulates the germs of the moral instincts by which it must be worked. but i also hold that no mere rearrangement does any permanent good unless it calls forth a corresponding moral change, and, moreover, that the moral change, however slow and imperceptible, does incomparably more than any external change. if we assume our present institutions to be permanent, a slight improvement in moral qualities, a growth of sobriety, of chastity, of prudence and intellectual culture, would make an almost indefinite improvement in the condition of the masses. if, for example, englishmen ceased to drink, every english home might be made reasonably comfortable. the two kinds of change imply each other; but it is the most characteristic error of the designers of utopias to suppose a mere change of regulations without sufficiently attending to the moral implication. to attain equality, as i have tried to define the word, would imply vast moral changes, and therefore a long and difficult elaboration. we have not simply to make men happy, as they now count happiness, but to alter their views of happiness. the good old copy-books tell us that happiness is as common in poor men's huts as in rich men's palaces. we are apt to reply that the statement is a mockery and a lie. but it points to the consummation which in some simple social states has been partly realised, and which in some distant future may come to be an expression of facts. it is conceivable surely that rich men may some day find that there are modes of occupation which are more interesting as well as more useful than accumulation of luxuries or the keeping of horses for the turf; that, in place of propitiating fate by supporting the institution of beggary, there is an indefinite field for public-spirited energy in the way not of throwing crumbs to lazarus, but of promoting national culture of mind, of spirit, and of body; that benevolence does not mean simple self-sacrifice, except to the selfish, but the pursuit of a noble and most interesting career; that men's duty to their children is not to enable them to lead idle lives, but to fit them for playing a manly part in the great game of life; and that their relation to those whom they employ is not that of persons exploiting the energies of inferior animals, but of leaders of industry with a common interest in the prosperity of their occupation. people, no doubt, will hardly pursue business from motives of pure benevolence to others, and i do not think it desirable that they should. but the recognition that the pursuit of an honourable business is useful to others may, nevertheless, guide their energies, make the mere scramble for wealth disreputable, and induce them to labour for solid and permanent advantages. such moral changes are, i conceive, necessary conditions of the equality of which i have spoken; they must be brought about to some extent if the industrial organism is to free itself from the injustice necessarily implied in a mere blind struggle for personal comfort. moreover, however distant the final consummation may be, there are, i think, many indications of an approximation. nothing is more characteristic of modern society than the enormous development of the power of association for particular purposes. in former days a society had to form an independent organ, a corporation, a college, and so forth, to discharge any particular function, and the resulting organ was so distinct as to absorb the whole life of its members. the work of the fellow was absorbed in the corporate life of his corporation, and he had no distinct personal interests. now we are all members of societies by the dozen, and society is constantly acquiring the art of forming associations for any purpose, temporary or permanent, which imply no deep structural division, and unite people of all classes and positions. as the profounder lines are obliterated, the tendency to form separate castes, defended by personal privileges, and holding themselves apart from other classes, rapidly diminishes; and the corresponding prejudices are in process of diminution. but i can only hint at this principle. a correlative moral change in the poor is, of course, equally essential. america is described by mr. lowell in the noblest panegyric ever made upon his own country, as "she that lifts up the manhood of the poor". she has taken some rather queer methods of securing that object lately; yet, however imperfect the result, every american traveller will, i believe, sympathise with what mr. bryce has recently said in his great book. america is still the land of hope--the land where the poor man's horizon is not bounded by a vista of inevitable dependence on charity; where--in spite of some superficially grotesque results--every man can speak to every other without the oppressive sense of condescension; where a civil word from a poor man is not always a covert request for a gratuity and a tacit confession of dependence. "alas," says wordsworth, in one of his pregnant phrases, "the gratitude of men has oftener left me mourning" than their cold-heartedness; because, i presume, it is a painful proof of the rarity of kindness. when one man can only receive a gift and another can only bestow it as a payment on account of a long accumulation of the arrears of class injustice, the relations hardly admit of genuine gratitude on either side. what grates most painfully upon me, and, i suppose, upon most of us, is the "servility" of man; the acceptance of a beggar's code of morals as natural and proper for any one in a shabby coat. the more prominent evil just now, according to conservatives and pessimists, is the correlative one of the beggar on horseback; of the man who has found out that he can squeeze more out of his masters, and uses his power even without considering whether it is wise to drain your milch cow too exhaustively. a hope of better things is encouraged by schemes for arbitration and conciliation between employers and employed. but we require a moral change if arbitration is to imply something more than a truce between natural enemies, and conciliation to be something different from that employed by hood's butcher when, after hauling a sheep by main force into the slaughter-house, he exclaimed, "there, i've conciliated _him_!" the only principle on which arbitration can proceed is that the profits should be divided in such a way as to be a sufficient inducement to all persons concerned to give their money or their labour, mental or physical, to promote the prosperity of the business at large. but the reconciliation can only be complete when the capitalist is capable of employing his riches with enough public spirit and generosity to disarm mere envy by his obvious utility, and the poor man justifies his increased wages by his desire to secure permanent benefits and a better standard of life. in utopia, the question will still be, what plan shall be a sufficient inducement to the men who co-operate as employers or labourers, but the inducement will appeal to better motives, and the positions be so far equalised that each will be most tolerable to the man best fitted for it. here a vast series of problems opens about which i can only suggest the briefest hint. the principle i now urge is the old one, namely, that the usual mark of a quack remedy is the neglect of the moral aspect of a question. we want a state of opinion in which the poor are not objects to be slobbered over, but men to help in a manly struggle for moral as well as material elevation. a great deal is said, for example, about the evils of competition. it is remarkable indeed that few proposals for improvement even, so far as i can discover, tend to get rid of competition. co-operation, as tradesmen will tell us, is not an abolition of competition, but a competition of groups instead of units. "profit-sharing" is simply a plan by which workmen may take a direct share in the competition carried on by their masters. i do not mention this as any objection to such schemes, for i do not think that competition is an evil. i do not doubt the vast utility of schemes which tend to increase the intelligence and prudence of workmen, and give them an insight into the conditions of successful business. competition is no doubt bad so far as it means cheating or gambling. but competition is, it seems to me, inevitable so long as we are forced to apply the experimental method in practical life, and i fail to see what other method is available. competition means that thousands of people all over the world are trying to find out how they can supply more economically and efficiently the wants of other people, and that is a state of things to which i do not altogether object. equality in my sense implies that every one should be allowed to compete for every place that he can fill. the cry is merely, as it seems to me, an evasion of the fundamental difficulty. that difficulty is not that people compete, but that there are too many competitors; not that a man's seat at the table has to be decided by fair trial of his abilities, but that there is not room enough to seat everybody. malthus brought to the front the great stumbling-block in the way of utopian optimism. his theory was stated too absolutely, and his view of the remedy was undoubtedly crude. but he hit the real difficulty; and every sensible observer of social evils admits that the great obstacle to social improvement is that social residuum, the parasitic class, which multiplies so as to keep down the standard of living, and turns to bad purposes the increased power of man over nature. we have abolished pestilence and famine in their grimmest shape; if we have not abolished war, it no longer involves usurpation or slavery or the permanent desolation of the conquered; but one result is just this, that great masses can be regularly kept alive at the lowest stage of existence without being periodically swept away by a "black death" or a horde of brutal invaders. if we choose to turn our advantages to account in this way, no nostrums will put an end to poverty; and the evil can only be met--as i venture to assume--by an elevation of the moral level, involving all that is implied in spreading civilisation downward. the difficulty shows itself in discussions of the proper sphere of government. upon that vast and most puzzling topic i will only permit myself one remark. in former times the great aim of reformers was the limitation of the powers of government. they came to regard it as a kind of bogy or extra-natural force, which acted to oppress the poor in order to maintain certain personal privileges. some, like godwin of the "political justice," held that the millennium implied the abolition of government and the institution of anarchy. the early utilitarians held that government might be reformed by placing power in the hands of the subjects, who would use it only for their own interests, but still retained the prejudices engendered in their long struggle against authority, and held that its functions should still be gradually restricted on pain of developing a worse tyranny than the old. the government has been handed over to the people as they desired, but with the natural result that the new authorities not only use it to support their interests, but retain the conviction of its extra-natural, or perhaps supernatural, efficacy. it is regarded as an omnipotent body which can not only say (as it can) that whatever it pleases shall be legal, but that whatever is made a law in the juridical sense shall at once become a law of nature. even their individualist opponents, who profess to follow mr. herbert spencer, seem often to regard the power of government, not as one result of evolution, but as something external which can constrain and limit evolution. it corresponds to a kind of outside pressure which interferes arbitrarily with the so-called natural course of development, and should therefore be abolished. to me, on the contrary, it seems that government is simply one of the social organs, with powers strictly limited by its relation to others and by the nature of the sentiment upon which it rests. there are obvious reasons, in the centralisation of vast industrial interests, the "integration," as mr. spencer calls it, which is the correlative of differentiation, in the growing solidarity of different classes and countries, in the consequent growth of natural monopolies, which give a solid reason for believing that the functions of the central government may require expansion. to decide by any _à priori_ principle what should be the limits of this expansion is, to my mind, hopeless. the problem is one to be worked out by experiment,--that is, by many generations and by repeated blundering. a fool, said erasmus darwin, is a man who never makes an experiment; an experiment is a new mode of action which fails in its object ninety-nine times out of a hundred; therefore, wise men make more blunders, though they also make more discoveries than fools. now, experiments in government and social organisation are as necessary to improvement as any other kind of experiment, and probably still more liable to failure. one thing, however, is again obvious. the simple remedy of throwing everything upon government, of allowing it to settle the rate of wages, the hours of labour, the prices of commodities, and so forth, requires for success a moral and intellectual change which it is impossible to over-estimate. i will not repeat the familiar arguments which, to my mind, justify this statement. it is enough to say that there is no ground in the bare proposal for putting all manner of industrial regulations into the hands of government, for supposing that it would not drag down every one into pauperism instead of raising everybody to comfort. i often read essays of which the weakness seems to be that while they purpose to establish equality, they give no real reason for holding that it would not be an equality of beggary. if every one is to be supported, idle or not, the natural conclusion is universal pauperism. if people are to be forced to work by government, or their numbers to be somehow restricted by government, you throw a stress upon the powers of government which, i will not say, it is impossible that it should bear, but which, to speak in the most moderate terms, implies a complete reconstruction of the intelligence, morality, and conceptions of happiness of human beings. your government would have to be omniscient and purely benevolent as well as omnipotent, and i confess that i cannot see in the experience of those countries where the people have the most direct influence upon the government, any promise that this state of things will be realised just yet. thus, i return to my conclusion,--to my platitude, if you will. professor fawcett used to say that he could lay down no rules for the sphere of government influence, except this rule, that no interference would do good unless it helped people to help themselves. i think that the doctrine was characteristic of his good sense, and i fully subscribe to it. i heartily agree that equality in the sense i have given, is a most desirable ideal; i agree that we should do all that in us lies to promote it; i only say that our aims should be always in consistence with the principle that such equality is only possible and desirable in so far as the lowest classes are lifted to a higher standard, morally as well as physically. of course, that implies approval of every variety of new institutions and laws, of co-operation, of profit sharing, of boards of conciliation, of educational and other bodies for carrying light into darkness and elevating popular standards of life: but always with the express condition that no such institution is really useful except as it tends to foster a genuine spirit of independence, and to supply the moral improvement without which no outward change is worth a button. this is a truism, you may say. yet, when i read the proposals to get rid of poverty by summarily ordering people to be equal, or to extirpate pauperism by spending a million upon certain institutions for out-door relief, i cannot help thinking that it is a truism which requires to be enforced. the old political economy, you say, is obsolete; meaning, perhaps, that you do not mean to be bothered with its assertions; but the old economists had their merits. they were among the first who realised the vast importance of deeper social questions; they were the first who tried to treat them scientifically; they were not (i hope) the last who dared to speak unpleasant truths, simply because they believed them and believed in their importance. perhaps, indeed, they rather enjoyed the practice a little too much, and indulged in it a little too ostentatiously. yet, i am sure that, on the whole, it was a very useful practice, and one which is now scarcely as common as it should be. people are more anxious to pick holes in their statement of economic laws than to insist upon the essential fact that, after all, there are laws, not "laws" made by parliament, but laws of nature, which do, and will, determine the production and distribution of wealth, and the recognition of which is as important to human welfare as the recognition of physiological laws to the bodily health. holding this faith, the old economists were never tired of asserting what is the fundamental truth of so-called "individualism," that, after all we may say about the social development, the essential condition of all social improvement is not that we should have this or that system of regulations, but that the individual should be manly, self-respecting, doing his duty as well as getting his pay, and deeply convinced that nothing will do any permanent good which does not imply the elevation of the individual in his standards of honesty, independence, and good conduct. we can only say to lazarus: "you are probably past praying for, and all we can do is to save you from starving, by any means which do not encourage other people to fall into your weaknesses; but we recognise the right of your class for any and every possible help that can be given towards making men of them, and putting them on their legs by teaching them to stand upright". ethics and the struggle for existence. in his deeply-interesting romanes lecture, professor huxley has stated the opinion that the ethical progress of society depends upon our combating the "cosmic process" which we call the struggle for existence. since, as he adds, we inherit the "cosmic nature" which is the outcome of millions of years of severe training, it follows that the "ethical nature" may count upon having to reckon with a tenacious and powerful enemy as long as the world lasts. this is not a cheerful prospect. it is, as he admits, an audacious proposal to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm. we cannot help fearing that the microcosm may get the worst of it. professor huxley has not fully expanded his meaning, and says much to which i could cordially subscribe. but i think that the facts upon which he relies admit or require an interpretation which avoids the awkward conclusion. pain and suffering, as professor huxley tells us, are always with us, and even increase in quantity and intensity as evolution advances. the fact had been recognised in remote ages long before theories of evolution had taken their modern form. pessimism, from the time of the ancient hindoo philosophers to the time of their disciple, schopenhauer, has been in no want of evidence to support its melancholy conclusions. it would be idle to waste rhetoric in the attempt to recapitulate so familiar a position. though i am not a pessimist, i cannot doubt that there is more plausibility in the doctrine than i could wish. moreover, it may be granted that any attempt to explain or to justify the existence of evil is undeniably futile. it is not so much that the problem cannot be answered, as that it cannot even be asked in any intelligible sense. to "explain" a fact is to assign its causes--that is, to give the preceding set of facts out of which it arose. however far we might go backwards, we should get no nearer to perceiving any reason for the original fact. if we explain the fall of man by adam's eating the apple, we are quite unable to say why the apple should have been created. if we could discover a general theory of pain, showing, say, that it implied certain physiological conditions, we shall be no nearer to knowing why those physiological conditions should have been what they are. the existence of pain, in short, is one of the primary data of our problem, not one of the accidents, for which we can hope in any intelligible sense to account. to give any "justification" is equally impossible. the book of job really suggests an impossible, one may almost say a meaningless, problem. we can give an intelligible meaning to a demand for justice when we can suppose that a man has certain antecedent rights, which another man may respect or neglect. but this has no meaning as between the abstraction "nature" and the concrete facts which are themselves nature. it is unjust to meet equal claims differently. but it is not "unjust" in any intelligible sense that one being should be a monkey and another a man, any more than that part of me should be a hand and another head. the question would only arise if we supposed that the man and the monkey had existed before they were created, and had then possessed claims to equal treatment. the most logical theologians, indeed, admit that as between creature and creator there can be properly no question of justice. the pot and the potter cannot complain of each other. if the writer of job had been able to show that the virtuous were rewarded and the vicious punished, he would only have transferred the problem to another issue. the judge might be justified, but the creator would be condemned. how can it be just to place a being where he is certain to sin, and then to damn him for sinning? that is the problem to which no answer can be given; and which already implies a confusion of ideas. we apply the conception of justice in a sphere where it is not applicable, and naturally fail to get any intelligible answer. it is impossible to combine the conceptions of god as the creator and god as the judge; and the logical straits into which the attempt leads are represented by the endless free-will controversy. i will not now enter that field of controversy: and i will only indicate what seems to me to be the position which we must accept in any scientific discussion of our problem. hume, as i think, laid down the true principle when he said that there could be no _à priori_ proof of a matter of fact. an _à priori_ truth is a truth which cannot be denied without self-contradiction, but there can never be a logical consideration in supposing the non-existence of any fact whatever. the ordinary appeal to the truths of pure mathematics is, therefore, beside the question. all such truths are statements of the precise equivalence of two propositions. to say that there are four things is also to say that there are two pairs of things: to say that there is a plane triangle is also to say that there is a plane trilateral. one statement involves the other, because the difference is not in the thing described, but in our mode of contemplating it. we, therefore, cannot make one assertion and deny the other without implicit contradiction. from such results, again, is evolved (in the logical sense of evolution) the whole vast system of mathematical truths. the complexity of that system gives the erroneous idea that we can, somehow, attain a knowledge of facts, independently of experience. we fail to observe that even the most complex mathematical formula is simply a statement of an exact equivalence of two assertions; and that, till we know by experience the truth of one statement, we can never infer the truth, in fact, of the other. however elaborate may be the evolutions of mathematical truth, they can never get beyond the germs out of which they are evolved. they are valid precisely because the most complex statement is always the exact equivalent of the simpler, out of which it is constructed. they remain to the end truths of number or truths of geometry. they cannot, by themselves, tell us that things exist which can be counted or which can be measured. the whole claim, however elaborate, still requires its point of suspension. we may put their claims to absolute or necessary truth as high as we please; but they cannot give us by themselves a single fact. i can show, for example, that a circle has an infinite number of properties, all of which are virtually implied in the very existence of a circle. but that the circle or that space itself exists, is not a necessary truth, but a datum of experience. it is quite true that such truths are not, in one sense, empirical; they can be discovered without any change of experience; for, by their very nature, they refer to the constant element of experience, and are true on the supposition of the absolute changelessness of the objects contemplated. but it is a fallacy to suppose that, because independent of particular experiences, they are, therefore, independent of experience in general. now, if we agree, as huxley would have agreed, that hume's doctrine is true, if we cannot know a single fact except from experience, we are limited in moral questions, as in all others, to elaborating and analysing our experience, and can never properly transcend it. a scientific treatment of an ethical question, at any rate, must take for granted all the facts of human nature. it can show what morality actually is; what are, in fact, the motives which make men moral, and what are the consequences of moral conduct. but it cannot get outside of the universe and lay down moral principles independent of all influences. i am well aware that in speaking of ethical questions upon this ground, i am exposed to many expressions of metaphysical contempt. i may hope to throw light upon the usual working of morality; but my theory of the facts cannot make men moral of itself. i cannot hope, for example, to show that immorality involves a contradiction, for i know that immorality exists. i cannot even hope to show that it is necessarily productive of misery to the individual, for i know that some people take pleasure in vicious conduct. i cannot deduce facts from morals, for i must consistently regard morals as part of the observed consequences of human nature under given conditions. metaphysicians may, if they can, show me a more excellent method. i admit that their language sometimes enables them to take what, in words at least, is a sublimer position than mine. kant's famous phrase, "thou must, therefore thou canst," is impressive. and yet, it seems to me to involve an obvious piece of logical juggling. it is quite true that whenever it is my duty to act in a certain way, it must be a possibility; but that is only because an impossibility cannot be a duty. it is not my duty to fly, because i have not wings; and conversely, no doubt, it would follow that _if_ it were my duty i must possess the organs required. thus understood, however, the phrase loses its sublimity, and yet, it is only because we have so to understand it, that it has any plausibility. admitting, however, that people who differ from me can use grander language, and confessing my readiness to admit error whenever they can point to a single fact attainable by the pure reason, i must keep to the humbler path. i speak of the moral instincts as of others, simply from the point of view of experience: i cannot myself discover a single truth from the abstract principle of non-contradiction; and am content to take for granted that the world exists as we know it to exist, without seeking to deduce its peculiarities by any high _à priori_ road. upon this assumption, the question really resolves itself into a different one. we can neither explain nor justify the existence of pain; but, of course, we can ask whether, as a matter of fact, pain predominates over pleasure; and we can ask whether, as a matter of fact, the "cosmic processes" tend to promote or discourage virtuous conduct. does the theory of the "struggle for existence" throw any new light upon the general problem? i am quite unable to see, for my own part, that it really makes any difference: evil exists; and the question whether evil predominates over good, can only, i should say, be decided by an appeal to experience. one source of evil is the conflict of interests. every beast preys upon others; and man, according to the old saying, is a wolf to man. all that the darwinian or any other theory can do is, to enable us to trace the consequences of this fact in certain directions; but it neither creates the fact nor makes it more or less an essential part of the process. it "explains" certain phenomena, in the sense of showing their connection with previous phenomena, but does not show why the phenomena should present themselves at all. if we indulge our minds in purely fanciful constructions, we may regard the actual system as good or bad, just as we choose to imagine for its alternative a better or a worse system. if everybody had been put into a world where there was no pain, or where each man could get all he wanted without interfering with his neighbours, we may fancy that things would have been pleasanter. if the struggle, which we all know to exist, had no effect in preventing the "survival of the fittest," things--so, at least, some of us may think--would have been worse. but such fancies have nothing to do with scientific inquiries. we have to take things as they are and make the best of them. the common feeling, no doubt, is different. the incessant struggle between different races suggests a painful view of the universe, as hobbes' natural state of war suggested painful theories as to human nature. war is evidently immoral, we think; and a doctrine which makes the whole process of evolution a process of war must be radically immoral too. the struggle, it is said, demands "ruthless self-assertion" and the hunting down of all competitors; and such phrases certainly have an unpleasant sound. but in the first place, the use of the epithets implies an anthropomorphism to which we have no right so long as we are dealing with the inferior species. we are then in a region to which such ideas have no direct application, and where the moral sentiments exist only in germ, if they can properly be said to exist at all. is it fair to call a wolf ruthless because he eats a sheep and fails to consider the transaction from the sheep's point of view? we must surely admit that if the wolf is without mercy he is also without malice. we call an animal ferocious because a man who acted in the same way would be ferocious. but the man is really ferocious because he is really aware of the pain which he inflicts. the wolf, i suppose, has no more recognition of the sheep's feelings than a man has of feelings in the oyster or the potato. for him, they are simply non-existent; and it is just as inappropriate to think of the wolf as cruel, as it would be to call the sheep cruel for eating grass. are we to say that "nature" is cruel because the arrangement increases the sum of undeserved suffering? that is a problem which i do not feel able to examine; but it is, at least, obvious that it cannot be answered off-hand in the affirmative. to the individual sheep it matters nothing whether he is eaten by the wolf or dies of disease or starvation. he has to die any way, and the particular way is unimportant. the wolf is simply one of the limiting forces upon sheep, and if he were removed others would come into play. the sheep, left to himself, would still give a practical illustration of the doctrine of malthus. if, as evolutionists tell us, the hostility of the wolf tends to improve the breed of sheep, to encourage him to think more and to sharpen his wits, the sheep may be, on the whole, the better for the wolf, in this sense at least: that the sheep of a wolfless region might lead a more wretched existence, and be less capable animals and more subject to disease and starvation than the sheep in a wolf-haunted region. the wolf may, so far, be a blessing in disguise. this suggests another obvious remark. when we speak of the struggle for existence, the popular view seems to construe this into the theory that the world is a mere cockpit, in which one race carries on an interminable struggle with the other. if the wolves are turned in with the sheep, the first result will be that all the sheep will become mutton, and the last that there will be one big wolf with all the others inside him. but this is contrary to the essence of the doctrine. every race depends, we all hold, upon its environment, and the environment includes all the other races. if some, therefore, are in conflict, others are mutually necessary. if the wolf ate all the sheep, and the sheep ate all the grass, the result would be the extirpation of all the sheep and all the wolves, as well as all the grass. the struggle necessarily implies reciprocal dependence in a countless variety of ways. there is not only a conflict, but a system of tacit alliances. one species is necessary to the existence of others, though the multiplication of some implies also the dying out of particular rivals. the conflict implies no cruelty, as i have said, and the alliance no goodwill. the wolf neither loves the sheep (except as mutton) nor hates him; but he depends upon him as absolutely as if he were aware of the fact. the sheep is one of the wolf's necessaries of life. when we speak of the struggle for existence we mean, of course, that there is at any given period a certain equilibrium between all the existing species; it changes, though it changes so slowly that the process is imperceptible and difficult to realise even to the scientific imagination. the survival of any species involves the disappearance of rivals no more than the preservation of allies. the struggle, therefore, is so far from internecine that it necessarily involves co-operation. it cannot even be said that it necessarily implies suffering. people, indeed, speak as though the extinction of a race involved suffering in the same way as the slaughter of an individual. it is plain that this is not a necessary, though it may sometimes be the actual result. a corporation may be suppressed without injury to its members. every individual will die before long, struggle or no struggle. if the rate of reproduction fails to keep up with the rate of extinction, the species must diminish. but this might happen without any increase of suffering. if the boys in a district discovered how to take birds' eggs, they might soon extirpate a species; but it does not follow that the birds would individually suffer. perhaps they would feel themselves relieved from a disagreeable responsibility. the process by which a species is improved, the dying out of the least fit, implies no more suffering than we know to exist independently of any doctrine as to a struggle. when we use anthropomorphic language, we may speak of "self-assertion". but "self-assertion," minus the anthropomorphism, means self-preservation; and that is merely a way of describing the fact that an animal or plant which is well adapted to its conditions of life is more likely to live than an animal which is ill-adapted. i have some difficulty in imagining how any other arrangement can even be supposed possible. it seems to be almost an identical proposition that the healthiest and strongest will generally live longest; and the conception of a "struggle for existence" only enables us to understand how this results in certain progressive modifications of the species. if we could ever for a moment have fancied that there was no pain and disease, and that some beings were not more liable than others to those evils, i might admit that the new doctrine has made the world darker. as it is, it seems to me that it leaves the data just what they were before, and only shows us that they have certain previously unsuspected bearings upon the history of the world. one other point must be mentioned. not only are species interdependent as well as partly in competition, but there is an absolute dependence in all the higher species between its different members which may be said to imply a _de facto_ altruism, as the dependence upon other species implies a _de facto_ co-operation. every animal, to say nothing else, is absolutely dependent for a considerable part of its existence upon its parents. the young bird or beast could not grow up unless its mother took care of it for a certain period. there is, therefore, no struggle as between mother and progeny; but, on the contrary, the closest possible alliance. otherwise, life would be impossible. the young being defenceless, their parents could exterminate them if they pleased, and by so doing would exterminate the race. the parental relation, of course, constantly involves a partial sacrifice of the mother to her young. she has to go through a whole series of operations, which strain her own strength and endanger her own existence, but which are absolutely essential to the continuance of the race. it may be anthropomorphic to attribute any maternal emotions of the human kind to the animal. the bird, perhaps, sits upon her eggs because they give her an agreeable sensation, or, if you please, from a blind instinct which somehow determines her to the practice. she does not look forward, we may suppose, to bringing up a family, or speculate upon the delights of domestic affection. i only say that as a fact she behaves in a way which is at once injurious to her own chances of individual survival, and absolutely necessary to the survival of the species. the abnormal bird who deserts her nest escapes many dangers; but if all birds were devoid of the instinct, the birds would not survive a generation. now, i ask, what is the difference which takes place when the monkey gradually loses his tail and sets up a superior brain? is it properly to be described as a development or improvement of the "cosmic process," or as the beginning of a prolonged contest against it? in the first place, so far as man becomes a reasonable being, capable of foresight and of the adoption of means to ends, he recognises the nature of these tacit alliances. he believes it to be his interest not to exterminate everything, but to exterminate those species alone whose existence is incompatible with his own. the wolf eats every sheep that he comes across as long as his appetite lasts. if there are too many wolves, the process is checked by the starvation of the supernumerary eaters. man can maintain just as many sheep as he wants, and may also proportion the numbers of his own species to the possibilities of future supply. many of the lower species thus become subordinate parts of the social organism--that is to say, of the new equilibrium which has been established. there is so far a reciprocal advantage. the sheep that is preserved with a view to mutton gets the advantage, though he is not kept with a view to his own advantage. of all arguments for vegetarianism, none is so weak as the argument from humanity. the pig has a stronger interest than any one in the demand for bacon. if all the world were jewish, there would be no pigs at all. he has to pay for his privileges by an early death; but he makes a good bargain of it. he dies young, and, though we can hardly infer the "love of the gods," we must admit that he gets a superior race of beings to attend to his comforts, moved by the strongest possible interest in his health and vigour, and induced by its own needs, perhaps, to make him a little too fat for comfort, but certainly also to see that he has a good sty, and plenty to eat every day of his life. other races, again, are extirpated as "ruthlessly" as in the merely instinctive struggle for existence. we get rid of wolves and snakes as well as we can, and more systematically than can be done by their animal competitors. the process does not necessarily involve cruelty, and certainly does not involve a diminution of the total of happiness. the struggle for existence means the substitution of a new system of equilibrium, in which one of the old discords has been removed, and the survivors live in greater harmony. if the wolf is extirpated as an internecine enemy, it is that there may be more sheep when sheep have become our allies and the objects of our earthly providence. the result may be, perhaps i might say must be, a state in which, on the whole, there is a greater amount of life supported on the planet; and therefore, as those will think who are not pessimists, a decided gain on the balance. at any rate, the difference so far is that the condition which was in all cases necessary, is now consciously recognised as necessary; and that we deliberately aim at a result which always had to be achieved on penalty of destruction. so far, again, as morality can be established on purely prudential grounds, the same holds good of relations between human beings themselves. men begin to perceive that, even from a purely personal point of view, peace is preferable to war. if war is unhappily still prevalent, it is at least not war in which every clan is fighting with its neighbours, and where conquest means slavery or extirpation. millions of men are at peace within the limits of a modern state, and can go about their business without cutting each other's throats. when they fight with other nations they do not enslave nor massacre their prisoners. starting from the purely selfish ground hobbes could prove conclusively that everybody benefited by the social compact which substituted peace and order for the original state of war. is this, then, a reversal of the old state of things--a combating of a "cosmic process"? i should rather say that it is a development of the tacit alliances, and a modification so far of the direct or internecine conflict. both were equally implied in the older conditions, and both still exist. some races form alliances, while others are crowded out of existence. of course, i cease to do some things which i should have done before. i don't attack the first man i meet in the street and take his scalp. one reason is that i don't expect he will take mine; for, if i did, i fear that, even as a civilised being, i should try to anticipate his intentions. this merely means that we have both come to see that we have a common interest in keeping the peace. and this, again, merely means that the tacit alliance which was always an absolutely necessary condition of the survival of the species has now been extended through a wider area. the species could not have got on at all if there had not been so much alliance as is necessary for its reproduction and for the preservation of its young for some years of helplessness. the change is simply that the small circle which included only the primitive family or class has extended, so that we can meet members of the same nation, or, it may be, of the same race, on terms which were previously confined to the minor group. we have still to exterminate and still to preserve. the mode of employing our energies has changed, but not the essential nature. morality proper, however, has so far not emerged. it begins when sympathy begins; when we really desire the happiness of others; or, as kant says, when we treat other men as an end and not simply as a means. undoubtedly this involves a new principle, no less than the essential principle of all true morality. still, i have to ask whether it implies a combating or a continuation of a cosmic process. now, as i have observed, even the animal mother shows what i have called a _de facto_ altruism. she has instincts which, though dangerous to the individual, are essential for the race. the human mother sacrifices herself with a consciousness of the results to herself, and her personal fears are overcome by the strength of her affections. she intentionally endures a painful death to save them from suffering. the animal sacrifices herself, but without foresight of the result, and therefore without moral worth. this is merely the most striking exemplification of the general process of the development of morality. conduct is first regarded purely with a view to the effects upon the agent, and is therefore enforced by extrinsic penalties, by consequences, that is, supposed to be attached to us by the will of some ruler, natural or supernatural. the instinct which comes to regard such conduct as bad in itself, which implies a dislike of giving pain to others, and not merely a dislike to the gallows, grows up under such probation until the really moralised being acquires feelings which make the external penalty superfluous. this, indubitably, is the greatest of all changes, the critical fact which decides whether we are to regard conduct simply as useful, or also to regard it as moral in the strictest sense. but i should still call it a development and not a reversal of the previous process. the conduct which we call virtuous is the same conduct externally which we before regarded as useful. the difference is that the simple fact of its utility, that is, of its utility to others and to the race in general, has now become also the sufficient motive for the action as well as the implicit cause of the action. in the earlier stages, when no true sympathy existed, men and animals were still forced to act in a certain way because it was beneficial to others. they now act in that way because they are conscious that it is beneficial to others. the whole history of moral evolution seems to imply this. we may go back to a period at which the moral law is identified with the general customs of the race; at which there is no perception of any clear distinction between that which is moral and that which is simply customary; between that which is imposed by a law in the strict sense and that which is dictated by general moral principles. in such a state of things, the motives for obedience partake of the nature of "blind instincts". no definite reason for them is present to the mind of the agent, and it does not occur to him even to demand a reason. "our fathers did so and we do so" is the sole and sufficient explanation of their conduct. thus instinct again may be traced back by evolutionists to the earliest period at which the instincts implied in the relations between the sexes or between parents and offspring, existed. they were the germ from which has sprung all morality such as we now recognise. morality, then, implies the development of certain instincts which are essential to the race, but which may, in an indefinite number of cases, be injurious to the individual. the particular mother is killed because she obeys her natural instincts; but, if it were not for mothers and their instincts, the race would come to an end. professor huxley speaks of the "fanatical individualism" of our time as failing to construct morality from the analogy of the cosmic process. an individualism which regards the cosmic process as equivalent simply to an internecine struggle of each against all, must certainly fail to construct a satisfactory morality upon such terms, and i will add that any individualism which fails to recognise fully the social character, which regards society as an aggregate instead of an organism, will, in my opinion, find itself in difficulties. but i also submit that the development of the instincts which directly correspond to the needs of the race, is merely another case in which we aim consciously at an end which was before an unintentional result of our actions. every race, above the lowest, has instincts which are only intelligible by the requirements of the race; and has both to compete with some and to form alliances with others of its fellow occupants of the planet. both in the unmoralised condition and in that in which morality has become most developed, these instincts have common characteristics, and may be regarded as conditions of the power of the race to which they belong to maintain its position in the world, and, speaking roughly, to preserve or increase its own vitality. i will not pause to insist upon this so far as regards many qualities which are certainly moral, though they may be said to refer primarily to the individual. that chastity and temperance, truthfulness and energy, are, on the whole, advantages both to the individual and to the race, does not, i fancy, require elaborate proof; nor need i argue at length that the races in which they are common will therefore have inevitable advantages in the struggle for existence. of all qualities which enable a race to hold its own, none is more important than the power of organising individually, politically, and socially, and that power implies the existence of justice and the instinct of mutual confidence-in short, all the social virtues. the difficulty seems to be felt in regard to those purely altruistic impulses, which, at first glance at any rate, make it apparently our duty to preserve those who would otherwise be unfit to live. virtue, says professor huxley, is directed "not so much to the survival of the fittest," as to the "fitting of as many as possible to survive". i do not dispute the statement, i think it true in a sense; but i have a difficulty as to its application. morality, it is obvious, must be limited by the conditions in which we are placed. what is impossible is not a duty. one condition plainly is that the planet is limited. there is only room for a certain number of living beings; and though we may determine what shall be the number, we cannot arbitrarily say that it shall be indefinitely great. it is one consequence that we do, in fact, go on suppressing the unfit, and cannot help going on suppressing them. is it desirable that it should be otherwise? should we wish, for example, that america could still be a hunting-ground for savages? is it better that it should contain a million red men or sixty millions of civilised whites? undoubtedly the moralist will say with absolute truth that the methods of extirpation adopted by spaniards and englishmen were detestable. i need not say that i agree with him, and hope that such methods may be abolished wherever any remnant of them exists. but i say so partly because i believe in the struggle for existence. this process underlies morality, and operates whether we are moral or not. the most civilised race, that which has the greatest knowledge, skill, power of organisation, will, i hold, have an inevitable advantage in the struggle, even if it does not use the brutal means which are superfluous as well as cruel. all the natives who lived in america a hundred years ago would be dead now in any case, even if they had invariably been treated with the greatest humanity, fairness, and consideration. had they been unable to suit themselves to new conditions of life, they would have suffered an euthanasia instead of a partial extirpation; and had they suited themselves they would either have been absorbed or become a useful part of the population. to abolish the old brutal method is not to abolish the struggle for existence, but to make the result depend upon a higher order of qualities than those of the mere piratical viking. mr. pearson has been telling us in his most interesting book, that the negro may not improbably hold his own in africa. i cannot say i regard this as an unmixed evil. why should there not be parts of the world in which races of inferior intelligence or energy should hold their own? i am not so anxious to see the whole earth covered by an indefinite multiplication of the cockney type. but i only quote the suggestion for another reason. till recent years the struggle for existence was carried on as between europeans and negroes by simple violence and brutality. the slave trade and its consequences have condemned the whole continent to barbarism. that, undoubtedly, was part of the struggle for existence. but, if mr. pearson's guess should be verified, the results have been so far futile as well as disastrous. the negro has been degraded, and yet, after all our brutality, we cannot take his place. therefore, besides the enormous evils to slave-trading countries themselves, the lowering of their moral tone, the substitution of piracy for legitimate commerce, and the degradation of the countries which bought the slaves, the superior race has not even been able to suppress the inferior. but the abolition of this monstrous evil does not involve the abolition but the humanisation of the struggle. the white man, however merciful he becomes, may gradually extend over such parts of the country as are suitable to him; and the black man will hold the rest and acquire such arts and civilisation as he is capable of appropriating. the absence of cruelty would not alter the fact that the fittest race would extend; but it may ensure that whatever is good in the negro may have a chance of development in his own sphere, and that success in the struggle will be decided by more valuable qualities. without venturing further into a rather speculative region, i need only indicate the bearing of such considerations upon problems nearer home. it is often complained that the tendency of modern civilisation is to preserve the weakly, and therefore to lower the vitality of the race. this seems to involve inadmissible assumptions. in the first place, the process by which the weaker are preserved consists in suppressing various conditions unfavourable to human life in general. sanitary legislation, for example, aims at destroying the causes of many of the diseases from which our forefathers suffered. if we can suppress the smallpox, we of course save many weakly children, who would have died had they been attacked. but we also remove one of the causes which weakened the constitutions of many of the survivors. i do not know by what right we can say that such legislation, or again, the legislation which prevents the excessive labour of children, does more harm by preserving the weak than it does good by preventing the weakening of the strong. one thing is at any rate clear: to preserve life is to increase the population, and therefore to increase the competition; or, in other words, to intensify the struggle for existence. the process is as broad as it is long. if we could be sure that every child born should grow up to maturity, the result would be to double the severity of the competition for support, what we should have to show, therefore, in order to justify the inference of a deterioration due to this process, would be, not that it simply increased the number of the candidates for living, but that it gave to the feebler candidates a differential advantage; that they are now more fitted than they were before for ousting their superior neighbours from the chances of support. but i can see no reason for supposing such a consequence to be probable or even possible. the struggle for existence, as i have suggested, rests upon the unalterable facts that the world is limited and population elastic. under all conceivable circumstances we shall still have in some way or other to proportion our numbers to our supplies; and under all circumstances those who are fittest by reason of intellectual or moral or physical qualities will have the best chance of occupying good places, and leaving descendants to supply the next generation. it is surely not less true that in the civilised as much as in the most barbarous race, the healthiest are the most likely to live, and the most likely to be ancestors. if so, the struggle will still be carried on upon the same principles, though certainly in a different shape. it is true that this suggests one of the most difficult questions of the time. it is suggested, for example, that in some respects the "highest" specimens of the race are not the healthiest or the fittest. genius, according to some people, is a variety of disease, and intellectual power is won by a diminution of reproductive power. a lower race, again, if we measure "high" and "low" by intellectual capacity, may oust a higher race, because it can support itself more cheaply, or, in other words, because it is more efficient for industrial purposes. without presuming to pronounce upon such questions, i will simply ask whether this does not interpret professor huxley's remark about that "cosmic nature" which is still so strong, and which is likely to be strong so long as men require stomachs. we have not, i think, to suppress it, but to adapt it to new circumstances. we are engaged in working out a gigantic problem: what is the best, in the sense of the most efficient, type of human being? what is the best combination of brains and stomach? we turn out saints, who are "too good to live," and philosophers, who have run too rapidly to brains. they do not answer in practice, because they are instruments too delicate for the rough work of daily life. they may give us a foretaste of qualities which will be some day possible for the average man; of intellectual and moral qualities, which, though now exceptional, may become commonplace. but the best stock for the race are those in whom we have been lucky enough to strike out the happy combination, in which greater intellectual power is produced without the loss of physical vigour. such men, it is probable, will not deviate so widely from the average type. the reconciliation of the two conditions can only be effected by a very gradual process of slowly edging onwards in the right direction. meanwhile the theory of a struggle for existence justifies us, instead of condemning us, for preserving the delicate child, who may turn out to be a newton or a keats, because he will leave to us the advantage of his discoveries or his poems, while his physical feebleness assures us that he will not propagate his race. this may lead to a final question. does the morality of a race strengthen or weaken it; fit it to hold its own in the general equilibrium, or make its extirpation by low moral races more probable? i do not suppose that anybody would deny what i have already suggested, that the more moral the race, the more harmonious and the better organised, the better it is fitted for holding its own. but if this be admitted, we must also admit that the change is not that it has ceased to struggle, but that it struggles by different means. it holds its own, not merely by brute force, but by justice, humanity, and intelligence, while, it may be added, the possession of such qualities does not weaken the brute force, where such a quality is still required. the most civilised races are, of course, also the most formidable in war. but, if we take the opposite alternative, i must ask how any quality which really weakens the vitality of the race can properly be called moral. i should entirely repudiate any rule of conduct which could be shown to have such a tendency. this, indeed, indicates what seems to me to be the moral difficulty with most people. charity, you say, is a virtue; charity increases beggary, and so far tends to produce a feebler population; therefore, a moral quality tends doubly to diminish the vigour of a nation. the answer is, of course, obvious, and i am confident that professor huxley would have so far agreed with me. it is that all charity which fosters a degraded class is therefore immoral. the "fanatical individualism" of to-day has its weaknesses; but in this matter it seems to me that we see the weakness of the not less fanatical "collectivism". the question, in fact, how far any of the socialistic or ethical schemes of to-day are right or wrong, depends upon our answer to the question how far they tend to produce a vigorous or an enervated population. if i am asked to subscribe to general booth's scheme, i inquire first whether the scheme is likely to increase or diminish the number of helpless hangers-on upon the efficient part of society. will the whole nation consist in larger proportions of active and responsible workers, or of people who are simply burdens upon the real workers? the answer decides not only the question whether it is expedient, but also the question whether it is right or wrong, to support the proposed scheme. every charitable action is so far a good action that it implies sympathy for suffering; but if it is so much in want of prudence that it increases the evil which it means to remedy, it becomes for that reason a bad action. to develop sympathy without developing foresight is just one of the one-sided developments which fail to constitute a real advance in morality, though i will not deny that it may incidentally lead to an advance. i hold, then, that the "struggle for existence" belongs to an underlying order of facts to which moral epithets cannot be properly applied. it denotes a condition of which the moralist has to take account, and to which morality has to be adapted; but which, just because it is a "cosmic process," cannot be altered, however much we may alter the conduct which it dictates. under all conceivable circumstances, the race has to adapt itself to the environment, and that necessarily implies a conflict as well as an alliance. the preservation of the fittest, which is surely a good thing, is merely another aspect of the dying out of the unfit, which is hardly a bad thing. the feast which nature spreads before us, according to malthus's metaphor, is only sufficient for a limited number of guests, and the one question is how to select them. the tendency of morality is to humanise the struggle, to minimise the suffering of those who lose the game; and to offer the prizes to the qualities which are advantageous to all, rather than to those which increase and intensify the bitterness of the conflict. this implies the growth of foresight, which is an extension of the earlier instinct, and enables men to adapt themselves to the future and to learn from the past, as well as to act up to immediate impulse of present events. it implies still more the development of the sympathy which makes every man feel for the hurts of all, and which, as social organisation is closer, and the dependence of each constituent atom upon the whole organisation is more vividly realised, extends the range of a man's interests beyond his own private needs. in that sense, again, it must stimulate "collectivism" at the expense of a crude individualism, and condemns the doctrine which, as professor huxley puts it, would forbid us to restrain the member of a community from doing his best to destroy it. to restrain such conduct is surely to carry on the conflict against all anti-social agents or tendencies. for i should certainly hold any form of collectivism to be immoral which denied the essential doctrine of the abused individualist, the necessity, that is, for individual responsibility. we have surely to suppress the murderer, as our ancestors suppressed the wolf. we have to suppress both the external enemies, the noxious animals whose existence is incompatible with our own, and the internal enemies which are injurious elements in the society itself. that is, we have to work for the same end of eliminating the least fit. our methods are changed; we desire to suppress poverty, not to extirpate the poor man. we give inferior races a chance of taking whatever place they are fit for, and try to supplant them with the least possible severity if they are unfit for any place. but the suppression of poverty supposes not the confiscation of wealth, which would hardly suppress poverty in the long run, nor even the adoption of a system of living which would enable the idle and the good-for-nothing to survive. the progress of civilisation depends, i should say, on the extension of the sense of duty which each man owes to society at large. that involves such a constitution of society that, although we abandon the old methods of hanging and flogging and shooting down--methods which corrupted the inflicters of punishment by diminishing their own sense of responsibility--may give an advantage to the prudent and industrious, and make it more probable that they will be the ancestors of the next generation. a system which should equalise the advantages of the energetic and the helpless would begin by demoralising, and would very soon lead to an unprecedented intensification of the struggle for existence. the probable result of a ruthless socialism would be the adoption of very severe means for suppressing those who did not contribute their share of work. but, in any case, as it seems, we never get away or break away from the inevitable fact. if individual ends could be suppressed, if every man worked for the good of society as energetically as for his own, we should still feel the absolute necessity of proportioning the whole body to the whole supplies obtainable from the planet, and to preserve the equilibrium of mankind relatively to the rest of nature. that day is probably distant; but even upon that hypothesis the struggle for existence would still be with us, and there would be the same necessity for preserving the fittest and killing out, as gently as might be, those who were unfit. from images provided by the million book project. progressive morality _fowler_ [illustration] progressive morality an essay in ethics by thomas fowler, m.a., ll.d., f.s.a. president of corpus christi college wykeham professor of logic in the university of oxford preface. these pages represent an attempt to exhibit a scientific conception of morality in a popular form, and with a view to practical applications rather than the discussion of theoretical difficulties. for this purpose it has been necessary to study brevity and avoid controversy. hence, i have made few references to other authors, and i have almost altogether dispensed with foot-notes. but, though i have attempted to state rather than to defend my views, i believe that they are, in the main, those which, making exception for a few back eddies in the stream of modern thought, are winning their way to general acceptance among the more instructed and reflective men of our day. it is necessary that i should state that this essay is independent of a much larger work, entitled the 'principles of morals,' on which i was, some years ago, engaged with my predecessor, the late professor wilson. owing to the declining state of his health during the latter years of his life, that work was, at the time of his death, left in a condition which rendered its completion very difficult and its publication probably undesirable. for the present work i am solely responsible, though no one can have been brought into close contact with so powerful a mind as that of professor wilson, without deriving from it much stimulus and retaining many traces of its influence. it has long been my belief that the questions of theoretical ethics would be far less open to dispute, as well as far more intelligible, if they were considered with more direct reference to practice. this little book will, i trust, furnish an example, however slight and imperfect, of such a mode of treatment. c.c.c. _july_ , . contents. chapter i. introduction. the sanctions of conduct. chapter ii. the moral sanction or moral sentiment. its functions and the justification of its claims to superiority. chapter iii. analysis and formation of the moral sentiment. its education and improvement. chapter iv. the moral test and its justification. chapter v. examples of the practical application of the moral test to existing morality. progressive morality. * * * * * chapter i. introduction. the sanctions of conduct. all reflecting men acknowledge that both the theory and the practice of morality have advanced with the general advance in the intelligence and civilisation of the human race. but, if this be so, morality must be a matter capable of being reasoned about, a subject of investigation and of teaching, in which the less intelligent members of a community have always something to learn from the more intelligent, and the more intelligent, in their turn, have ever fresh problems to solve and new material to study. it becomes, then, of prime importance to every educated man, to ask what are the data of ethics, what is the method by which its general principles are investigated, what are the considerations which the moralist ought to apply to the solution of the complex difficulties of life and action. and still, in spite of these obvious facts, ethical investigation, or any approach to an independent review of the current morality, is always unpopular with the great mass of mankind. though the conduct of their own lives is the subject which most concerns men, it is that in which they are least patient of speculation. nothing is so wounding to the self-complacency of a man of indolent habits of mind as to call in question any of the moral principles on which he habitually acts. praise and blame are usually apportioned, even by educated men, according to vague and general rules, with little or no regard to the individual circumstances of the case. and of all innovators, the innovator on ethical theory is apt to be the most unpopular and to be the least able to secure impartial attention to his speculations. and hence it is that vague theories, couched in unintelligible or only half-intelligible language, and almost totally inapplicable to practice, have usually done duty for what is called a system of moral philosophy. the authors or exponents of such theories have the good fortune at once to avoid odium and to acquire a reputation for profundity. in the following pages, i shall attempt ( ) to discriminate morality, properly so called, from other sanctions of conduct; ( ) to determine the precise functions, and the ultimate justification, of the moral sentiment, or, in other words, of the moral sanction; ( ) to enquire how this sentiment has been formed, and how it may be further educated and improved; ( ) to discover some general test of conduct; ( ) to give examples of the application of this test to existing moral rules and moral feelings, with a view to shew how far they may be justified and how far they require extension or reformation. as my subject is almost exclusively practical, i shall studiously avoid mere theoretical puzzles, such as is pre-eminently that of the freedom of the will, which, in whatever way resolved, probably never influences, and never will influence, any sane man's conduct. questions of this kind will always excite interest in the sphere of speculation, and speculation is a necessity of the cultivated human intellect; but it does not seem to me that they can be profitably discussed in a treatise, the aim of which is simply to suggest principles for examining, for testing, and, if possible, for improving the prevailing sentiment on matters of practical morals. to begin with the first division of my subject, how is morality, properly so called, discriminated from other sanctions of conduct? by a sanction i may premise that i mean any pleasure which attracts to as well as any pain which deters from a given course of action. in books on jurisprudence, this word is usually employed to designate merely pains or penalties, but this circumstance arises from the fact that, at least in modern times, the law seldom has recourse to rewards, and effects its ends almost exclusively by means of punishments. when we are considering conduct, however, in its general aspects and not exclusively in its relations to law, we appear to need a word to express any inducement, whether of a pleasureable or painful nature, which may influence a man's actions, and such a word the term 'sanction' seems conveniently to supply. taking the word in this extended sense, the sanctions of conduct may be enumerated as the physical, the legal, the social, the religious, and the moral. of the physical sanction familiar examples may be found in the headache from which a man suffers after a night's debauch, the pleasure of relaxation which awaits a well-earned holiday, the danger to life or limb which is attendant on reckless exercise, or the glow of constant satisfaction which rewards a healthy habit of life. these pleasures and pains, when once experienced, exercise, for the future, an attracting or a deterring influence, as the case may be, on the courses of conduct with which they have respectively become associated. thus, a man who has once suffered from a severe headache, after a night's drinking-bout, will be likely to exercise more discretion in future, or the prospect of agreeable diversion, at the end of a hard day's work, will quicken a man's efforts to execute his task. the legal sanction is too familiar to need illustration. without penal laws, no society of any size could exist for a day. there are, however, two characteristics of this sanction which it is important to point out. one is that it works almost exclusively[ ] by means of penalties. it would be an endless and thankless business, in a society of any size, even if it were possible, to attempt to reward the virtuous for their consideration in not breaking the laws. the cheap, the effective, indeed, in most cases, the only possible method is to punish the transgressor. by a carefully devised and properly graduated system of penalties each citizen is thus furnished with the strongest inducement to refrain from those acts which may injure or annoy his neighbour. another characteristic of the legal sanction is that, though it is professedly addressed to all citizens alike, it actually affects the uneducated and lower classes far more than the educated and higher classes of society. this circumstance arises partly from the fact that persons in a comfortable position of life are under little temptation to commit the more ordinary crimes forbidden by law, such as are theft, assault, and the like, and partly from the fact that their education and associations make them more amenable to the social, and, in most cases, to the moral and religious sanctions, about to be described presently. few persons in what are called the higher or middle ranks of life have any temptation to commit, say, an act of theft, and, if they experienced any such temptation, they would be at least as likely to be restrained by the consideration of what their neighbours would think or say about them, even apart from their own moral and religious convictions, as by the fear of imprisonment. [footnote : there are a few exceptions to the rule that the sanctions employed by the state assume the form of punishments rather than of rewards. such are titles and honours, pensions awarded for distinguished service, rewards to informers, &c. but these exceptions are almost insignificant, when compared with the numerous examples of the general rule.] one of the most effective sanctions in all conditions of life, but especially in the upper and better educated circles of a civilized society, is what may be called the social sanction, that is to say, a regard for the good opinion and a dread of the evil opinion of those who know us, and especially of those amongst whom we habitually live. it is one of the characteristics of this sanction that it is much more far-reaching than the legal sanction. not only does it extend to many acts of a moral character which are not affected, in most countries, by the legal sanction, such as lying, backbiting, ingratitude, unkindness, cowardice, but also to mere matters of taste or fashion, such as dress, etiquette, and even the proprieties of language. indeed, as to the latter class of actions, there is always considerable danger of the social sanction becoming too strong. society is apt to insist on all men being cast in one mould, without much caring to examine the character of the mould which it has adopted. and it frequently happens that a wholly disproportionate value thus comes to be attached to the observance of mere rules of etiquette and good-breeding as compared with acts and feelings which really concern the moral and social welfare of mankind. there is many a man, moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality. in these cases, as we shall see hereafter, the social sanction requires to be corrected by the moral and religious sanctions, and it is the special province of the moral and religious teacher in each generation to take care that this correction shall be duly and effectively applied. the task may, from time to time, require the drastic hand of the moral or religious reformer, but, unless some one has the courage to undertake it, we are in constant danger of neglecting the weightier matters of the law, while we are busy with the mint and cummin and anise of fashion and convention. but, notwithstanding the danger of exaggeration and misapplication, there can be no doubt of the vast importance and the generally beneficial results of a keen sensitiveness to the opinions of our fellow-men. without the powerful aid of this sanction, the restraints of morality and religion would often be totally ineffective. when the social sanction operates, not through society generally, but through particular sections of society, it may be called a law of honour, a term which originated in the usages of chivalry. in a complex and civilized form of society, such as our own, there may be many such laws of honour, and the same individual may be subject to several of them. thus each profession, the army, the navy, the clerical, the legal, the medical, the artistic, the dramatic profession, has its own peculiar code of honour or rules of professional etiquette, which its members can only infringe on pain of ostracism, or, at least, of loss of professional reputation. the same is the case with trades, and is specially exemplified in the instance of trades-unions, or, their mediaeval prototypes, the guilds. a college or a school, again, has its own rules and traditions, which the tutor or undergraduate, the master or boy, can often only violate at his extreme peril. almost every club, institution, and society affords another instance in point. the class of 'gentlemen,' too, that is to say, speaking roughly, the upper and upper middle ranks of society, claim to have a code of honour of their own, superior to that of the ordinary citizen. a breach of this code is called 'ungentlemanly' rather than wrong or immoral or unjust or unkind. so far as this code insists on courtesy of demeanour and delicacy of feeling and conduct, it is a valuable complement to the ordinary rules of morality, though, so far as it fulfils this function, it plainly ought not to be the exclusive possession of one class, but ought to be communicated, by means of example and education, to the classes who are now supposed to be bereft of it. there are points in this code, however, such as that the payment of 'debts of honour' should take precedence of that of tradesmen's bills, and that less courtesy is due to persons in an inferior station than to those in our own, which at least merit re-consideration. it may, indeed, be said of all these laws or codes of honour, that, though they have probably, on the whole, a salutary effect in maintaining a high standard of conduct in the various bodies or classes where they obtain, they require to be constantly watched, lest they should become capricious or tyrannical, and specially lest they should conflict with the wider interests of society or the deeper instincts of morality. it must not be forgotten that we are 'men' before we are 'gentlemen,' and that no claims of any profession, institution, or class can replace or supplant those of humanity and citizenship. we see, then, or rather we are obliged at the present stage of our enquiry to assume, that the social sanction, whether it be derived from the average sentiment of society at large or from the customs and opinions of particular aggregates of society, requires constant correction at the hands of the moralist. the sentiment which it represents may be only the sentiment of men of average moral tone, or it may even be that of men of an inferior or degraded morality, and hence it often needs to be tested by the application of rules derived from a higher standard both of feeling and intelligence. nor is it the moral standard only which may be used to correct the social standard. we may often advantageously have recourse to the legal standard for the same purpose. for the laws of a country express, as a rule, the sentiments of the wisest and most experienced of its citizens, and hence we might naturally expect that they would be in advance of the average moral sentiment of the people, as well as of the social traditions of particular professions or classes. and this i believe to be usually the case. for instances, we have to go no further than the comparison between the laws and the popular or professional sentiment on bribery at elections, on smuggling, on evasion of taxation, on fraudulent business transactions, on duelling, on prize-fighting, or on gambling. at the same time it must be confessed that, as laws sometimes become antiquated, and the leanings of lawyers are proverbially conservative, it occasionally happens that, on some points, the average moral sentiment is in advance of the law. i may select as examples, from comparatively recent legal history, the continuance of religious disabilities and the excessive punishment of ordinary or even trivial crimes; and, perhaps, i may venture to add, as a possible reform in the future now largely demanded by popular sentiment, some considerable modifications of the laws regulating the transfer of and the succession to landed property. thus it will be seen that law and the sentiment of society may each be employed as corrective of the other, and that, consequently, their comparison implies a higher standard than either, by means of which each may be tested, and to which each, in its turn, may be referred. this higher or common standard it will be our business to consider in a subsequent part of this essay. meanwhile, it may be pointed out that, in addition to its function as an occasional corrective of the legal sanction, the social sanction subserves two great objects: first, it largely complements the legal sanction, being applicable to numberless cases which that sanction does not, and, in fact, cannot reach; secondly, the legal sanction, even in those cases which it reaches, is greatly reinforced by the social sanction, which adds the pains arising from an evil reputation, and all the indefinable social inconveniences which an evil reputation brings with it, to the actual penalties inflicted by the law. the religious sanction varies, of course, with the different religious creeds, and, in the more imperfect forms of religion, by no means always operates in favour of morality. but it will be sufficient here to consider the religious sanction solely in relation to christianity. as enforced by the bible and the church, the religious sanctions of conduct are two, which i shall call the higher and the lower sanctions. by the latter i mean the hope of the divine reward or the fear of the divine punishment, either in this world or the next; by the former, the love of god and that veneration for his nature which irresistibly inspires the effort to imitate his perfections. the lower religious sanction is plainly the same in kind with the legal sanction. if a man is induced to do or to refrain from doing a certain action from fear of punishment, the motive is the same, whether the punishment be for a long time or a short one, whether it is to take immediate effect or to be deferred for a term of years. and, similarly, the same is the case with rewards. no peculiar merit, as it appears to me, can be claimed by a man because he acts from fear of divine punishment rather than of human punishment, or from hope of divine rewards rather than of human rewards. the only differences between the two sanctions are ( ) that the hopes and fears inspired by the religious sanction are, to one who believes in their reality, far more intense than those inspired by the legal sanction, the two being related as the temporal to the eternal, and ( ) that, inasmuch as god is regarded as omnipresent and omniscient, the religious sanction is immeasurably more far-reaching than the legal sanction or even than the legal and the social sanctions combined. thus the lower religious sanction is, to those who really believe in it, far more effective than the legal sanction, though it is the same in kind. but the higher religious sanction appeals to a totally different class of motives, the motives of love and reverence rather than of hope and fear. in this higher frame of mind, we keep god's commandments, because we love him, not because we hope for his rewards or fear his punishments. we reverence god, and, therefore, we strive to be like him, to be perfect even as he is perfect. we have attained to that state of mind in which perfect love has cast out fear, and, hence, we simply do good and act righteously because god, who is the supreme object of our love and the supreme ideal of conduct, is good and righteous. there can be no question that, in this case, the motives are far loftier and purer than in the case of the legal and the lower religious sanctions. but there are few men, probably, capable of these exalted feelings, and, therefore, for the great mass of mankind the external inducements to right conduct must, probably, continue to be sought in the coarser motives. it may be mentioned, before concluding this notice of the religious sanctions, that there is a close affinity between the higher religious sanction and that form of the social sanction which operates through respect for the good opinions of those of our fellow-men whom we love, reverence, or admire. but, quite distinct from all the sanctions thus far enumerated, there is another sanction which is derived from our own reflexion on our own actions, and the approbation or disapprobation which, after such reflexion, we bestow upon them. there are actions which, on no reasonable estimate of probabilities, can ever come to the knowledge of any other person than ourselves, but which we look back on with pleasure or regret. it may be said that, though, in these cases, the legal and the social sanctions are confessedly excluded, the sanction which really operates is the religious sanction, in either its higher or its lower form. but it can hardly be denied that, even where there is no belief in god, or, at least, no vivid sense of his presence nor any effective expectation of his intervention, the same feelings are experienced. these feelings, then, appear to be distinct in character from any of the others which we have so far considered, and they constitute what may appropriately be called the moral sanction, in the strict sense of the term. it is one of the faults of bentham's system that he confounds this sanction with the social sanction, speaking indifferently of the moral _or_ popular (that is to say, social) sanction; but let any one examine carefully for himself the feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with which he looks back upon past acts of his own life, and ask himself whether he can discover in those feelings any reference to the praise or blame of other persons, actual or possible. there will, if i mistake not, be many of them in which he can discover no such reference, but in which the feeling is simply that of satisfaction with himself for having done what he ought to have done, or dissatisfaction with himself for having done that which he ought not to have done. whether these feelings admit of analysis and explanation is another question, and one with which i shall deal presently, but of their reality and distinctness no competent and impartial person, on careful self-examination, can well doubt. the answer, then, to our first question, i conceive to be that the moral sanction, properly so called, is distinguished from all other sanctions of conduct in that it has no regard to the prospect of physical pleasure or pain, or to the hope of reward or fear of punishment, or to the estimation in which we shall be held by any other being than ourselves, but that it has regard simply and solely to the internal feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with which, on reflexion, we shall look back upon our own acts. chapter ii. the moral sanction or moral sentiment. its functions and the justification of its claims to superiority. i now proceed to consider more at length what are the precise functions of the moral sentiment or moral sanction[ ], and what is the justification of the weight which we attach to it, or rather of the preference which we assign to it, or feel that we ought to assign to it, over all the other sanctions of conduct. we have already seen that the moral sentiment or sanction is the feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction which we experience when we reflect on our own acts, without any reference to any external authority or external opinion. now it is important to ask whether this feeling is uniformly felt on the occurrence of the same acts, or whether it ever varies, so that acts, for instance, which are at one time viewed with satisfaction, are at another time regarded with indifference or with positive dissatisfaction. it would seem as if no man who reflects on ethical subjects, and profits by the observation and experience of life, could possibly answer this question in any other than one way. there must be very few educated and reflective men who have not seen reason, with advancing years, to alter their opinion on many of, at least, the minor points of morality in which they were instructed as children. a familiar instance occurs at once in the different way in which most of us view card-playing or attendance at balls or theatres from the much stricter views which prevailed in many respectable english households a generation ago. on the other hand, excess in eating and drinking is regarded with far less indulgence now than it was in the days of our fathers and grandfathers. on these points, then, at least, and such as these, it must be allowed that there is a variation of moral sentiment, or, in other words, that the acts condemned or approved by the moral sanction are not invariably the same. moreover, any of us who are accustomed to reason on moral questions, and can observe carefully the processes through which the mind passes, will notice that there is constantly going on a re-adjustment, so to speak, of our ethical opinions, whether we are reviewing abstract questions of morality or the specific acts of ourselves or others. we at one time think ourselves or others more, and, at another time, less blameable for the self-same acts, or we come to regard some particular class of acts in a different light from what we used to do, either modifying our praise or blame, or, in extreme cases, actually substituting one for the other. but, though these facts are patent, and may be verified by any one in his experience either of himself or others, there have actually been moralists who have appeared to maintain the position that, when a man is unbiassed by passion or interest, his moral judgments are and must be invariably the same. this error has, undoubtedly, been largely fostered by the loose and popular use of the terms conscience and moral sense. these terms, and especially the word conscience, are often employed to designate a sort of mysterious entity, supposed to have been implanted in the mind by god himself, and endowed by him with the unique prerogative of infallibility. even so philosophical and sober a writer as bishop butler has given some countenance to this extravagant supposition, and to the exaggerated language which he employs on the prerogatives of conscience, and to the emphatic manner in which he insists on the absolute, if not the infallible, character of its decisions, may be traced much of the misconception which still prevails on the subject. but we have only to take account of the notorious fact that the consciences of two equally conscientious men may point in entirely opposite directions, in order to see that the decisions of conscience cannot, at all events, be credited with infallibility. those who denounce and those who defend religious persecution, those who insist on the removal and those who insist on the retention of religious disabilities, those who are in favour of and those who are opposed to a relaxation of the marriage laws, those who advocate a total abstention from intoxicating liquors and those who allow of a moderate use of them,--men on both sides in these controversies, or, at least, the majority of them, doubtless act conscientiously, and yet, as they arrive at opposite conclusions, the conscience of one side or other must be at fault. there is no act of religious persecution, there are few acts of political or personal cruelty, for which the authority of conscience might not be invoked. i doubt not that queen mary acted as conscientiously in burning the reformers as they did in promulgating their opinions or we do in condemning her acts. it is plain, then, not only that the decisions of conscience are not infallible, but that they must, to a very large extent, be relative to the circumstances and opinions of those who form them. in any intelligible or tenable sense of the term, conscience stands simply for the aggregate of our moral opinions reinforced by the moral sanction of self-approbation or self-disapprobation. that we ought to act in accordance with these opinions, and that we are acting wrongly if we act in opposition to them, is a truism. 'follow conscience' is the only safe guide, when the moment of action has arrived. but it is equally important to insist on the fallibility of conscience, and to urge men, by all means in their power, to be constantly improving and instructing their consciences, or, in plain words, to review and, wherever occasion offers, to correct their conceptions of right and wrong. the 'plain, honest man' of bishop butler would, undoubtedly, always follow his conscience, but it is by no means certain that his conscience would always guide him rightly, and it is quite certain that it would often prompt him differently from the consciences of other 'plain, honest men' trained elsewhere and under other circumstances. to act contrary to our opinions of right and wrong would be treason to our moral nature, but it does not follow that those opinions are not susceptible of improvement and correction, or that it is not as much our duty to take pains to form true opinions as to act in accordance with our opinions when we have formed them. [footnote : i use the expressions 'moral sanction' and 'moral sentiment' as equivalent terms, because the pleasures and pains, which constitute the moral sanction, are inseparable, even in thought, from the moral feeling. the moral feeling of self-approbation or self-disapprobation cannot even be conceived apart from the pleasures or pains which are attendant on it, and by means of which it reveals itself to us. it should be noticed that the expression 'moral sentiment' is habitually used in two senses, as the equivalent ( ) of the moral feeling only, ( ) of the entire moral process, which, as we shall see in the third chapter, consists partly of a judgment, partly of a feeling. it is in the latter sense, for instance, that we speak of the 'current moral sentiment' of any given age or country, meaning the opinions then or there prevalent on moral questions, reinforced by the feeling of approbation or disapprobation. as, however, the moral feeling always follows immediately and necessarily on the moral judgment, whenever that judgment pronounces decisively for or against an action, and always implies a previous judgment (i am here again obliged to anticipate the discussion in chapter ), the ambiguity is of no practical importance at the present stage of our enquiry. it is almost needless to add that the word 'sentiment,' when used alone, has the double meaning of a feeling and an opinion, an ambiguity which is sometimes not without practical inconvenience.] the terms 'conscience' and 'moral sense' are very convenient expressions for popular use, provided we always bear in mind that 'illuminate' or 'instruct' your 'conscience' or 'moral sense' is quite as essential a rule as 'follow' your 'conscience' or 'moral sense.' but the scientific moralist, in attempting to analyse the springs of moral action and to detect the ultimate sanctions of conduct, would do well to avoid these terms altogether. the analysis of moral as well as of intellectual acts is often only obscured by our introducing the conception of 'faculties,' and, in the present instance, it is far better to confine ourselves to the expressions 'acts' of 'approbation or disapprobation,' 'satisfaction or dissatisfaction,' which we shall hereafter attempt to analyse, than to feign, or at least assume, certain 'faculties' or 'senses' as distinct entities from which such acts are supposed to proceed. i shall, therefore, in the sequel of this work, say little or nothing of 'conscience' or 'moral sense,' not because i think it desirable to banish those words from popular terminology, but because i think that, in an attempt to present the principles of ethics in a scientific form, they introduce needless complexity and obscurity. if the statements thus far made in this chapter be accepted, it follows that the feelings of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, which constitute the moral sanction, by no means invariably supervene on acts of the same kind even in the case of the same individual, much less in the case of different individuals, and that the acts which elicit the moral sanction depend, to a considerable extent, on the circumstances and education of the person who passes judgment on them. the moral sanction, therefore, though it always consists in the feelings of self-approbation, or self-disapprobation, of satisfaction or dissatisfaction at one's own acts, is neither uniform, absolute, nor infallible; but varies, as applied not only by different individuals but by the same individual at different times, in relation to varying conditions of education, temperament, nationality, and, generally, of circumstances both external and internal. lastly, it admits of constant improvement and correction. how, then, it may be asked, do we justify the application of this sanction, and why do we regard it as not only a legitimate sanction of conduct, but as the most important of all sanctions, and, in cases of conflict, the supreme and final sanction? the answer to this question is that, if we regard an action as wrong, no matter whether our opinion be correct or not, no external considerations whatsoever can compensate us for acting contrary to our convictions. human nature, in its normal condition, is so constituted that the remorse felt, when we look back upon a wrong action, far outweighs any pleasure we may have derived from it, just as the satisfaction with which we look back upon a right action far more than compensates for any pain with which it may have been attended. the 'mens sibi conscia recti' is the highest reward which a man can have, as, on the other hand, the retrospect on base, unjust, or cruel actions constitutes the most acute of torments. now, when a man looks back upon his past actions, what he regards is not so much the result of his acts as the intention and the motives by which the intention was actuated. it is not, therefore, what he would now think of the act so much as what he then thought of it that is the object of his approbation or disapprobation. and, consequently, even though his opinions as to the nature of the act may meanwhile have undergone alteration, he approves or disapproves of what was his intention at the moment of performing it and of the state of mind from which it then proceeded. it is true that the subsequent results of our acts and any change in our estimate of their moral character may considerably modify the feelings with which we look back upon them, but, still, in the main, it holds good that the approval or disapproval with which we regard our past conduct depends rather upon the opinions of right and wrong which we entertained at the moment of action than those which we have come to entertain since. to have acted, at any time, in a manner contrary to what we then supposed to be right leaves behind it a trace of dissatisfaction and pain, which may, at any future time, reappear to trouble and distress us; just as to have acted, in spite of all conflicting considerations, in a manner which we then conceived to be right, may, in after years, be a perennial source of pleasure and satisfaction. it is characteristic of the pleasures and pains of reflexion on our past acts (which pleasures and pains of reflexion may, of course, connect themselves with other than purely moral considerations), not only that they admit of being more intense than any other pleasures and pains, but that, whenever there is any conflict between the moral sanction and any other sanction, it is to the moral sanction that they attach themselves. thus, if a man has incurred physical suffering, or braved the penalties of the law or the ill word of society, in pursuance of a course of conduct which he deemed to be right, he looks back upon his actions with satisfaction, and the more important the actions, and the clearer his convictions of right and the stronger the inducements to act otherwise, the more intense will his satisfaction be. but no such satisfaction is felt, when a man has sacrificed his convictions of right to avoid physical pain, or to escape the penalties of the law, or to conciliate the goodwill of society; the feeling, on the other hand, will be that of dissatisfaction with himself, varying, according to circumstances, from regret to remorse. and, if no similar remark has to be made with reference to the religious sanction, it is because, in all the higher forms of religion, the religious sanction is conceived of as applying to exactly the same actions as the moral sanction. what a man himself deems right, that he conceives god to approve of, and what he conceives god as disapproving of, that he deems wrong. but in a religion in which god was not regarded as holy, just, and true, or in which there was a plurality of gods, some good and some evil, i conceive that a man would look back with satisfaction, and not with dissatisfaction, on those acts in which he had followed his own sense of right rather than the supposed will of the deity, just as, when there is a conflict between the two, he now congratulates himself on having submitted to the claims of conscience rather than to those of the law. the justification, then, of that claim to superiority, which is asserted by the moral sanction, consists, i conceive, in two circumstances: first, that the pleasures and pains, the feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, by means of which it works, are, in the normally constituted mind, far more intense and durable than any other pleasures and pains; secondly, that, whenever this sanction comes into conflict with any other sanction, its defeat is sure, on a careful retrospect of our acts, to bring regret or remorse, whereas its victory is equally certain to bring pleasure and satisfaction. we arrive, then, at the conclusion that it is the moral sanction which is the distinctive guide of conduct, and to which we must look, in the last resort, to enforce right action, while the other sanctions are mainly valuable in so far as they reinforce the moral sanction or correct its aberrations. a man must, ultimately, be the judge of his own conduct, and, as he acts or does not act according to his own best judgment, so he will subsequently feel satisfaction or remorse; but these facts afford no reason why he should not take pains to inform his judgment by all the means which physical knowledge, law, society, and religion place at his disposal. chapter iii. analysis and formation of the moral sentiment. its education and improvement. before proceeding to our third question, namely, how the moral sentiment, which is the source of the moral sanction, has been formed, and how it may be further educated and improved, it is desirable to discriminate carefully between the intellectual and the emotional elements in an act of approbation or disapprobation. we sometimes speak of moral judgment, sometimes of moral feeling. these expressions ought not to be regarded as the symbols of rival theories on the nature of the act of moral approbation, as has sometimes been the case, but as designating distinct parts of the process, or, to put the same statement rather differently, separate elements in the analysis. hume, whose treatment of this subject is peculiarly lucid, as compared with that of most writers on ethics, after reviewing the reasons assigned by those authors respectively who resolve the act of approbation into an act of judgment or an act of feeling, adds[ ]: 'these arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that i am apt to suspect they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions. the final sentence; it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blameable; that which stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle, and constitutes virtue our happiness and vice our misery: it is probable, i say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species. for what else can have an influence of this nature? but, in order to pave the way for such a sentiment and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance, command our affection and approbation; and, where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. but in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflexion. there are just grounds to conclude that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind.' [footnote : enquiry concerning the principles of morals, section i.] this passage, which i have thought it worth while to quote at length, exhibits, with sufficient clearness, the respective provinces of reason and feeling in the ethical estimation of action. whether we are reviewing the actions of ourselves or of others, what we seem to do, in the first instance, is to refer them to some class, or associate them with certain actions of a similar kind which are familiar to us, and, then, when their character has thus been determined, they excite the appropriate feeling of approbation or disapprobation, praise or censure. thus, as soon as we have realised that a statement is a lie or an act is fraudulent, we at once experience a feeling of indignation or disgust at the person who has made the statement or committed the act. and, in the same way, as soon as we have recognised that an act is brave or generous, we regard with esteem or admiration the doer of it. but, though the feeling of approbation or disapprobation follows instantaneously on the act of judgment, the recognition of the character of the action, or its reference to a class, which constitutes this act of judgment, may be, and often is, a process of considerable length and complexity. take the case of a lie. what did the man really say? in what sense did he employ the words used? what was the extent of his knowledge at the time that he made the statement? and what was his intention? these and possibly other questions have to be answered, before we are justified in accusing him of having told a lie. when the offence is not only a moral but a legal one, the act of determining the character of the action in question is often the result of a prolonged enquiry, extending over weeks or months. no sooner, however, is the intellectual process completed, and the action duly labelled as a lie, or a theft, or a fraud, or an act of cruelty or ingratitude, or the like, than the appropriate ethical emotion is at once excited. the intellectual process may also be exceedingly rapid, or even instantaneous, and always is so when we have no doubt as to the nature either of the action or of the intention or of the motives, but its characteristic, as distinguished from the ethical emotion, is that it may take time, and, except in perfectly clear cases or on very sudden emergencies requiring subsequent action, always ought to do so. we are now in a position to see the source of much confusion in the ordinary mode of speaking and writing on the subject of the moral faculty, the moral judgment, the moral feeling, the moral sense, the conscience, and kindred terms. the instantaneous, and the apparently instinctive, authoritative, and absolute character of the act of moral approbation or disapprobation attaches to the emotional, and not to the intellectual part of the process. when an action has once been pronounced to be right or wrong, morally good or evil, or has been referred to some well-known class of actions whose ethical character is already determined, the emotion of approval or disapproval is excited and follows as a matter of course. there is no reasoning or hesitation about it, simply because the act is not a reasoning act. hence, it appears to be instinctive, and becomes invested with those superior attributes of authoritativeness, absoluteness, and even infallibility, which are not unnaturally ascribed to an act in which, there being no process of reasoning, there seems to be no room for error. and, indeed, the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation can never be properly described as erroneous, though they are frequently misapplied. the error attaches to the preliminary process of reasoning, reference, or classification, and, if this be wrongly conducted, there is no justification for the feeling which is consequent upon it. but, instead of our asking for the justification of the feeling in the rational process which has preceded it, we often unconsciously justify our reasoning by the feeling, and thus the whole process assumes the unreflective character which properly belongs only to the emotional part of it. it is the want of a clear distinction between the logical process which determines the character of an act,--the moral judgment,--and the emotion which immediately supervenes when the character of the act is determined,--the moral feeling,--that accounts for the exaggerated epithets which are often attributed to the operations of the moral faculty, and for the haste and negligence in which men are consequently encouraged to indulge, when arriving at their moral decisions. let it be recollected that, when we have time for reflexion, we cannot take too much pains in forming our decisions upon conduct, for there is always a possibility of error in our judgments, but that, when our judgments are formed, we ought to give free scope to the emotions which they naturally evoke, and then we shall develope a conscience, so to speak, at once enlightened and sensitive, we shall combine accuracy and justness of judgment with delicacy and strength of feeling. there remains the question whether the feelings of approval and disapproval, which supervene on our moral judgments, admit of any explanation, or whether they are to be regarded as ultimate facts of our mental constitution. it seems to me that, on a little reflexion, we are led to adopt the former alternative. what are the classes of acts, under their most general aspect, which elicit the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation? they are such as promote, or tend to promote, the good either of ourselves or of others. now the feelings of which these classes of acts are the direct object are respectively the self-regarding and the sympathetic feelings, or, as they have been somewhat uncouthly called, the egoistic and altruistic feelings. we have a variety of appetites and desires, which centre in ourselves, including what has been called rational self-love, or a desire for what, on cool reflexion, we conceive to be our own highest good on the whole, as well as self-respect, or a regard for our own dignity and character, and for our own opinion of ourselves. when any of these various appetites or desires are gratified, we feel satisfaction, and, on the other hand, when they are thwarted, we feel dissatisfaction. similarly, we have a number of affections, of which others are the object, some of them of a malevolent or resentful, but most of them of a benevolent character, including a general desire to confer all the happiness that we can. here, again, we feel satisfaction, when our affections are gratified, and dissatisfaction, when they are thwarted. now these feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, which are called reflex feelings, because they are reflected, as it were, from the objects of our desires, include, though they are by no means coextensive with, the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation. when, for instance, we gratify the appetites of hunger or thirst, or our love of curiosity or power, we feel satisfaction, but we can hardly be said to regard the gratification of these appetites or feelings with moral approval or disapproval. we perform thousands of acts, and see thousands of acts performed, every day, which never excite any moral feeling whatever. but there are few men in whom an undoubted act of kindness or generosity or resistance to temptation would not at once elicit admiration or respect, or, if they reflected on such acts in their own case, of self-approval. now, what are the circumstances which distinguish these acts which merely cause us satisfaction from those which elicit the moral feeling of approbation? this question is one by no means easy to answer, and the solution of it must obviously depend to some extent on the moral surroundings and prepossessions of the person who undertakes to answer it. but, attempting to take as wide a survey as possible of those acts which, in different persons, elicit moral approbation or disapprobation, i will endeavour to discriminate the characteristics which they have in common. all those acts, then, it seems to me, which elicit a distinctively moral feeling have been the result of some conflict amongst the various desires and affections, or, to adopt the more ordinary phraseology, of a conflict of motives. we neither approve nor disapprove of acts with regard to which there seems to have been little or no choice, which appear to have resulted naturally from the pre-existing circumstances. thus, if a well-to-do man pays his debts promptly, or a man of known poverty asks to have the time of payment deferred, we neither visit the one with praise nor the other with censure, though, if their conduct were reversed, we should censure the former and praise the latter. the reason of this difference of treatment is plain. there is not, or at least need not be, any conflict, in the case of the well-to-do man, between his own convenience or any reasonable gratification of his desires and the satisfaction of a just claim. hence, in paying the debt promptly, he is only acting as we might expect him to act, and his conduct excites no moral feeling on our part, though, if he were to act differently, he would incur our censure. the poor man, on the other hand, must have put himself to some inconvenience and exercised some self-denial in order to meet his engagement at the exact time at which the payment became due, and hence he merits our praise, though, if he had acted otherwise, the circumstances might have excused him. another characteristic of acts which we praise or blame, in the case of others, or approve or disapprove, on reflexion, in our own case, seems to be that they must possess some importance. the great majority of our acts are too trivial to merit any notice, such as is implied in a moral judgment. when a man makes way for another in the street, or refrains from eating or drinking more than is good for him, neither he nor the bystander probably ever thinks of regarding the act as a meritorious one. it is taken as a matter of course, though the opposite conduct might, under certain circumstances, be of sufficient importance to incur censure. it is impossible here, as in most other cases where we speak of 'importance,' to draw a definite line, but it may at least be laid down that an act, in order to be regarded as moral or immoral, must be of sufficient importance to arrest attention, and stimulate reflexion. thus far, then, we have arrived at the conclusion that acts which are the objects of moral approbation and disapprobation must have a certain importance, and must be the result of a certain amount of conflict between different motives. but we have not as yet attempted to detect any principle of discrimination between those acts which are the objects of praise or approbation and those which are the objects of censure or disapprobation. now it seems to me that such a principle may be found in the fact that all those acts of others which we praise or those acts of ourselves which, on reflexion, we approve involve some amount of sacrifice, whereas all those acts of others which we blame, or those acts of ourselves which, on reflexion, we disapprove involve some amount of self-indulgence. the conflict is between a man's own lower and higher good, or between his own good and the greater good of others, or, in certain cases, as we shall see presently, between the lesser good of some, reinforced by considerations of self-interest or partiality, and the greater good of others, not so reinforced, or even, occasionally, between the pleasure or advantage of others and a disproportionate injury to himself; and he who, in the struggle, gives the preference to the former of these motives usually becomes the object of censure or, on reflexion, of self-disapprobation, while he who gives the preference to the latter becomes the object of praise or, on reflexion, of self-approbation. i shall endeavour to illustrate this position by a few instances mostly taken from common life. we praise a man who, by due economy, makes decent provision for himself in old age, as we blame a man who fails to do so. quite apart from any public or social considerations, we admire and applaud in the one man the power of self-restraint and the habit of foresight, which enable him to subordinate his immediate gratifications to his larger interests in the remote future, and to forego sensual and passing pleasures for the purpose of preserving his self-respect and personal independence in later life. and we admire and applaud him still more, if to these purely self-regarding considerations he adds the social one of wishing to avoid becoming a burden on his family or his friends or the public. just in the same way, we condemn the other man, who, rather than sacrifice his immediate gratification, will incur the risk of forfeiting his self-respect and independence in after years as well as of making others suffer for his improvidence. a man who, by the exercise of similar economy and forethought, makes provision for his family or relations we esteem still more than the man who simply makes provision for himself, because the sacrifice of passing pleasures is generally still greater, and because there is also, in this case, a total sacrifice of all self-regarding interests, except, perhaps, self-respect and reputation, for the sake of others. similarly, the man who has a family or relations dependent upon him, and who neglects to make future provision for them, deservedly incurs our censure far more than the man who merely neglects to make provision for himself, because his self-indulgence has to contend against the full force of the social as well as the higher self-regarding motives, and its persistence is, therefore, the less excusable. i will next take the familiar case of a trust, voluntarily undertaken, but involving considerable trouble to the trustee, a case of a much more complicated character than the last. if the trustee altogether neglects or does not devote a reasonable amount of attention to the affairs of the trust, there is no doubt that, besides any legal penalties which he may incur, he merits moral censure. rather than sacrifice his own ease or his own interests, he violates the obligation which he has undertaken and brings inconvenience, or possibly disaster, to those whose interests he has bound himself to protect. but the demands of the trust may become so excessive as to tax the time and pains of the trustee to a far greater extent than could ever have been anticipated, and to interfere seriously with his other employments. in this case no reasonable person, i presume, would censure the trustee for endeavouring, even at some inconvenience or expense to the persons for whose benefit the trust existed, to release himself from his obligation or to devolve part of the work on a professional adviser. while, however, the work connected with the trust did not interfere with other obligations or with the promotion of the welfare of others, no one, i imagine, would censure the trustee for continuing to perform it, to his own inconvenience or disadvantage, if he chose to do so. his neighbours might, perhaps, say that he was foolish, but they would hardly go to the length of saying that he acted wrongly. neither, on the other hand, would they be likely to praise him, as the sacrifice he was undergoing would be out of proportion to the good attained by it, and the interests of others to which he was postponing his own interests would not be so distinctly greater as to warrant the act of self-effacement. but now let us suppose that, in attending to the interests of the trust, he is neglecting the interests of others who have a claim upon him, or impairing his own efficiency as a public servant or a professional man. if the interests thus at stake were plainly much greater than those of the trust, as they might well be, the attitude of neutrality would soon be converted into one of positive censure, unless he took means to extricate himself from the difficulty in which he was placed. the supposition just made illustrates the fact that the moral feelings may attach themselves not only to cases in which the collision is between a man's own higher and lower good, or between his own good and that of another, but also to those in which the competition is entirely between the good of others. it may be worth while to illustrate this last class of cases by one or two additional examples. a man tells a lie in order to screen a friend. the act is a purely social one, for he stands in no fear of his friend, and expects no return. it might be said that the competition, in this example, is between serving his friend and wounding his own self-respect. but the consciousness of cowardice and meanness which attends a lie spoken in a man's own interest hardly attaches to a lie spoken for the purpose of protecting another. and, any way, a little reflexion might show that the apparently benevolent intention comes into collision with a very extensive and very stringent social obligation, that of not impairing our confidence in one another's assertions. without maintaining that there are no conceivable circumstances under which a man would be justified in committing a breach of veracity, it may at least be said that, in the lives of most men, there is not likely to occur any case in which the greater social good would not be attained by the observation of the general rule to tell the truth rather than by the recognition of an exception in favour of a lie, even though that lie were told for purely benevolent reasons. in all those circumstances in which there is a keen sense of comradeship, as at school or college, or in the army or navy, this is a principle which requires to be constantly kept in view, and to be constantly enforced. the not infrequent breach of it, under such circumstances, affords a striking illustration of the manner in which the laws of honour, spoken of in the first chapter, occasionally over-ride the wider social sentiment and even the dictates of personal morality, _esprit de corps_ is, doubtless, a noble sentiment, and, on the whole, productive of much good, but, when it comes into collision with the more general rules of morality, its effects are simply pernicious. i will next take an example of the conflict between two impulses, each having for its object the good of others, from the very familiar case of a man having to appoint to, or vote in the election to, a vacant office or situation. the interests of the public service or of some institution require that the most competent candidate should be preferred. but a relative, or a friend, or a political ally is standing. affection, therefore, or friendship, or loyalty to party ties often dictates one course of conduct, and regard for the public interests another. when the case is thus plainly stated, there are probably few men who would seriously maintain that we ought to subordinate the wider to the narrower considerations, and still, in practice, there are few men who have the courage to act constantly on what is surely the right principle in this matter, and, what is worse still, even if they did, they would not always be sustained by public opinion, while they would be almost certain to be condemned by the circle in which they move. so frequently do the difficulties of this position recur, that i have often heard a shrewd friend observe that no man who was fit for the exercise of patronage would ever desire to be entrusted with it. the moral rule in ordinary cases is plain enough; it is to appoint or vote for the candidate who is most competent to fulfil the duties of the post to be filled up. there are exceptional cases in which it may be allowable slightly to modify this rule, as where it is desirable to encourage particular services, or particular nationalities, or the like, but, even in these cases, the rule of superior competency ought to be the preponderating consideration. parliamentary and, in a lesser degree, municipal elections, of course, form a class apart. here, in the selection of candidates within the party, superior competency ought to be the guiding consideration, but, in the election itself, the main object being to promote or prevent the passing of certain public measures, the elector quite rightly votes for those who will give effect to his opinions, irrespectively of personal qualifications, though, even in these cases, there might be an amount of unfitness which would warrant neutrality or opposition. peculiarly perplexing cases of competition between the rival claims of others sometimes occur in the domain of the resentful feelings, which, in their purified and rationalised form, constitute the sense of justice. my servant, or a friend, or a relative, has committed a theft. shall i prosecute him? a general regard to the public welfare undoubtedly demands that i should do so. there are few obligations more imperative on the individual citizen than that of denouncing and prosecuting crime. but, in the present case, there is the personal tie, involving the obligation of protection and assistance. this tie, obviously, must count for something, as a rival consideration. no man, except under the most extreme circumstances, would prosecute his wife, or his father, or his mother. the question, then, is how far this consideration is to count against the other, and much must, evidently, depend on the degree of relationship or of previous intimacy, the time and amount and kind of service, and the like. a similar conflict of motives arises when the punishment invoked would entail the culprit's ruin, or that of his wife or family or others who are dependent upon him. it is impossible, in cases of this kind, to lay down beforehand any strict rules of conduct, and the rectitude of the decision must largely turn on the experience, skill, and honesty of the person who attempts to resolve the difficulty. instances of the last division, where the conflict is between the pleasure or advantage of others and a disproportionate injury to oneself, are of comparatively infrequent occurrence. it is not often that a man hesitates sufficiently between his own manifest disadvantage and the small gains or pleasures of his neighbours to make this class of cases of much importance to the moralist. as a rule, we may be trusted to take care of ourselves, and other people credit us sufficiently with this capacity not to trade very much upon the weakness of mere good-nature, however much they may trade upon our ignorance and folly. the most familiar example, perhaps, of acts of imprudence of the kind here contemplated is to be found in the facility with which some people yield to social temptations, as where they drink too much, or bet, or play cards, when they know that they will most likely lose their money, out of a feeling of mere good fellowship; or where, from the mere desire to amuse others, they give parties which are beyond their means. the gravest example is to be found in certain cases of seduction. instances of men making large and imprudent sacrifices of money for inadequate objects are very rare, and are rather designated as foolish than wrong. with regard to all the failings and offences which fall under this head, it may be remarked that, from their false show of generosity, society is apt to treat them too venially, except where they entail degradation or disgrace. if it be asked how actions of this kind, seeing that they are done out of some regard to others, can be described as involving self-indulgence, or the resistance to them can be looked on in the light of sacrifice, it may be replied that the conflict is between a feeling of sociality or a spirit of over-complaisance or the like, on the one side, and a man's self-respect or a regard to his own highest interests, on the other, and that some natures find it much easier to yield to the former than to maintain the latter. it is quite possible that the spirit of sacrifice may be exhibited in the maintenance, against temptation, of a man's own higher interests, and the spirit of self-indulgence in weakly yielding to a perverted sympathy or an exaggerated regard for the opinions of others. before concluding this chapter, there are a few objections to be met and explanations to be made. in the first place, it may be objected that the theory i have adopted, that the moral feeling is excited only where there has been a conflict of motives, runs counter to the ordinary view, that acts proceeding from a virtuous or vicious habit are done without any struggle and almost without any consciousness of their import. i do not at all deny that a habit may become so perfect that the acts proceeding from it cease to involve any struggle between conflicting motives, but, in this case, i conceive that our approbation or disapprobation is transferred from the individual acts to the habit from which they spring, and that what we really applaud or condemn is the character rather than the actions, or at least the actions simply as indicative of the character. and the reason that we often praise or blame acts proceeding from habit more than acts proceeding from momentary impulse is that we associate such acts with a good or evil character, as the case may be, and, therefore, include the character as well as the acts in the judgment which we pass upon them. it may possibly have occurred to the reader that, in the latter part of this chapter, i have been somewhat inconsistent in referring usually to the social sanction of praise and blame rather than to the distinctively moral sanction of self-approbation and self-disapprobation. i have employed this language solely for the sake of convenience, and to avoid the cumbrous phraseology which the employment of the other phrases would sometimes have occasioned. in a civilized and educated community, the social sentiment may, on almost all points except those which involve obscure or delicate considerations of morality, be taken to be identical with the moral sentiment of the most reflective members of the society, and hence in the tolerably obvious instances which i have selected there was no need to draw any distinction between the two, and i have felt myself at liberty to be guided purely by considerations of convenience. all that i have said of the praise or blame, the applause or censure, of others, of course, admits of being transferred to the feelings with which, on reflexion, we regard our own acts. i am aware that the expressions, 'higher and lower good,' 'greater and lesser good,' are more or less vague. but the traditional acceptation of the terms sufficiently fixes their meaning to enable them to serve as a guide to moral conduct and moral feeling, especially when modified by the experience and reflexion of men who have given habitual attention to the working of their own motives and the results of their own practice. as i shall shew in the next chapter, any terms which we employ to designate the test of moral action and the objects of the moral feeling are indefinite, and must depend, to some extent, on the subjective interpretation of the individual. all that we can do is to avail ourselves of the most adequate and intelligible terms that we can find. but, admitting the necessary indefiniteness of the terms, it may be asked whether it can really be meant, as a general proposition, that the praise of others and our approbation of ourselves, on reflexion, attach to acts in which we subordinate our own good to the greater good of others, however slight the preponderance of our neighbour's good over out own may be. if we have to undergo an almost equal risk in order to save another, or, in order to promote another's interests, to forego interests almost as great, is not our conduct more properly designated as weak or quixotic, than noble or generous? this would not, i think, be the answer of mankind at large to the question, or that of any person whose moral sentiments had been developed under healthy influences. when a man, at the risk of his own life, saves another from drowning, or, at a similar risk, protects his comrade in battle, or, rushing into the midst of a fire, attempts to rescue the helpless victims, surely the feeling of the bystanders is that of admiration, and not of pity or contempt. when a man, with his life in his hands, goes forth on a missionary or a philanthropic enterprise, like xavier, or henry martyn, or howard, or livingstone, or patteson, or when a man, like frederick vyner, insists on transferring his own chance of escape from a murderous gang of brigands to his married friend, humanity at large rightly regards itself as his debtor, and ordinary men feel that their very nature has been ennobled and exalted by his example. but it is not only these acts of widely recognised heroism that exact a response from mankind. in many a domestic circle, there are men and women, who habitually sacrifice their own ease and comfort to the needs of an aged or sick or helpless relative, and, surely, it is not with scorn for their weakness that their neighbours, who know their privations, regard them, but with sympathy and respect for their patience and self-denial. the pecuniary risks and sacrifices which men are ready to make for one another, in the shape of sureties and bonds and loans and gifts, are familiar to us all, and, though these are often unscrupulously wrung from a thoughtless or over-pliant good-nature, yet there are many instances in which men knowingly, deliberately, and at considerable danger or loss to themselves, postpone their own security or convenience to the protection or relief of their friends. it is in cases of this kind, perhaps, that the line between weakness and generosity is most difficult to draw, and, where a man has others dependent on him for assistance or support, the weakness which yields to the solicitations of a reckless or unscrupulous friend may become positively culpable. the last class of instances will be sufficient to shew that it is not always easy to determine where the good of others is greater than our own. nor is it ever possible to determine this question with mathematical exactness. men may, therefore, be at least excused if, before sacrificing their own interests or pleasures, they require that the good of others for which they make the sacrifice shall be plainly preponderant. and, even then, there is a wide margin between the acts which we praise for their heroism, or generosity, or self-denial, and those which we condemn for their baseness, or meanness, or selfishness. it must never be forgotten, in the treatment of questions of morality, that there is a large number of acts which we neither praise nor blame, and this is emphatically the case where the competition is between a man's own interests and those of his neighbours. we applaud generosity; we censure meanness: but there is a large intermediate class of acts which can neither be designated as generous nor mean. it will be observed that, in my enumeration of the classes of acts to which praise and blame, self-approbation and self-disapprobation attach, i have carefully drawn a distinction between the invariable connexion which obtains between certain acts and the ethical approval of ourselves or others, and the only general connexion which obtains between the omission of those acts and the ethical feeling of disapproval. simply to fall short of the ethical standard which we approve neither merits nor receives censure, though there is a degree of deficiency, determined roughly by society at large and by each individual for himself, at which this indifference is converted into positive condemnation. a like neutral zone of acts which we neither applaud nor condemn, of course, exists also in the case of acts which simply affect ourselves or simply affect others, though it does not seem to be so extensive as in the case where the conflict of motives is between the interests of others and those of ourselves. in determining the cases in which we shall subordinate our own interests to those of others, or do good to others at our own risk or loss, it is essential that we should take account of the remote as well as the immediate effects of actions; and, moreover, that we should enquire into their general tendencies, or, in other words, ask ourselves what would happen if everybody or many people acted as we propose to act. thus, at first sight, it might seem as if a rich man, at a comparatively small sacrifice to himself, might promote the greater good of his poor neighbours by distributing amongst them what to them would be considerable sums of money. if i have ten thousand a year, why should i not make fifty poor families happy by endowing them with a hundred a year each, which to them would be a handsome competency? the loss of five thousand a year would be to me simply an abridgment of superfluous luxuries, which i could soon learn to dispense with, while to them the gain of a hundred a year would be the substitution of comfort for penury and of case for perpetual struggle. the answer is that, in the first place, i should probably not, in the long run, be making these families really happy. the change of circumstances would, undoubtedly, confer considerable pleasure, while it continued to be a novelty, but their improved circumstances, when they became accustomed to them, would soon be out-balanced by the _ennui_ produced by want of employment; while, the motive to exertion being removed, and the taste for luxuries stimulated, they or the next generation would probably lapse again into poverty, which would be all the more keenly felt for their temporary enjoyment of prosperity. moreover, i should be injuring the community at large, by withdrawing a number of persons from industrial employments and transferring them to the non-productive classes. again, if the five thousand a year were withdrawn not from my personal expenditure, but from industrial enterprises in which i was engaged, i should be actually depriving the families of many workmen and artisans of the fruits of their honest labour for the purpose of enabling a smaller number of families to live in sloth and indolence. but, now, suppose the case i have imagined to become a general one, and that it was a common occurrence for rich men to dispense their superfluous wealth amongst their poorer neighbours, without demanding any return in labour or services. the result would inevitably be the creation of a large class of idle persons, who would probably soon become a torment to themselves, while their descendants, often brought up to no employment and with an insufficient income to support them, would probably lapse into pauperism. the effect on the community at large, if the evil became widely spread, would be the paralysis of trade and commerce. of course, i am aware that these evils would be, to a certain extent, modified in practice by the good sense of the recipients, some of whom might employ their money on reproductive industries instead of on merely furnishing themselves with the means of living at their ease; but that the general tendency would be that which i have intimated no one, i think, who is acquainted with the indolent propensities of human nature, can well doubt. similar results might be shewn to follow from an indiscriminate distribution of charity on a smaller scale. it seems hard-hearted to refuse a shilling to a beggar, or a guinea to a charitable association, when one would hardly miss the sum at the end of the week or the month. but, if we could trace all the consequences, direct and remote, of these apparent acts of benevolence, we should often see that the small act of sacrifice on our own part was by no means efficacious in promoting the 'greater good' of the recipient, and still less of society at large. a life of vagrancy or indolence may easily be made more attractive than one of honest industry, and well-meant efforts to anticipate all the wants and misfortunes of the poor may often have the effect of making them careless of the future and of destroying all elements of independence and providence in their character. another instance of the contrast between the immediate and remote, or apparent and real, results of acts of intended beneficence is to be found in the prodigality with which well-to-do persons often distribute gratuities amongst servants. these gratuities have the immediate effect of giving gratification to the recipients and securing better service to the donors, but they have often the remote and more permanent effect of rendering the recipients servile and corrupt, and (as in the case of railway porters) of depriving poorer or less prodigal persons of services to which they are equally entitled. in adducing these illustrations, i must not be understood to be advocating or defending a selfish employment of superfluous wealth, but to be shewing the evils which may result from an unenlightened benevolence, and the importance of ascertaining that the 'greater good of others,' to which we sacrifice our own interests or enjoyments, is a real, and not merely an apparent good, and, moreover, that our conduct, if it became general, would promote the welfare of the community at large, and not merely particular sections of it to the injury of the rest. to sum up the results of this chapter, we may repeat that we must distinguish carefully between the intellectual act of moral judgment, or the judgment we pass on matters of conduct, and the emotional act of moral feeling, or the feeling which supervenes upon that judgment, and that, so far as we can give a precise definition of the latter, it is an indirect or reflex form of one or other of the sympathetic, resentful, or self-regarding feelings, occurring when, on consideration, we realise that, in matters involving a conflict of motives and of sufficient importance to arrest our attention and stimulate our reflexion, one or other of these feelings has been gratified or thwarted: moreover, that we praise, in the case of others, and approve, in our own case, all those actions of the above kind, in which a man subordinates his own lower to his higher good, or his own good to the greater good of others, or, when the interests only of others are at stake, the lesser good of some to the greater good of others, as well as, under certain circumstances, those actions in which he refuses to subordinate his own greater good to the lesser good of others; while we blame, in the case of others, and disapprove, in our own case, all those actions of the above kind, in which he manifestly and distinctly (for there is a large neutral zone of actions, which we neither applaud nor condemn) subordinates his own higher to his lower good, or the greater good of others to his own lesser good, or, where the interests only of others are at stake, the greater good of some to the lesser good of others, or, lastly, under certain circumstances, the lesser good of others to the greater good of himself, especially where that greater good is the good of his higher nature. even at the present stage of our enquiry, it must be tolerably evident to the reader that moral progress, if such a fact exist, will be due mainly to the increasing accuracy and the extended applications of our moral judgments, or, in other words, to the development of the rational rather than the emotional element in the ethical act. the moral feeling follows on the moral judgment, and awards praise or blame, experiences satisfaction or dissatisfaction, in accordance with the intellectual decisions which have preceded it. the character of the feeling, therefore, as distinct from its intensity, is already determined for it by a previous process. and its intensity is undoubtedly greater amongst primitive and uneducated men than it is in civilized life. amongst ourselves, not only are the feelings of approbation and disapprobation themselves largely modified by the account we take of mixed motives, qualifying circumstances, and the like, but the expression of, them is still further restrained by the caution which the civilized man habitually practises in the presence of others. indeed, great, in many respects, as are the advantages of this moderation and restraint, there is a certain danger that, as civilisation advances, the approval of virtue and the disapproval of vice may cease to be expressed in sufficiently plain and emphatic terms. but, on the other hand, with the extension of experience and the ever-improving discipline of the intellectual faculties, the moral judgment, we may already presume (for the confirmation of this presumption i must refer to the next chapter), will always be growing in accuracy, receiving further applications, and becoming a more and more adequate representative of facts. the analysis, therefore, of the moral act, with which we have been mainly engaged in the foregoing chapter, besides being essential to the determination of any theoretical problem of ethics, has a most important practical bearing from the indication which it affords of the direction in which moral progress is, in the future, most likely to be found. it must never be forgotten, however, that men may know what is right and do what is wrong, and, hence, the due stimulation of the moral emotions, so that they may respond to the improved moral judgments, is at once an indispensable branch of moral education and an indispensable condition of moral progress. but this is the function, not so much of the scientific moralist, as of the parent, the instructor of youth, the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, the journalist, the artist, and, above all, of the religious teacher. chapter iv. the moral test and its justification. the moral feeling, as we have seen, follows immediately and necessarily on the moral judgment. but what considerations guide the moral judgment? our moral judgments, as we have also seen, are the result of a logical process of reference to a class or of association with similars. this particular action is like certain other actions, or belongs to a class of actions, which we habitually regard as right or wrong, and, consequently, as soon as the reference or association is made, the moral feeling supervenes. now, in this process, there are two possible sources of error. in the first place, the act of reference or association may be faulty, and the action may not really belong to the class to which we refer or really be like the other actions with which we associate it. this fault is one of classification, and can only be remedied, as all other faulty acts of classification, by learning to discriminate between the essential and the non-essential marks of similarity, and insisting on the presence of the essential marks. in criminal cases, this is one of the functions of the jury, and, unless they exercise great care, they may easily be mistaken as to whether an alleged act of fraud, theft, assault, &c., was really an act of that kind. but, even if the action be referred to its right head, there remains the second question whether we are really justified in regarding the class of actions itself as right or wrong. failure to prosecute for or punish heresy or witchcraft was at one time regarded at least as wrong as failure to punish or prosecute for theft or murder would now be. to decline to fight a duel was, till quite recently, to place yourself outside the pale of gentlemen. a reluctance to sacrifice herself on the funeral pile of her dead husband was, till the practice of suttee was abolished by the british government, one of the most immoral traits which a brahman widow could exhibit. now, have we any means of discriminating, and, if so, how do we discriminate, between those acts which are really, and those which are only reputed, right or wrong? that there is great need of such a test, if it can be discovered, is plain. the wide divergences of opinion on matters of conduct in different ages, in different countries, in different classes of society, and even amongst men of the same class in the same country and at the same time, shew at once the vast importance of ascertaining some common measure of actions, and that there is no uniform rule of right and wrong to be found in the human mind itself. if there is such a rule, it must be derived from some external considerations, and, if there is no such rule, then morality must be, to a large extent, a matter of prejudice, fancy, and caprice. now i conceive that there is a simple mode of ascertaining whether there is any test of actions other than the merely subjective determinations of our own minds, or, in other words, whether there are any reasons or external considerations by which the mind guides itself in its decisions on matters of conduct. do our moral opinions merely vary, or do they grow? is there any progress to be traced in morality, or does it simply oscillate, within certain limits, round a fixed point? if some 'simple' and 'innate' idea of right, or some universal sense, were the test of morality, then we might expect that the moral decisions of all men would be uniform, or, at least, approximately uniform; if, on the other hand, there were no test at all, or, what amounts to much the same thing, a merely personal test, then we might expect that the moral judgments of mankind would vary arbitrarily according to the disposition and temperament of each individual man. but, if there be a test derived from external considerations and capable of being applied to particular cases by the ordinary processes of reasoning, then we may fairly expect that, as the opportunities of observation and experience increase, the test will be applied more widely and more accurately, and that the science of conduct will grow, like all other sciences, with the advance of knowledge and of general civilisation. now, what, as a mutter of fact, has been the case? can anyone affect to doubt that the morality of civilized countries is far higher and purer, and far better adapted to secure the preservation and progress of society, than the customs of savage or barbaric tribes? or, however enamoured a man may be of classical antiquity, is there any one who would be prepared to change the ethical code and the prevailing ethical sentiment of modern times for those of the greeks or romans? or, again, should we be willing, in this respect, to go back three hundred, or two hundred, or even one hundred years in our own history? are not the abolition of slavery, the improved and improving treatment of captives taken in war, of women and children, of the distressed and unfortunate, and even of the lower animals, alone sufficient to mark the difference between the morality of earlier and of later times? i shall assume, then, that there is a test of conduct, and that this test is of such a character that its continued application, by individual thinkers or by mankind at large, consciously or semi-consciously, is sufficient to account for the existence of a progressive morality. but, if so, it must be a test which experience enables us to apply with increasing accuracy, and which is derived from external considerations, or, in other words, from the observation of the effects and tendencies of actions. and here i may observe, parenthetically, that to make 'conscience' or 'moral reason' or 'moral sense' the test of action, as, for instance, bishop butler appears to do in the case of conscience, is, even on the supposition of the independent existence of these so-called 'faculties,' to confound the judge with the law which governs his decisions, the 'faculty' with the rules in accordance with which it operates. limiting ourselves, therefore, to a test which is derived from a consideration of the results, direct and indirect, immediate and remote, of our actions, we simply have to enquire what is the characteristic in these results which men have in view when they try to act rightly, and which they mistake, ignore, or lose sight of, when they act wrongly. there are, in the main, three answers to this question, though they are rather different modes, i conceive, of presenting the same idea, than distinct and independent explanations. it may be said that we look to the manner in which the action will affect the happiness or pleasure of those whom it concerns, or their welfare or well-being, or the development or perfection of their character. now it seems to me that these are by no means necessarily antagonistic modes of speaking, and that, in attempting to determine the test of right action, they are all useful as complementing each other. there is, however, a view of the measure of actions which, though derived from external considerations, is opposed to them all, and which it may be desirable to notice at once, with the object of eliminating it from our enquiry. it is that we are only concerned with actions so far as they affect ourselves, and that, providing we observe the law of the land, which will punish us if we do not observe it, we are under no further obligations to our fellow-citizens. this paradox, for such it is, has mainly acquired notoriety though the advocacy of hobbes, though it has sometimes been ignorantly attributed to bentham and other writers of what is called the utilitarian school. but, be this as it may, it is so plainly inconsistent with some of the most obvious facts of human nature, and specially with the existence of that large and essential group of emotions which we call the sympathetic feelings, as well as with the constitution of family, social, and civic life, that it is unnecessary here further to discuss it. the views now generally accepted as to the origin of society in the family or tribal relations are alike irreconcileable with the selfish psychology from which hobbes educes his system of morality and with that 'state of nature in which every man was at war with every man' from which he traces the growth of law and government. reverting, therefore, to those tests of conduct which recognise, the independent existence of social as well as self-regarding springs of action, i shall now make some remarks on the appropriateness and adequacy, for the purpose of designating such tests, of the three classes of terms, noticed above. to begin with happiness or pleasure. taking happiness to mean the balance of pleasures over pains, and degrees of happiness the proportions of this balance, it will be sufficient if i confine myself to the word 'pleasure.' one statement, then, of the test of the morality or rightness of an action is that it should result in a larger amount of pleasure than pain to all those whom it affects. but it is at once objected that there is the greatest variety of pleasures and pains, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, sympathetic, sensual, and so on; and it is asked how are we to determine their respective values, and to strike the balance between the conflicting kinds? how much sensual pleasure would compensate for the pangs of an evil conscience, or what amount of intellectual enjoyment would allay the cravings of hunger or thirst? the only escape from this difficulty is frankly to acknowledge that there are some pleasures and pains which are incommensurable with one other, and that, therefore, where they are concerned, we must forego the attempt at comparison, and so act as to compass the immeasurably greater pleasure or avoid the immeasurably greater pain. especially is this the case with the pleasures and pains attendant on the exercise of the moral feelings. a man who is tormented with the recollection of having committed a great crime will, as the phrase goes, 'take pleasure in nothing;' while, similarly, a man who is enjoying the retrospect of having done his duty, in some important crisis, will care little for obloquy or even for the infliction of physical suffering. making this admission, then, as well as recognising the fact that our pleasures differ in quality as well as in volume, so that the pleasures of the higher part of our nature, the religious, the intellectual, the moral, the aesthetic, the sympathetic nature, affect us with a different kind of enjoyment from the sensual pleasures, or those which are derived from them, we may rightly regard the tendency to produce a balance of pleasure over pain as the test of the goodness of an action, and the effort and intention to perform acts having this tendency as the test of the morality of the agent. but when we enunciate the production of pleasure as our aim, or the balance of pleasure-producing over pain-producing results as the test of right action, we are not always understood to have admitted these explanations, and, consequently, there is always a danger of our being supposed to degrade morality by identifying it with the gratification, in ourselves and others, of the coarser and more material impulses of our nature. though, then, if due distinctions and admissions be made, the tendency to produce, in the long run, the greatest amount of happiness or misery, pleasure or pain, may be taken as the test of the goodness or badness of an action, the phraseology is so misleading, and so liable to frustrate the practical objects of the moralist, that it is desirable, if possible, to find terms not equally lending themselves to misinterpretation and perversion. let us now, then, consider whether we are supplied with such terms in the phrases 'perfection' or 'development' of 'character.' it is a noble idea of human action to suppose that its end is the perfection of individual men, or the development of their various capacities to the utmost extent that is available. and yet, as the phrases 'pleasure' and 'happiness' are apt too exclusively to suggest material well-being and the gratification of the more animal parts of our nature, so the phrases 'perfection' or 'development' of 'character' are apt altogether to keep out of sight these necessary pre-suppositions of a healthy and progressive condition of humanity. unless there were some standard of comfortable living, and a constant effort not only to maintain but to improve it, and unless some zest were given to every-day life by the gratification of the appetites, within reasonable limits, and the endeavour to obtain the means of indulging them, men, constituted as they are, would be in danger of sinking into sloth, squalor, and indigence, and, to the great mass of mankind, the opportunity of developing and perfecting their higher nature would never occur. we seem, therefore, to require some term which will not only suggest the highest results of moral endeavour, but also the conditions which, in the case of humanity, are essential to the attainment of those results. moreover, to a greater extent even than the words 'pleasure' and 'happiness,' the expressions 'perfection' and 'development' of 'character' are in danger of being supposed to imply an exclusive reference to self. it is true that we cannot properly develope our characters, much less attain to all the perfection of which they are capable, without quickening the moral feeling and giving larger scope to the sympathetic emotions; but, in the mere attempt to improve their own nature, men are very apt to lose sight of their relations to others. the phrases ought, however, to be taken, and usually are intended to be taken, to include the effort to improve the character of others as well as our own; and if this extension of their meaning be well understood, and it is also understood that the development or perfection of character implies certain conditions of material comfort and the gratification, within reasonable limits, of our appetitive nature, there ought to be no objection on the part of the moralist to their employment for the purpose of designating the test of right conduct; and, any way, they are useful as supplementing, correcting, and elevating the associations attached to the more commonly employed terms, pleasure and happiness. but are there no terms by which the somewhat exclusive associations connected with the two sets of phrases already examined may be avoided? i venture to suggest that such terms may be found by reverting to the old, but now usually discarded, expressions 'welfare' and 'well-being.' these words, it seems to me, do not primarily suggest material prosperity, like happiness, nor the gratification of the lower parts of our nature, like pleasure, nor the exclusive development of the higher parts of our nature, like perfection, but cover the whole ground of healthy human activity and the conditions which are favourable to it. corresponding, too, almost exactly with the [greek: eudaimonia] of aristotle, they have the advantage of venerable historic associations. lastly, they seem to have less of a personal and more of a social reference than any of the other terms employed. we speak, i think, more naturally of the well-being or welfare of society, than of the happiness, pleasure, or perfection of society. i cannot, therefore, but think that the moralist would be wise in at least trying the experiment of recurring to these terms in place of those which, in recent systems of ethics, have usually superseded them. if it be said that they are vague, and that different people will attach different meanings to them, according to their own prepossessions and their own theories of life, i can only reply that this objection applies with at least equal force to any of the other terms which we have passed in review. and, if it be said that our conceptions of well-being and welfare are not fixed, but that our ideas of the nature and proper proportions of their constituents are undergoing constant modification and growth, i may ask if this is less the case with regard to happiness, or the sum of pleasures, or the balance of pleasures over pains, or the perfection or due development of human character, all of which expressions, indeed, when properly qualified and explained, i acknowledge to be the equivalents of those for which i have stated a preference. and here occurs a difficulty with respect to all these expressions and ideas. if their meaning or content is not fixed, and specially if they are undergoing a constant change, in the way of growth, with the progress of reason and society, how can we employ them as a test of morality, which is itself also a variable conception? surely this is to make one indefinite idea the gauge of another indefinite idea. the answer to this question will, i trust, bring out clearly the nature of a moral test, as well as the different modes of its application. the ultimate origin of moral rules, i conceive, so far at least as science can trace them, is to be found in the effort of men to adapt themselves to the circumstances, social and physical, in which they are placed. at first, probably, this process of adaptation was almost automatic and unconscious, but, when men once began consciously to adapt means to ends, they would soon begin to reflect on their acts, and to ask themselves the reasons why they had selected this course of conduct rather than another. the justifying reasons of their past acts, like the impelling motives of their future acts, could have reference to nothing but the convenience or gratification of themselves or those amongst whom they lived. and the acts which they justified in themselves they would approve of in others. here, then, already we have a test consciously applied to the estimation of conduct. experience shews that this or that action promotes some object which is included in the narrow conception of well-being entertained by the primitive man. he, therefore, continues to act in accordance with the rule which prescribes it, or the habit from which it proceeds. and, in like manner, if he finds from experience that the action does not promote that object, and he is free to exercise his own choice, he desists from it and, perhaps, tries the experiment of substituting another. now, in these cases, it is plain that any judgment which the man exercises independently, and apart from the society of which he is a member, is guided solely by the consideration whether the course of conduct is efficacious in attaining its end, that end being part of his conception of the well-being of himself, his family, or his tribe. if he thinks about the matter for himself at all, this is the only consideration of which he can take account. there are three courses open to him. he need not reflect on the action at all, but simply follow in the wake of his neighbours (and this, of course, is far the commonest case); or, if there is any divergence of opinion about it amongst his neighbours, he may deliberate as to whose opinion it is safest to follow; or, lastly, he may consider for himself, whether the action is really the best means of attaining the end aimed at, that is to say, he may test the means by its conduciveness to the end, which is always, in some shape, the welfare of himself or others. if he follows the opinion of others, it is plain that their opinion, so far as it has been formed independently, has been formed in the manner above described. the only alternative, therefore, is between the acceptance of existing opinions, without any consideration or examination, and their reference to the conception of well-being, or however else the idea may be expressed, as a measure of their appropriateness and sufficiency. the idea of well-being itself may be inadequate, and even in parts incorrect, and, as society advances, it is undoubtedly undergoing a constant process of expansion and rectification; but it seems to me that this regard for their own welfare or that of others, however we may phrase it, is the only guiding-principle of conduct, in the light of which men can reconsider and review their rules. unless they follow the mere blind impulses of feeling (in which case they do not follow rules at all, but simply act irrationally), or else observe implicitly the maxims of conduct which they find prevalent around them, they must, and can only, ask the question whether it is possible to alter their conduct for the better, that is to say, whether they can better promote their own welfare or that of others by some modification of their actions. take the case of slavery. there was a time when savage or barbaric tribes, moved by a regard to their own interests, and also, we may trust, touched by some compassion for their victims, began to substitute, for the wholesale butchery of their enemies defeated in war, the practice of retaining some or all of them for the purposes of domestic or agrarian service. again, there came a time when, viewed by the side of other forms of service which had meanwhile come into existence, slavery, with its various incidents, began to shock the philanthropic sentiments of the more civilized races of mankind, while the question also began to be raised whether slave-labour was not economically at a disadvantage, when compared with free labour, and the result of these combined considerations, often aided by a strong and enthusiastic outburst of popular feeling, has been the total disappearance of slavery amongst civilized, and its almost total disappearance even amongst barbaric or semi-civilized races. take, too, the revolting practice, common among many savage tribes, past and present, of killing and eating aged parents or other infirm members of the tribe, when engaged in war. this practice which, at first sight, seems so utterly unnatural, was doubtless dictated, in part at least, by the desire to save their victims from the worse fate of being tortured and mutilated by their enemies. subsequently, in the history of some of these tribes, there has come a time when it has been discovered that a more humane mode of attaining the same object is to build strong places and leave the feebler folk at home. if we follow the varying marriage customs of savage or barbaric tribes, we shall find, in the same way, that they have always been originally framed on reasons of convenience, and that, when they have been changed, it has been because different views of well-being, including the needs of purity, closer attachment, increased care of children, and the like, have begun to prevail. in all these examples, which might be multiplied to any extent, it is plain that changes of conduct are moulded and determined by changes of opinion as to what is best and most suitable for the circumstances of the individual, the family, the tribe, or whatever the social aggregate may be. and i may venture to affirm that, wherever any change of moral conduct takes place, unless it be dictated by blind passion, or mere submission to authority, enforced or voluntary, the change is invariably due to some change of opinion on what constitutes the advantage of the persons whom it affects. it is true, therefore, that moral conduct varies, and it is true that our conceptions of well-being vary, but the two do not vary independently of one another, or either of them capriciously. increased experience of ourselves and of others, enlarged observation of the external world, more matured reflexion are constantly expanding and rectifying our conceptions of what constitutes human welfare, and to this constantly amended conception are readjusted, from time to time, our conduct and our sentiments on the conduct both of ourselves and of others. in brief, then, the conduct of men and the sentiments of men on conduct vary with their conceptions of well-being, and their conceptions of well-being are determined by experience (including the opportunity for experience) and reflexion. my conclusion may, perhaps, be illustrated and enforced by one further consideration. it generally happens, in the progress of society, that, after a number of rules of conduct have been accumulated, they become enshrined in some sacred book, some code, or, at least, some constant and authoritative tradition. in this manner they may be stereotyped for ages. now, after a time, these rules, especially if they are numerous and minute, become unsuited, at least in part, to the altered circumstances of the society, and probably bear hardly on many of the individuals composing it. when this condition of things is beginning to be intolerable, there often arises the social reformer, and what is the course which he pursues? he endeavours to shew how unsuitable the rules have become to attain the ends which they were originally intended to compass, in how much better a manner other rules would attain these objects, how grievously the present rules bear on many classes and individuals in the state, how unequal they are in their incidence, at what a disadvantage they place the community in comparison with neighbouring communities, how easily they may be altered, and the like. in fact, the considerations which he urges may all be included in the one argument that the existing rules are opposed to the well-being of the state, and that the advantages resulting from their abrogation will more than compensate for any disturbance of existing relations which may ensue from the change. apart from force, or mere rant, rhetoric, or imposture, it is difficult to see what other resource the reformer has open to him. and, in those cases where there is no accumulation of antiquated rules and no need of the individual reformer, but where society at large has the happy knack of imperceptibly accommodating its practice and principles of action to altered circumstances, there can be no doubt that it is by considerations of well-being, half conscious though the process of application may be, that the change is directed. the plastic power by which men accommodate their actions and even their maxims of conduct to modifications in surrounding circumstances is one of the advantages which they gain by the progress of civilisation. in ancient society the tyranny of custom is often almost absolute. in modern society changes, which would otherwise require the drastic hand of the reformer, are often quietly effected by the gradual and almost imperceptible action of the people themselves. it is thus that the equity branch of english law, and much of our case law, grew up, giving expression to changes which had already occurred in the current of popular opinion. it is thus that the obligation of 'gentlemen' to offer, on the slightest provocation, and to accept, without questioning, a 'challenge' to take each other's lives, has, in most civilized countries, now grown obsolete, having gradually become enfeebled together with the exaggerated military spirit which gave it birth. it is thus also that, with an increase of the industrial spirit, with softened manners, and with that quickening of our sympathetic nature which has gradually been effected by the teaching of christianity, a strong sentiment against slavery, a respect for human life as such, a regard for the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and many tender feelings of a similar kind, have almost insensibly been developed as an essential element in modern civilisation. these considerations naturally lead me to notice the two different ways in which the test of conduct may be, and as a fact is, applied. one mode is the conscious and intentional application of it by the reflective man. the other is the semi-conscious and almost instinctive application of it by the community at large. in morals, as in the arts, men, almost without knowing it, are constantly re-adjusting their means to their ends, feeling their way to some tentative solution of a new difficulty or a better solution of an old one, shaping their conduct with reference to the special needs of the situation in which they are placed. it is thus, for the most part, that new circumstances develope new rules, and that the simple maxims of a primitive people are gradually replaced by the multifarious code of law and morals with which we are now familiar. the guiding principle throughout the process is the conception of their own good, comprehending, as it does, not only ease, personal comfort, and gratification of the various appetites and desires, which, in the early stages of society, are the preponderating considerations, but also those higher constituents of welfare, both individual and social, which attain an ever-increasing importance as society advances, such as are the development of the moral, the intellectual, and the aesthetic faculties; the purification of the religious sentiments, the expansion of the sympathetic feelings, the diffusion of liberty and prosperity, the consolidation of national unity, the elevation of human life. this principle works throughout the community, actuating some men in its higher, others in its lower forms; but, except where the force of tradition or prejudice is too strong for it, invariably moulding conduct into accordance with the more complex requirements of advancing civilisation. its action, of course, is not wholly advantageous. growing needs and more complicated relations suggest to men fresh devices for compassing their selfish ends, such as the various forms of fraud, forgery, and conspiracy, as well as more enlarged or more effective schemes of beneficence, stricter or more intelligent applications of the principle of justice, and possibilities of higher and freer developments of their faculties. but, on the whole, and setting aside as exceptional certain periods of retrogression, such as the decline of the roman empire, the evolution of society seems to be attended by the progress of morality, and specially by the amelioration of social relations, whether between individuals, families, or states. the intelligence that apprehends the greater good re-acts upon the desire to attain it, and the result is the combination of more rational aims with a purer interest in the pursuit of them. this tendency in society at large to modify and re-adjust its conduct in conformity with fuller and more improved conceptions of well-being, which are themselves suggested by a growing experience, is reinforced, especially in the later stages of civilisation, by the consciously reflective action of philosophers and reformers. it is the function of these classes not only to give expression to the thoughts which are working obscurely in the minds of other men, but also to detect those aspects and bearings of conduct which are not obvious to the general intelligence. this task is effected partly by tracing actions to their indirect and remote results, partly by more distinctly realising their results, whether immediate or remote, direct or indirect, and partly by generalising them, that is to say, by considering what would happen to society if men generally were to act in that manner. thus, take the case of lying. in primitive states of society, and even in some more advanced nations, no great opprobrium attaches to telling a lie. in ancient greece, for instance, veracity by no means occupied the same prominent position among the virtues that it does among ourselves, and, even now, teutonic races are generally credited with a peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of truthfulness. this improved sentiment as regards veracity is, no doubt, partly due to the realisation of its importance and of the inconveniences which result from the breaches of it, especially in commercial affairs, by the members of a community at large; but it must also, to a great extent, have been produced by the definite teaching conveyed in books, and by moral and religious instructors. follow out a lie to all its consequences, realise the feelings of the person deceived by it, when he has discovered the deception, above all, consider what would be the result if men were commonly to deceive one another, and no man could place any dependence on the information which his neighbour gave him; and then a falsehood excites very different feelings from what it does when regarded simply as an isolated act. or, again, take the evasion of taxes. there is probably, even yet, no country in which the popular sentiment on this subject is sufficiently enlightened and severe. a man smuggles a box of cigars, or evades paying a tax for his dog, or makes an insufficient return of his income, and few of his neighbours, if the fact come to their knowledge, think the worse of him. the character and consequences of the action are not obvious, and hence they do not perceive what, on reflexion, or, if guided by proper instruction, they could hardly fail to realise, that the act is really a theft, only practised on the community at large instead of on an individual member of it, and that, if every one were to act in the same way, the collection of taxes and, consequently, the administration and defence of the country, the maintenance of its army and navy, its police, its harbours and roads, would become an impossibility, and it would quickly relapse into barbarism. other familiar instances of the advantage to be derived from the conscious and intentional application of the reasoning powers to matters of conduct may be found in the successive reforms of the penal code of any civilized country, or in the abolition of slavery. punishment is, in all very early stages of society, capricious, mostly unregulated by any definite customs or enactments, and, consequently, often disproportioned, either in the way of excess or defect, to the character of the offence. as the community advances in complexity and intelligence, successive reformers arise who attempt, by definite enactment, to regulate the amount of punishment due to each description of offence, and, from time to time, to increase or diminish, as occasion seems to require, the severity of the existing code. the considerations by which, at least in our own time, these reforms are determined are such as these: the adequacy or inadequacy of the punishment to deter men from the commission of the offence, the tendency of excessive punishment to produce a reaction of sentiment in favour of the criminal, and a reluctance on the part of the judge or jury to convict, the superfluous suffering inflicted by that part of the punishment which is in excess of the requirements of the case, due publicity and notoriety as a means of warning others, the reform of the criminal himself, and so on. all these considerations, it will be observed, are derived from tracing the effects of the punishment either on the criminal himself, or on persons who are under a similar temptation to commit the crime, or on the sentiment of society at large, or of that portion of society which is connected with the administration of justice, and it is only by the exercise of great circumspection, and of a keen intelligence on the part of the statesman, the jurist, or the moralist, that grave errors can be avoided, and an adequate estimate of the probable results can be formed. the mere instinct of the community, unmodified and uncorrected by the conscious speculations of its more thoughtful members, would be in much danger of either causing a large amount of needless suffering to the criminal, or of seriously diminishing the security of society. it would almost certainly be guilty of grave inequalities in the apportionment of punishment to specific crimes. the history of slavery similarly shews the importance of the functions of the moralist and the reformer. it must have been at the suggestion of some prominent member of a tribe, whose intelligence was in advance of that of his fellows, that men first took to capturing their defeated enemies, with a view to future service, instead of slaughtering them on the field of battle. and we know that, in the time of plato and aristotle, there had already arisen a strong sentiment against the enslaving of greeks by greeks, originating probably in the instinctive sympathy of race, but quickened and fostered, doubtless, by the superior capacity which men possess of realising suffering and misfortune in those who are constituted and endowed like themselves, by the new conception of a pan-hellenic unity, and by the vivid sense which, on reflexion, the citizens of each state must have entertained of their own liability to be reduced, in turn, to the same condition. in modern times, the movement which has led to the entire abolition of slavery in civilized countries owes much, undoubtedly, to the softened manners and wider sympathies of a society largely transformed by the combined operation of christianity and culture, but it has been promoted, to no inconsiderable degree, by conscious reflexion and direct argument. social and religious reasons, derived from the community of nature and origin in man, reinforced by a vivid realisation of the sufferings of others, and appealing forcibly to the tender and sympathetic feelings, have co-operated with the economical considerations drawn from the wastefulness and comparative inefficiency of slave labour, and with what may be called the self-regarding reason of the hardening and debasing effect of slave-owning on the character of the slave-owner himself. it will be sufficient, in this connexion, simply to allude to the ideals of mercy, purity, humility, long-suffering, and self-denial, which are pourtrayed in the christian teaching and have, ever since the early days of christianity, exercised so vast and powerful an influence on large sections of mankind. there is, of course, a process of constant interaction going on between the two elements in the constitution of moral sentiment which i have been attempting to describe. the circumstances, opinions, and feelings of the society of which he is a member, must necessarily contribute to determine the opinions and feelings, the character and aims, of the moralist or the reformer. in turn, the moralist or reformer modifies, corrects, and elevates the current moral sentiment of those who are brought within the influence of his work. and this result is usually a permanent one. when the average moral sentiment on a particular point of conduct has been consciously raised, and the change is fully realised, it seldom happens that it afterwards recedes, though the automatic or semi-conscious adaptations of society to new needs and circumstances, when regarded from a more general point of view, are not infrequently found to be regressive as well as progressive. thus, though we may imagine the distinctions between the different classes of society becoming more numerous or more accentuated (as i believe to have actually occurred in england during the present century), or the evasion of taxation becoming more general than it at present is, we can hardly conceive a recurrence to slavery, or a needless increase in the severity of punishments, or a revival of the hard-drinking habits of the last century. when society is fully aware of its moral gains, it is not likely knowingly to surrender them. hence, allowing for occasional oscillations and for possible exceptions in certain departments of conduct, morality, as a whole, almost necessarily advances with the general progress of intelligence. it is not altogether easy to adjust the respective claims of society at large and of the individual thinker in the constitution of moral theory, or, in other words, to determine the limits within which the speculative moralist may legitimately endeavour to reform the existing moral sentiment. it is plain that it must be open to the moralist, and, in fact, to every intelligent citizen, to criticize the current morality, or else moral progress, even if it took place at all, would, on many points of conduct, be exceedingly slow. but, on the other hand, it is equally plain that a constant discussion of the accepted rules of conduct would weaken the moral sentiment, lessen the sense of obligation, and suggest a general uncertainty as to the validity of the maxims which, in their relations to one another, men usually take for granted. hence, though it would be almost fatal to moral progress to discourage speculation on moral topics, the moralist must always bear in mind that his task is one which is not lightly to be undertaken, and that, with an exception to be noticed presently, the presumption should always be in favour of existing rules of conduct. if for no other reason, this presumption ought to be made on the practical ground that a disturbance of the moral sentiment on one point is likely to weaken its force generally, and, before we expose men to this danger, we ought to have some adequate justification. but there is also the speculative ground that any given society, and indeed mankind generally, has been engaged for ages in feeling its way, instinctively or semi-consciously, towards a solution of the self-same problems which the philosopher is attempting to solve consciously and of set purpose. that, on the whole, a society has solved these problems in the manner best suited to its existing needs and circumstances may fairly be taken for granted, and, even where the ethical stand-point of the reformer is very superior to the stand-point of the society which he wishes to reform, he will be wise in endeavouring to introduce his reforms gradually, and, if possible, in connexion with principles already acknowledged, rather than in attempting to effect a moral revolution, the ultimate results of which it may be impossible to foresee. the work of the moralist is, therefore, best regarded as corrective of, and supplementary to, the work which mankind is constantly doing for itself, and not as antagonistic to it. the method is the same in both cases: only it is applied semi-consciously, and merely as occasions suggest it, in the one case; consciously and spontaneously in the other. in both cases alike the guiding principle, whether of action or of speculation upon action, is the adaptation of conduct to surrounding circumstances, physical and social, with a view to promote, to the utmost extent possible, the well-being of the individual and of the society of which he is a member. where the interests of the individual and of the society clash, society, that is to say, a man's fellow-citizens, usually approves, as we saw in the last chapter, of the sacrifice of individual to social interests, a course of conduct which is also, on reflexion, usually stamped by the individual's own approbation, and hence we may say briefly that their tendency to promote or impair the welfare of society is the test by which, in different ways, all actions are estimated alike by the philosopher, in his hours of speculation, and by the community at large, in the practical work of life. in laying down the principle that the presumption of the moralist should always be in favour of existing rules of conduct, i intimated that there was one exception to this principle. the exception includes all those cases which are legitimate, though not obvious, applications of existing rules, and to which, therefore, the ordinary moral sentiment does not attach in the same way that it does to the plainer and more direct applications. thus, if it can be shewn, as it undoubtedly can be, that smuggling falls under the head of stealing, and holding out false hopes under that of lying, the moralist need take no account of the lax moral sentiment which exists with regard to these practices, though, of course, in estimating the guilt of the individual as distinct from the character of the act, due allowance must be made for his imperfect appreciation of the moral bearings of his conduct. this exception, as will be found in the next chapter, covers, and therefore at once justifies, a large proportion of the criticisms which, in the present advanced stage of morality, when the more fundamental principles have been already settled, it is still open to us to make. it remains now to enquire what is the justification of the test propounded in this chapter. i do not found it on any external considerations, whether of law or revelation, both of which, i conceive, presuppose morality, but on the very make and constitution of our nature. the justification of the moral test and the source of the moral feeling are alike, i conceive, to be discovered by an examination of human nature, and, so far as that nature has a divine origin, so far is the origin of morality divine. whatever the ultimate source of morality may be, to us, at all events, it can only be known as revealed or reflected in ourselves. what, then, is it in the constitution of our nature, which leads us to aim at the well-being of ourselves and those around us, and to measure our own conduct and that of others by the extent to which it promotes these ends? in answering this question, i must give a brief account of the ultimate principles of human nature, though this account has been partly anticipated in the last chapter. human nature, in its last analysis, seems, so far as it is concerned with action, to consist of certain impulses or feelings, and a power of comparing with one another the results which follow from the gratification of these feelings, which power reacts upon the several feelings themselves by way of intensifying, checking, or controlling them. this power we call reason. the feelings themselves fall into two principal groups, the egoistic or self-regarding feelings, which centre in a man's self, and are developed by his personal needs, and the altruistic or sympathetic feelings, which centre in others and are developed by the social surroundings in which he finds himself placed. these two groups of feelings, i conceive, were independent of one another from the first, or at least as soon as man could be called man, and neither of them admits of being resolved into the other. as the one was developed by and adapted to personal needs, so the other was developed by and adapted to the manifold requirements of family or tribal life, which, from the first, was inseparable from the life of the individual. intermediate between these two groups of feelings, the purely self-regarding and the purely sympathetic, and derived probably from the interaction of both, is another group, which may be called the semi-social group. this group includes shame, love of reputation, love of notoriety, desire of fame, and the like, but, on analysis, it will be found that all these feelings admit of being referred to two heads, the love of approbation and the fear of disapprobation. lastly, if any of our desires or feelings are thwarted by the intentional action of other men, the result in our minds is a feeling which we call resentment, and which, though it regards others, is, unlike the sympathetic feelings, a malevolent and not a benevolent feeling. it is important, in considering the economy of human nature, to notice that resentment, as is also the case with the love of cruelty, is a secondary not a primary, a derived not an original affection of our minds; for, apart from the desire to gratify some self-regarding or sympathetic feeling, or disappointment when that desire is not gratified, there is, i conceive, no such thing as ill-feeling in one human being towards another. resentment is properly a reflex form of sympathy or self-regard, arising when our sympathetic feelings are wounded by an injury done to another, or our self-regarding desires are frustrated by an injury done to ourselves; when, in fact, any emotional element in our nature is, by the intentional intervention of another, disappointed of attaining its end. each of these groups of feelings admits of being studied apart, though in the actual conduct of life they are seldom found to operate alone, and each, under the continued action of reason, assumes a form or forms in which its various elements are brought into harmonious working with each other, so as best to promote the ends which the whole group subserves. these forms, thus rationalised or moralised, if i may be allowed the use of such expressions, are, in the case of the self-regarding feelings, self-respect and rational self-love; in the case of the sympathetic feelings, rational benevolence; in the case of the semi-social feelings, a reasonable regard for the opinion of others; and in the case of the resentful feelings, a sense of justice. these higher forms of the several groups of feelings themselves require to be harmonised, before man can satisfy the needs of his nature as a whole. and, when co-ordinated under the control of reason, they become a rational desire for the combined welfare of the individual and of society, or, if we choose to use different but equivalent expressions, of the individual considered as an unit of society, or of society considered as including the individual. in a settled state of existence, the interests of the individual and of society, even leaving out of account the pleasures and pains of the moral sanction, are, for the most part, identical. if an individual pursues a selfish course of conduct, neglecting the interests and feelings of others, he is almost certain to suffer for it in the long run. and the prosperity and general well-being of the community in which they live is, to citizens, living a normal life and pursuing ordinary avocations, an essential condition of their own prosperity and well-being. on the other hand, it is by each man attending to his own business and directing his efforts to the promotion of his own interests or those of his family, his firm, or whatever may be the smaller social aggregate in which his work chiefly lies, that the interests of the community at large are best secured. men whose time is mainly taken up with philanthropic enterprises are very likely to neglect the duties which lie immediately before them. 'to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please god to call me' is a very homely, but it is an essential lesson. that the great mass of the citizens of a country should lay it well to heart, and act habitually on it, is the first condition of national prosperity. of course, this primary regard to our own interests, or those of the persons with whom we are more immediately connected, must be limited by wider considerations. a man has duties, not only to himself and his own family, but to his neighbours, to the various institutions with which he is connected, to his town, his country, mankind at large, and even the whole sentient creation. how far these should limit each other or a man's individual or family interests is a question by no means easy to answer, and is the main problem which each man has to be perpetually solving for himself, and society at large for us all. there is hardly any waking hour in which we have not to attempt to settle rival claims of this kind, and, according as we settle them to our own satisfaction or not, so have we peace or trouble of mind. no one can reasonably deny that the more immediate interests of the individual and of the various social aggregates, including society at large, are frequently in conflict. it seems to me, i must confess, that it is also futile to deny that there are occasions, though such occasions may be rare, in which even a man's interests in the long run are incompatible with his social duties. to take one or two instances. it may sometimes be for the good of society that a man should speak out his mind freely on some question of private conduct or public policy, though his utterances may be on the unpopular side or offend persons of consideration and influence. the man performs what he conceives to be his duty, but he knows that, in doing so, he is sacrificing his prospects. or, again, he is invited to join in some popular movement which he believes to be of a questionable or pernicious tendency, and, because he believes that to take part in it would be untrue to his own convictions and possibly harmful to others, he refrains from doing so, at the risk of losing preferment, or custom, or patronage. then, we are all familiar with the difficulties in which men are often placed, when they have to record a vote; their convictions and the claims of the public service being on one side, and their own interests and prospects on the other. in all these cases it is true that, if their moral nature be in a healthy condition, they approve, on reflexion, of having taken the more generous course, while it is often a matter of life-long regret if they have sacrificed their nobler impulses to their selfish interests. and, taking into account these after-feelings of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, it is often the case, and is always the case where these feelings are very strong, that a man gains more happiness, in the long run, by following the path of duty and obeying his social impulses than by confining himself to the narrow view which would be dictated by a cool calculation of what is most likely to conduce to his own private good. but, where the moral feelings are not strong, and still more where they are almost in abeyance, i fear that the theory that virtue and happiness are invariably coincident will hardly be supported by a candid examination of facts. to some men, i fear it must be acknowledged, present wealth and power and dignity are more than a sufficient recompense for any remorse which they may continue to feel for past greed or lack of candour or truthfulness. these considerations will serve to shew the immense importance of moral education, alike in the family, the school, and the state. if we are to depend on men acting rightly, and with a due regard to wider interests than their own, we must take pains to develope in them moral feelings sufficiently strong and sensitive to make the reflexion on wrong or selfish acts more painful to them than the sacrifice which is needed for dutiful and generous conduct. so far as society, through its various instruments of law and opinion, of education and domestic influences, can effect this object, so far will it promote its own security and advancement. our adoption, then, of a tendency to promote social welfare or well-being, as the test of conduct, is justified, i conceive, by an examination of the internal constitution of human nature and of the conditions which are necessary to secure the harmonious working of its various parts. it may be objected that this test is vague in its conception and difficult in its application. both objections, to a great extent, hold good. if they did not, moral theory and moral practice would be very easy matters, but, as a fact, we know that they are by no means easy. the conception of social well-being must be more or less vague, because we are constantly filling it up by experience; it is not a fixed, but a growing conception, and, though we may be certain of the character and importance of many of the elements which have already been detected in it by the experience of past generations, it seems impossible to fix any limits to its development in the future history of mankind. man will constantly be discovering new wants, new and more refined susceptibilities of his nature, and with them his conception of human well-being must necessarily grow. but, though not a fixed or final conception, the idea of social well-being is sufficiently definite, in each generation, to act as a guide and incentive to conduct. it is the star, gradually growing brighter and brighter, which lights our path, and, any way, we know that, if it were not above us in the heavens, we should be walking in the darkness. it must be confessed that the test of social well-being is not always easy of application. even, when we know what the good of the community consists in, it is not always easy to say what course of action will promote it, or what course of action is likely to retard it. society arrives, in a comparatively early period of its development, at certain broad rules of conduct, such as those which condemn murder, theft, ingratitude to friends, disobedience to parents. but the more remote applications of these rules, the nicer shades of conduct, such as those relating to social intercourse, the choice between clashing duties, the realisation of our obligations to the community at large, require for their appreciation a large amount of intelligence and an accumulated stock of experience which are not to be found in primitive societies. hence, the rules of conduct, which at first are few and simple, gradually become more numerous and complex. nor have we yet arrived at the time, nor do we seem to be within any appreciable distance of it, when the code is complete, or even the parts of it which already exist are altogether free from doubt and discussion. in the simpler relations of life, he that runs may read, but with increasing complications comes increasing uncertainty. to remove, as far as may be, this uncertainty from the domain of conduct is the task of advancing civilisation, and specially of those members of a community who have sufficient leisure, education, and intelligence to review the motives and compare the results of actions. the task has doubtless its special difficulties, and the conclusions of the moralist will by no means always command assent, but that the art of life is an easy one, who is there, at all experienced in affairs or accustomed to reflexion, that will contend? i may here pause for a moment, in order to emphasise the fact, which is already abundantly apparent from what has preceded, that, with ever widening and deepening conceptions of well-being, man is constantly learning to subordinate his individual interests to those of society at large, or rather to identify his interests with those of the larger organism of which he is a part. it is thus that we may justify the peculiar characteristic of the moral sentiment, indicated in the last chapter, which seems, in all acts of which it approves, to demand an element of sacrifice, whether of the lower to the higher self, or of the individual to his fellows. in order thoroughly to realise ourselves, we must be conscious of our absorption, or at least of our inclusion, in a greater and grander system than that of our individual surroundings; in order to find our lives, we must first discover the art of losing them. chapter v. practical applications of the moral test. in this chapter i propose, without any attempt to be exhaustive or systematic, to give some examples of the manner in which the test of conduct may be applied to practical questions, either by extending existing rules to cases which do not obviously fall under them, or by suggesting more refined maxims of conduct than those which are commonly prevalent. in either case, i am accepting the somewhat invidious task of pointing out defects in the commonly received theory, or the commonly approved practice, of morality. but, if morality is progressive, as i contend that it is, and progresses by the application to conduct of a test which itself involves a growing conception, the best mode of exhibiting the application of that test will be in the more recent acquisitions or the more subtle deductions of morality, rather than in its fundamental rules or most acknowledged maxims. i shall begin with a topic, the examples of which are ready to hand, and may easily be multiplied, to almost any extent, by the reader for himself--the better realisation of our duties to society at large as distinct from particular individuals. when the primary mischief resulting from a wrong act falls upon individuals, and especially upon our neighbours or those with whom we are constantly associating, it can hardly escape our observation. and, even if it does, the probability is that our attention will be quickly called to it by the reprobation of others. but, when the consequences of the act are diffused over the whole community, or a large aggregate of persons, so that the effect on each individual is almost imperceptible, we are very apt to overlook the mischief resulting from it, and so not to recognise its wrongful character, while, at the same time, from lack of personal interest, others fail to call us to account. hence it is that men, almost without any thought, and certainly often without any scruple, commit offences against the public or against corporations or societies or companies, which they would themselves deem it impossible for them to commit against individuals. and yet the character of the acts is exactly the same. take smuggling. a man smuggles cigars or tobacco to an amount by which he saves himself twenty shillings, and defrauds the state to the same extent. this is simply an act of theft, only that the object of the theft is the community at large and not an individual. so far as the mischief or wrongfulness of the act goes, apart from the intention of the agent, he might as well put his hands into the pocket of one of his fellow-passengers and extract the same amount of money. the twenty shillings which, by evading payment of the duty, he has appropriated to his own uses, has been taken from the rest of the tax-payers, and he has simply shifted on to them the obligation which properly attached to himself. sooner or later they must make up the deficit. if many men were to act in the same way, the burden of the honest tax-payer would be largely increased, and, if the practice became general, the state would have to resort to some other mode of taxation or collect its customs-revenue at a most disproportionate cost. thus, a little reflexion shows that smuggling is really theft, and i cannot but think that it would be to the moral as well as the material advantage of the community if it were called by that name, and were visited with the same punishment as petty larceny. exactly the same remarks, of course, apply to the evasion of income-tax, or of rates or taxes of any kind, which are imposed by a legitimate authority. travelling on a railway without a ticket or in a higher class or for a greater distance than that for which the ticket was taken is, similarly, only a thinly disguised case of theft, and should be treated accordingly. the sale or purchase of pirated editions of books is another case of the same kind, the persons from whom the money is stolen being the authors or publishers. many paltry acts of pilfering, such as the unauthorised use of government-paper or franks, or purloining novels or letter-paper from a club, or plucking flowers in a public garden, fall under the same head of real, though not always obvious, thefts. there is, of course, a certain degree of pettiness which makes them insignificant, but there is always a danger lest men should think too lightly of acts of this kind, whether done by themselves or others. the best safeguard, perhaps, against thoughtless wrong-doing to the community or large social aggregates is to ask ourselves these two questions: should we commit this act, or what should we think of a man who did commit it, in the case of a private individual? what would be the result, if every one who had the opportunity were to do the same? many of these acts would, then, stand out in their true light, and we should recognise that they are not only mean but criminal. other, but analogous, instances of the failure of men to realise their obligations to society or to large social aggregates are to be found in the careless and perfunctory manner in which persons employed by government, or by corporations, or large companies, often perform their duties. if they were in the service of a private employer, they would at all events realise, even if they did not act on their conviction, that they were defrauding him by idling away their time or attending to their own affairs, or those of charities or institutions in which they were interested, when they ought to be attending to the concerns of their employer. but in a government or municipal office, or the establishment of a large company, no one in particular seems to be injured by the ineffective discharge of their functions; and hence it does not occur to them that they are receiving their wages without rendering the equivalent of them. the inadequate supervision which overlooks or condones this listlessness is, of course, itself also the result of a similar failure to realise responsibility. the spirit in which patronage is often administered affords an instance of a similar kind. if a man were engaging a person to perform some service for himself or his family, or one of his intimate friends, he would simply look to competency, including, perhaps, moral character, for the special work to be done. but, when he has to appoint to a public post, and especially if he is only one of a board of electors, he is very apt to think that there is no great harm in appointing or voting for a relative or friend, or a person who has some special bond of connexion with him, such as that of political party, though he may not be the candidate best qualified for the position. and, if it does occur to him that he is acting wrongly, he is more likely to think of the wrong which he is doing to the individual who possesses the highest qualifications (and to him it is an undoubted wrong, for it frustrates just expectations) than of the wrong which he is doing to the community or the institution which he is depriving of the services of the fittest man. and yet, if he takes the trouble to reflect, he must see that he is guilty of a breach of trust; that, having undertaken a public duty, he has abused the confidence reposed in him. a vote given in return for a bribe, a case which now seldom occurs except in parliamentary elections, is open to the same ethical objections as a vote given on grounds of partiality; and, as the motive which dictates the breach of trust is purely selfish, it incurs the additional reproach of meanness. but why, it may be asked, should not a man accept a bribe, if, on other grounds, he would vote for the candidate who offers it? simply, because he is encouraging a practice which would, in time, deprive parliament of most of its more competent members, and reduce it to an oligarchy of millionaires, as well as degrading himself by a sordid act. to receive a present for a vote, even if the vote be given conscientiously, is to lend countenance to a practice which must inevitably corrupt the consciences, and pervert the judgment, of others. it hardly needs to be pointed out that the man who offers the bribe is acting still more immorally than the man who accepts it. he is not only causing others to act immorally, but, as no man can be a proper judge of his own competency, he is attempting to thrust himself into an office of trust without any regard to his fitness to fill it. intimidation, on the part of the man who practises it, is on the same ethical level as bribery, with respect to the two points just mentioned; but, as it appeals to the fears of men instead of their love of gain, and costs nothing to him who employs it, it is more odious, and deserves, at the hands of the law, a still more severe punishment. to yield to intimidation is, under most circumstances, more excusable than to yield to bribery; for the fear of losing what one has is to most men a more powerful inducement than the hope of gaining what one has not, and, generally speaking, the penalty threatened by the intimidator is far in excess of the advantage offered by the briber. as it betrays a vain and grasping disposition, when a man attempts to thrust himself into an office to which he is not called by the spontaneous voice of his fellow-citizens, so to refuse office, when there is an evident opportunity of doing good service to the community, betrays pride or indolence, coupled with an indifference to the public welfare. in democratic communities, there is always a tendency on the part of what may be called superfine persons to hold aloof from public, and especially municipal, life. if this sentiment of fastidiousness or indifference were to spread widely, and a fashion which begins in one social stratum quickly permeates to those immediately below it, there would be great danger, as there seems to be in america, of the public administration becoming seriously and permanently deteriorated. to prevent this evil, it is desirable to create, in every community, a strong sentiment against the practice of persons, who have the requisite means, leisure, and ability, withholding themselves from public life, when invited by their fellow-citizens to take their part in it. there may, of course, be paramount claims of another kind, such as those of science, or art, or literature, or education, but the superior importance of these claims on the individuals themselves, where they obviously exist, and where the claims of the public service are not urgent, would readily be allowed. it seems to be a rapid transition from cases of this kind to suicide, but, amongst the many reasons, moral and religious, which may be urged against suicide, there is one which connects itself closely with the considerations which have just been under our notice. as pointed out long ago by aristotle, the suicide wrongs the state rather than himself. where a man is still able to do any service to the state, in either a private or a public capacity, he is under a social, and, therefore, a moral obligation to perform that service, and, consequently, to withdraw from it by a voluntary death is to desert the post of duty. this consideration, of course, holds only where a man's life is still of value to society, but it should be pointed out that, where this ceases to be the case, many other considerations often, and some always do, intervene. there are few men who have not relatives, friends, or neighbours, who will be pained, even if they are not injured materially, by an act of suicide, and, wherever the injury is a material one, as in the case of leaving helpless relatives unprovided for, it becomes an act of cruelty. then, under all circumstances, there remain the evil example of cowardice and, to those who acknowledge the obligations of religion, the sin of cutting short the period of probation which god has assigned us. amongst duties to society, which are seldom fully realised in their social aspect, is the duty of bringing up children in such a manner as to render them useful to the state, instead of a burden upon it. under this head, there are two distinct cases, that of the rich and that of the poor, or, more precisely, that of those who are in sufficiently good circumstances to educate their children without the assistance of the state or of their neighbours, and that of those who require such assistance. in the latter case, it is the duty of society to co-operate with the parent in giving the child an education which shall fit it for the industrial occupations of life, and hence the moral obligation on the richer members of a community to provide elementary schools, aided by the state or by some smaller political aggregate, or else by voluntary efforts. the object of this assistance is not so much charity to the parent or the individual children, as the prevention of crime and pauperism, and the supply of an orderly and competent industrial class. in rendering the assistance, whether it come from public or private funds, great care ought to be taken not to weaken, but, rather to stimulate, the interest of the parent in the child's progress, both by assigning to him a share of the responsibility of supervision, and, if possible, by compelling him to contribute an equitable proportion of the cost. so largely, if not so fully, are the duties of the state and of individuals of the wealthier classes, in the matter of educating the children of the poor, now recognised, that the dangers arising from a defective or injudicious education seem, in the immediate future, to threaten the richer rather than the poorer classes. over-indulgence and the encouragement of luxurious habits during childhood; the weakened sense of responsibility, on the part of the parent, which is often caused by the transference to others of authority and supervision during boyhood or girlhood; the undue stimulation of the love of amusement, or of the craving for material comforts, during the opening years of manhood or womanhood; the failure to create serious interests or teach adequately the social responsibilities which wealth and position bring with them,--all these mistakes or defects in the education of the children of the upper classes constitute a grave peril to society, unless they are remedied in time. it seems, so far as we can forecast the future, that it is only by all classes taking pains to ascertain their respective duties and functions in sustaining and promoting the well-being of the community, and making serious efforts to perform them, that the society of the next few generations can be saved from constant convulsions. as intelligence expands, and a sense of the importance of social co-operation becomes diffused, it is almost certain that the existence of a merely idle and self-indulgent class will no longer be tolerated. hence, it is as much to the interests of the wealthier classes themselves as of society at large, that their children should be educated with a full sense of their social responsibilities, and equipped with all the moral and intellectual aptitudes which are requisite to enable them to take a lead in the development of the community of which they are members. and here, perhaps, i may take occasion to draw attention to the importance of the acquisition of political knowledge by all citizens of the state, and especially by those who belong to the leisured classes. it is a plain duty to society, that men should not exercise political power, unless they have some knowledge of the questions at issue. the amount of this knowledge may vary almost infinitely, from that of the veteran statesman to that of the newly enfranchised elector, but it is within the power of every one, who can observe and reason, to acquire some knowledge of at least the questions which affect his own employment and the welfare of his own family and neighbourhood, and, unless he will take thus much pains, he might surely have the modesty to forego his vote. to record a vote simply to please some one else is only one degree baser than to barter it for money or money's worth, and indeed it is often only an indirect mode of doing the same thing. there is a large class of cases, primarily affecting individuals rather than society at large, which, if we look a little below the surface and trace their results, are of a much more pernicious character than is usually recognised, and, as ethical knowledge increases, ought to incur far more severe reprobation than they now do. foremost amongst these is what i may call the current morality of debts. a man incurs a debt with a tradesman which he has no intention or no reasonable prospect of paying, knowing that the tradesman has no grounds for suspecting his inability to pay. the tradesman parts with the goods, supposing that he will receive the equivalent; the customer carries them off, knowing that this equivalent is not, and is not likely to be, forthcoming. i confess that i am entirely unable to distinguish this case from that of ordinary theft. and still there is many a man, well received in society, who habitually acts in this manner, and whose practice must be more than suspected by his friends and associates. he and his friends would be much astonished if he were accosted as a thief, and still i cannot see how he could reasonably repudiate this title. short of this extreme case, which, however, is by no means uncommon, there are many degrees of what may be called criminal negligence or imprudence in contracting debts, as where a man runs up a large bill with only a slender probability of meeting it, or a larger bill than he can probably meet in full, or one of which he must defer the payment beyond a reasonable time. in all these cases, which are much aggravated, if the goods obtained are luxuries and not necessaries (for it is one of the plainest duties of every man, who is removed from absolute want, to live within his means), there is either actual dishonesty or a dangerous approximation to it, and it would be a great advance in every-day morality if society were to recognise this fact distinctly, and apportion its censures accordingly. where the tradesman knows that he is running a risk, the customer being also aware that he knows it, and adapts his charges to the fact, it is a case of 'greek meet greek,' and, even if the customer deserves reprobation, the tradesman certainly deserves no compassion. but this is a case outside the range of honest dealing altogether, and must be regulated by other sentiments and other laws than those which prevail in ordinary commerce. there is another well-known, and to many men only too familiar, exception to the ordinary relation of debtor and creditor. a friend 'borrows' money of you, though it is understood on both sides that he will have no opportunity of repaying it, and that it is virtually a gift. here, as the creditor does not expect any repayment, and the debtor knows that he does not, there is no act of dishonesty, but the debtor, by asking for a loan and not a gift, evades the obligation of gratitude and reciprocal service which would attach to the latter, and thus takes a certain advantage of his benefactor. in this case it would be far more straightforward, even if it involved some humiliation, to use plain words, and to accept at once the true position of a recipient, and not affect the seeming one of a borrower. connected with the subject of debtor and creditor is the ungrounded notion, to which i have already adverted, that the payment of what are called debts of honour ought to take precedence of all other pecuniary obligations. as these 'debts of honour' generally arise from bets or play or loans contracted with friends, the position assumed is simply that debts incurred to members of our own class or persons whom we know place us under a greater obligation than debts incurred to strangers or persons belonging to a lower grade in society. as thus stated, the maxim is evidently preposterous and indefensible, and affords a good instance, as i have noticed in a previous chapter, of the subordination of the laws of general morality to the convenience and prejudices of particular cliques and classes. if there is any competition at all admissible between just debts, surely those which have been incurred in return for commodities supplied have a stronger claim than those, arising from play or bets, which represent no sacrifice on the part of the creditor. another instance of the class of cases which i am now considering is to be found in reckless gambling. men who indulge in this practice are usually condemned as being simply hare-brained or foolish; but, if we look a little below the surface, we shall find that their conduct is often highly criminal. many a time a man risks on play or a bet or a horse-race or a transaction on the stock exchange the permanent welfare, sometimes even the very subsistence, of his wife and children or others depending on him; or, if he loses, he cuts short a career of future usefulness, or he renders himself unable to develope, or perhaps even to retain, his business or his estates, and so involves his tenants, or clerks, or workmen in his ruin, or, perhaps, he becomes bankrupt and is thus the cause of wide-spread misery amongst his creditors. and, even if these extreme results do not follow, his rash conduct may be the cause of much minor suffering amongst his relatives or tradesmen or dependents, who may have to forego many legitimate enjoyments in consequence of his one act of greed or thoughtlessness, while, in all cases, he is encouraging by his example a practice which, if not his own ruin, is certain to be the ruin of others. the light-heartedness with which many a man risks his whole fortune, and the welfare of all who are dependent on him, for what would, if gained, be no great addition to his happiness, is a striking example of the frequent blindness of men to all results except those which are removed but one step from their actions. a gamester, however sanguine, sees that he may lose his money, but he does not see all the ill consequences to himself and others which the loss of his money will involve. hence an act, which, if we look to the intention, is often only thoughtless, becomes, in result, criminal, and it is of the utmost importance that society, by its reprobation, should make men realise what the true nature of such actions is. i pass now to a case of a different character, which has only, within recent years, begun to attract the attention of the moralist and politician at all--the peril to life and health ensuing on the neglect of sanitary precautions. a man carelessly neglects his drains, or allows a mass of filth to accumulate in his yard, or uses well-water without testing its qualities or ascertaining its surroundings. after a time a fever breaks out in his household, and, perhaps, communicates itself to his neighbours, the result being several deaths and much sickness and suffering. these deaths and this suffering are the direct result of his negligence, and, though it would, doubtless, be hard and unjust to call him a murderer, he is this in effect. of course, if, notwithstanding warning or reflexion, he persists in his negligence, with a full consciousness of the results which may possibly ensue from it, he incurs a grave moral responsibility, and it is difficult to conceive a case more fit for censure, or even punishment. nor are the members of a corporation or a board, in the administration of an area of which they have undertaken the charge, less guilty, under these circumstances, than is a private individual in the management of his own premises. if men were properly instructed in the results of their actions or pretermissions, in matters of this nature, and made fully conscious of the responsibility which those results entail upon them, there would soon be a marked decrease in physical suffering, disease, and premature deaths. the average duration of life, in civilized countries, has probably already been lengthened by the increased knowledge and the increased sense of responsibility which have even now been attained. closely connected with these considerations on the diminution of death, disease, and suffering by improved sanitary arrangements, is the delicate subject of the propagation of hereditary disease. it is a commonplace that the most important of all the acts of life, is that on which men and women venture most thoughtlessly. but experience shews, unmistakably, that there are many forms of disease, both mental and bodily, which are transmitted from the parents to the children, and that, consequently, the marriage of a diseased parent, or of a parent with a tendency to disease, will probably be followed by the existence of diseased children. in a matter of this kind, everything, of course, depends on the amount of the risk incurred, that is to say, on the extent of the evil and the probability of its transmission. the former of these data is supplied by common observation, the latter by the researches of the pathologist. it is for the moralist simply to draw attention to the subject, and to insist on the responsibility attaching to a knowledge of it. the marriages of persons who are very poor, and have no reasonable prospect of bringing up children in health, decency, and comfort, are open to similar considerations but, as in the last case, i must content myself with simply adverting to the responsibility attaching to them, and noting the extent to which that responsibility is usually ignored. in connexion with this question, it may be added that many of the attempts made by well-meaning people to alleviate poverty and distress have, unfortunately, too often the effect of ultimately aggravating those evils by diverting attention from their real causes. a not unnatural reluctance to discuss or reflect on matters of this delicate character, combined with the survival of maxims and sentiments derived from an entirely different condition of society, are, doubtless, to a great extent, the reasons of the backward condition of morality on this subject. the importance, from a social point of view, of the careful education of children with reference to their future position in life has already been considered, but, in connexion with the class of duties i am now treating, i may draw attention to the obligation under which parents lie, in this respect, to their children themselves. the ancient morality, which was the product of the patriarchal form of society, when the _patria potestas_ was still in vigour, laid peculiar stress on the duties of children to parents, while it almost ignored the reciprocal duties of parents to children. when the members of a family were seldom separated, and the pressure of population had not yet begun to be felt, this was the natural order of ideas with respect to the parental relation. but now that the common labour of the household is replaced by competition amongst individuals, and most young men and women have, at an early age, to leave their families and set about earning their own living, or carving out their own career, it is obvious, on reflexion, that parents are guilty of a gross breach of duty, if they do not use their utmost endeavours to facilitate the introduction of their children to the active work of life, and to fit them for the circumstances in which they are likely to be placed. to bring up a son or daughter in idleness or ignorance ought to be as great a reproach to a parent as it is to a child to dishonour its father or mother. and yet, in the upper and middle classes at all events, there are many parents who, without incurring much reprobation from their friends, prefer to treat their children like playthings or pet animals rather than to take the pains to train them with a view to their future trials and duties. it ought to be thoroughly realised, and, as the moral consciousness becomes better adapted to the existing circumstances of society, it is to be trusted that it will be realised, that parents have no moral right to do what they choose with their children, but that they are under a strict obligation both to society and to their children themselves so to mould their dispositions and develope their faculties and inform their minds and train their bodies as to render them good and useful citizens, and honest and skilful men. it is to be hoped that, some day, people will regard with as much surprise the notion that parents have a right to neglect the education of their children as we now regard with wonder, when we first hear of it; the maxim of archaic law, that a parent had a right to put his child to death. much of the trouble, vexation, and misery of which men are the cause to themselves is due to cowardice, or the false shame which results from attaching undue importance to custom, fashion, or the opinion of others, even when that opinion is not confirmed by their own reflexion. shame is an invaluable protection to men, as a restraining feeling. but the objects to which it properly attaches are wrong-doing, unkindness, discourtesy, to others, and, as regards ourselves, ignorance, imprudence, intemperance, impurity, and avoidable defects or misfortunes. while it confines itself to objects such as these, it is one of the sternest and, at the same time, most effective guardians of virtue and self-respect. but, as soon as a man begins to care about what others will say of circumstances not under his own control, such as his race, his origin, his appearance, his physical defects, or his lack of wealth or natural talents, he may be laying up for himself a store of incalculable misery, and is certainly enfeebling his character and impairing his chances of future usefulness. it is under the influence of this motive, for instance, that many a man lives above his income, not for the purpose of gratifying any real wants either of himself or his family, but for the sake of 'keeping up appearances,' though he is exposing his creditors to considerable losses, his family to many probable disadvantages, and himself to almost certain disgrace in the future. it is under the influence of this motive, too, that many men, in the upper and middle classes, rather than marry on a modest income, and drop out of the society of their fashionable acquaintance, form irregular sexual connexions, which are a source of injury to themselves and ruin to their victims. a circumstance which has probably contributed largely, in recent times, to aggravate the feeling of false shame is the new departure which, in commercial communities, has been taken by class-distinctions. the old line, which formed a sharp separation between the nobility and all other classes, has been almost effaced, and in its place have been substituted many shades of difference between different grades of society, together with a broad line of demarcation between what may be called the genteel and the ungenteel classes. it was a certain advantage of the old line that it could not be passed, and, hence, though there might be some jealousy felt towards the nobility as a class, there were none of the heart-burnings which attach to an uncertain position or a futile effort to rise. in modern society, on the other hand, there is hardly any one whose position is so fixed, that he may not easily rise above or fall below it, and hence there is constant room for social ambition, social disappointment, and social jealousy. again, the broad line of gentility, which now corresponds most closely with the old distinction of nobility, is determined by such a number of considerations,--birth, connexions, means, manners, education, with the arbitrary, though almost essential, condition of not being engaged in retail trade,--that those who are just excluded by it are apt to feel their position somewhat unintelligible, and, therefore, all the more galling to their pride and self-respect it would be curious to ascertain what proportion of the minor inconveniences and vexations of modern life is due to the perplexity, on the one side, and the soreness, on the other, created by the exclusiveness of class-distinctions. that these distinctions are an evil, in themselves, there can, i think, be no doubt. men cannot, of course, all know one another, much less be on terms of intimacy with one another, and the degree of their acquaintance or intimacy will always be largely dependent on community of tastes, interests, occupations, and early associations. but these facts afford no reason why one set of men should look down with superciliousness and disdain on another set of men who have not enjoyed the same early advantages or are not at present endowed with the same gifts or accomplishments as themselves, or why they should hold aloof from them when there is any opportunity of common action or social intercourse. the pride of class is eminently unreasonable, and, in those who profess to believe in christianity, pre-eminently inconsistent. it will always, probably, continue to exist, but we may hope that it will be progressively modified by the advance of education, by the spread of social sympathy, and by a growing habit of reflexion. the ideal social condition would be one in which, though men continued to form themselves into groups, no one thought the worse or the more lightly of another, because he belonged to a different group from himself. connected with exaggerated class-feeling are abuses of-esprit de corps_. unlike class-feeling, _esprit de corps_ is, in itself, a good. it binds men together, as in a vessel or a regiment, a school or a college, an institution or a municipality, and leads them to sacrifice their ease or their selfish aims, and to act loyally and cordially with one another in view of the common interest. it is only when it sacrifices to the interests of its own body wider interests still, and subordinates patriotism or morality to the narrower sentiment attaching to a special law of honour, that it incurs the reprobation of the moralist. but that it does sometimes deservedly incur this reprobation, admits of no question. a man, to save the honour of his regiment, may impair the efficiency of an army, or, to promote the interests of his college or school, may inflict a lasting injury on education, or, to protect his associates, may withhold or pervert evidence, or, to aggrandize his trade, may ruin his country. it is the special province of the moralist, in these cases, to intervene, and point out how the more general is being sacrificed to the more special interest, the wider to the narrower sentiment, morality itself to a point of honour or etiquette. but, at the same time, he must recollect that the _esprit de corps_ of any small aggregate of men is, as such, always an ennobling and inspiriting sentiment, and that, unless it plainly detach them from the rest of the community, and is attended with pernicious consequences to society at large, it is unwise, if not reckless, to seek to impair it. to descend to a subject of less, though still of considerable, importance, i may notice that cowardice and fear of 'what people will say' lies at the bottom of much ill-considered charity and of that facility with which men, often to the injury of themselves or their families, if not of the very objects pleaded for, listen to the solicitations of the inconsiderate or interested subscription-monger. it has now become a truism that enormous mischief is done by the indiscriminate distribution of alms to beggars or paupers. it is no less true, though not so obvious, that much unintentional harm is often done by subscriptions for what are called public objects. people ought to have sufficient mental independence to ask themselves what will be the ultimate effects of subscribing their money, and, if they honestly believe that those effects will be pernicious or of doubtful utility, they ought to have the courage to refuse it. there is no good reason, simply because a man asks me and i find that others are yielding to him, why i should subscribe a guinea towards disfiguring a church, or erecting an ugly and useless building, or extending pauperism, or encouraging the growth of luxurious habits, or spreading opinions which i do not believe. and i may be the more emboldened in my refusal, when i consider how mixed, or how selfish, are often the motives of those who solicit me, and that the love of notoriety, or the gratification of a feeling of self-importance, or a fussy restlessness, or the craving for preferment is frequently quite as powerful an incentive of their activity as a desire to promote the objects explicitly avowed. there is, moreover, an important consideration, connected with this subject, which often escapes notice, namely, the extent to which new and multiplied appeals to charity often interfere with older, nearer, and more pressing claims. thus, the managers of the local hospital or dispensary or charity organisation have often too good cause to regret the enthusiastic philanthropy, which is sending help, of questionable utility, to distant parts of the world. people cannot subscribe to everything, and they are too apt to fall in with the most recent and most fashionable movement. in venturing on these remarks, i trust it is needless to say that i am far from deprecating the general practice of subscribing to charities and public objects, a form of co-operation which has been rendered indispensable by the habits and circumstances of modern life. i am simply insisting on the importance and responsibility of ascertaining whether the aims proposed are likely to be productive of good or evil, and deprecating the cowardice or listlessness which yields to a solicitation, irrespectively of the merits of the proposal. these solicitations often take the offensive form, which is intentionally embarrassing to the person solicited, of an appeal to relieve the purveyor of the subscription-list himself from the obligation incurred by a 'guarantee.' the issue is thus ingeniously and unfairly transferred from the claims of the object, which it is designed to promote, to the question of relieving a friend or a neighbour from a heavy pecuniary obligation. 'surely you will never allow me to pay all this money myself.' but why not, unless i approve of the object, and, even if i do, why should i increase my subscription, on account of an obligation voluntarily incurred by you, without any encouragement from me? in a case of this kind, the 'guarantee' ought to be regarded as simply irrelevant, and the question decided solely on the merits of the result to be attained. of course, i must be understood to be speaking here only of those cases in which the 'guarantee' is used as an additional argument for eliciting subscriptions, not of those cases in which, for convenience sake, or in order to secure celerity of execution, a few wealthy persons generously advance the whole sum required for a project, being quite willing to pay it themselves, unless they meet with ready and cheerful co-operation. in the department of social intercourse, there are several applications of existing moral principles, and specially of the softer virtues of kindness, courtesy, and consideration for others, the observance of which would sensibly sweeten our relations to our fellow-men and, to persons of a sensitive temperament, render life far more agreeable and better worth living than it actually is. a few of these applications i shall attempt to point out. amongst savage races, and in the less polished ranks of civilized life, men who disagree, or have any grudge against one another, resort to physical blows or coarse invective. in polite and educated circles, these weapons are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo. there are, of course, many advantages gained by the substitution of this more refined mode of warfare, but the mere fact that the intellectual skill which it displays gives pleasure to the bystanders, and wins social applause, renders its employment far more frequent than, on cool reflexion, could be justified by the occasions for it. there can be no doubt that it gives pain, often intense pain, especially where the victim is not ready enough to retaliate effectively in kind. and there can be no more justification for inflicting this peculiar kind of pain than any other, unless the circumstances are such as to demand it. any one, who will take the trouble to analyse his acts and motives, will generally find, when he employs these weapons, that he is actuated not so much by any desire to reform the object of his attack or to deter, by these means, him or others from wrong-doing, as by a desire to show off his own cleverness and to leave behind him a mark of his power in the smart which he inflicts. these unamiable motives are least justifiable, when the victim is a social inferior, or a person who, by his age or position, is unable to retaliate on equal terms. to vanity and cruelty are then added cowardice, and, though all these vices may only be displayed on a very small scale, they are none the less really present. it may be laid down, however difficult, with our present social habits, it may be to keep the rule, that sarcasm should never be employed, except deliberately, and as a punishment, and that for innuendo, if justifiable by facts, men should always have the courage to substitute direct assertion. of the minor social vices, one of the commonest is a disregard, in conversation, of other persons' feelings. men who lay claim to the character of gentlemen are specially bound to shew their tact and delicacy of feeling by avoiding all subjects which have a disagreeable personal reference or are likely to revive unpleasant associations in the minds of any of those who are present. and yet these are qualities which are often strangely conspicuous by their absence even in educated and cultivated society. one of the most repulsive and least excusable forms which this indifference to other persons' feelings takes is in impertinent curiosity. there are some people who, for the sake of satisfying a purposeless curiosity, will ask questions which they know it cannot be agreeable to answer. in all cases, curiosity of this kind is evidence of want of real refinement, and is a breach of the finer rules of social morality; but, when the questions asked are intended to extract, directly or indirectly, unwilling information on a man's private life or circumstances, they assume the character of sheer vulgarity. a man's private affairs, providing his conduct of them does not injuriously affect society, are no one's business but his own, and much pain and vexation of the smaller kind would be saved, if this very plain fact were duly recognised in social intercourse. it may be noticed in passing, that there still lingers on in society a minor form of persecution, a sort of inquisition on a small scale, which consists in attempting to extract from a man a frank statement of his religious, social, or political opinions, though it is known or suspected all the time, that, if he responds to the invitation, it will be to his social or material disadvantage. in cases of this kind, it becomes a casuistical question how far a man is called on to disclose his real sentiments at the bidding of any impertinent questioner. that the free expression of opinion should be attended with this danger is, of course, a proof how far removed we still are from perfect intellectual toleration. impertinent curiosity is offensive, not only because it shews an indifference to the feelings of the person questioned, but because it savours of gratuitous interference in his affairs. this quality it shares with another of the minor social vices, the tendering of unasked for advice, or, in brief, impertinent advice. there are certain circumstances and relations in which men have the right, even if they are not under the obligation, to give unsolicited advice, as where a man is incurring an unknown danger or foregoing some unsuspected advantage, or to their servants, or children, or wards, or pupils; but, in all these cases, either the special circumstance or the special relation implies superiority of knowledge or superiority of position on the part of the person tendering the advice, and to assume this superiority, where it does not plainly exist, is an act of impertinence. just as the assumption of superiority wounds a man's self-respect, so does the disposition to meddle in his affairs, which is generally founded on that assumption, affect his sense of independence, and, hence, an act which includes both grounds of offence seems to be a peculiarly legitimate object of resentment. the lesson of letting other people alone is one which men are slow to learn, though there are few who, in their own case, do not resent any attack on their liberty of judgment or action. this is emphatically one of the cases in which we should try to put ourselves in the place of others, and act to them as we would that they should act towards us. excessive, and often ill-natured, criticism of others is one of the minor vices which seem to grow up with advancing civilisation and intelligence rather than to retreat before them. it seems, as a rule, to prevail much more in educated than in uneducated society. the reason is not difficult to find. education naturally makes men more fastidious and more keenly alive to the defects of those with whom they associate. and then, when educated men converse together, they are apt, merely from the facility with which they deal with language, to express in an exaggerated form the unfavourable estimate which they have formed of others, especially if this exaggerated form can be compressed into an epigram. but it requires little reflexion to see that this keen and exaggerated habit of criticism must be productive of much discomfort in a society in which it is general, and that, when applied to literary work, even though it may be a protection against inaccuracy and breaches of taste, it must be a great discouragement to the young and repressive of much honest and valuable effort. to restrain the critical spirit, whether applied to mind or conduct, with proper limits, it is necessary, keeping these considerations in view, to ask how much we can reasonably or profitably require of men, and, above all, never to lose that sympathetic touch with others which renders us as keenly alive to their difficulties as their errors, to their aspirations as their failure to fulfil them. i shall say nothing here of detraction, backbiting, or malicious representation, because these are social vices which are too obvious and too generally acknowledged to be of any service as illustrations of those extensions or new applications of morality which i have in view in the present chapter. i may, however, notice in passing, that the invention or exaggeration of stories, which have a tendency to bring men into ridicule or contempt, is a practice which, from the entertainment it affords, is too easily tolerated by society, and usually fails to meet with the reprobation it deserves. i shall advert to only one other topic, namely, the treatment of the lower animals. with rare exceptions, it is only of late that this subject has been regarded as falling within the sphere of ethics, and it is greatly to the credit of bentham that he was amongst the first to recognise its importance and to commend it to the consideration of the legislator. that the lower animals, as sentient beings, have a claim on our sympathies, and that, consequently, we have duties in respect of them, i can no more doubt than that we have duties in respect to the inferior members of our own race. but, at the same time, considering their place in the economy of nature, i cannot doubt that man has a right, within certain limits, to use them, and even to kill them, for his own advantage. what these limits are is a question by no means devoid of difficulty. there are those who maintain that we have no right to kill animals for food, while there are those who, without maintaining this extreme position, hold that we have no right to cause them pain for the purposes of our own amusement, or even for the alleviation of human suffering by means of the advancement of physiological and medical science. it will be seen that the three questions here raised are the legitimacy of the use of animal food, of field sports, and of vivisection. as respects the first, i do not doubt that, considering their relative places in the scale of being, man is morally justified in sacrificing the lives of the lower animals to the maintenance of his own health and vigour, let alone the probability that, if he did not, they would multiply to such an extent as to endanger his existence, and would themselves, in the aggregate, experience more suffering from the privation caused by the struggle for life than they now do by incurring violent deaths. at the same time, though man may kill the lower animals for his own convenience, he is bound not to inflict needless suffering on them. the torture of an animal, for no adequate purpose, is absolutely indefensible. cock-fights, bull-fights, and the like seem to me to admit of no more justification than the gladiatorial shows. are field-sports, then, in the same category? the answer, i think, depends on three considerations: ( ) would the animal be killed any way, either for food, or as a beast of prey; ( ) what is the amount of suffering inflicted on it, in addition to that which would be inflicted by killing it instantaneously; ( ) for what purpose is this additional suffering inflicted. i shall not attempt to apply these considerations in detail, but i shall simply state as my opinion that, amongst the results of a legitimate application of them, would be the conclusions that worrying a dog or a cat is altogether unjustifiable; that fox-hunting might be justified on the ground that the additional suffering caused to the fox is far more than counterbalanced by the beneficial effects, in health and enjoyment, to the hunter; that shooting, if the sportsman be skilful, is one of the most painless ways of putting a bird or a stag to death, and, therefore, requires no justification, whereas, if the sportsman be unskilful, the sufferings which he is liable to cause, through a lingering and painful death, ought to deter him from practising his art. with regard to the much-debated question of vivisection, it seems to me utterly untenable, and eminently inconsistent on the part of those who eat animal food or indulge in field-sports, to maintain that, under no circumstances, is it morally justifiable to inflict pain on the lower animals for the purpose of ascertaining the causes or remedies of disease. but, having once made this admission, i should insist on the necessity of guarding it by confining the power of operating on the living animal to persons duly authorised, and by limiting it to cases of research as distinct from demonstration. those, moreover, who are invested with this serious responsibility, ought to feel morally bound to inflict no superfluous suffering, and ought, consequently, to employ anaesthetics, wherever they would not unduly interfere with the conduct of the experiment; to resort, as far as possible, to the lower rather than the higher organisms, as being less susceptible of pain; and to limit their experiments, both in number and duration, as far as is consistent with the objects for which they are permitted to perform them. this whole question, however, of our relation to the lower animals is one which is fraught with much difficulty, and supplies a good instance of the range of subjects within which the moral sentiment is probably in the course of development. recent researches, and, still more, recent speculations, have tended to impress us with the nearness of our kinship to other animals, and, hence, our sympathies with them and our interest in their welfare have been sensibly quickened. the word philanthropy no longer expresses the most general of the sympathetic feelings, and we seem to require some new term which shall denote our fellow-feeling with the whole sentient creation. such is a sample, and i must repeat that it is intended only as a sample, of the class of questions to which, as it seems to me, the moral test still admits of further application. morality, or the science and art of conduct, had its small beginnings, i conceive, in the primeval household and has only attained its present grand proportions by gradual increments, derived partly from the semi-conscious operations of the human intelligence adapting itself to the circumstances in which it is placed, partly from the conscious meditations of reflective men. that it is likely to advance in the future, as it has done in the past, notwithstanding the many hindrances to its progress which confessedly exist, is, i think, an obvious inference from experience. we may not unreasonably hope that there will be a stricter sense of justice, a more complete realisation of duty, more delicacy of feeling, a greater refinement of manners, more kindliness, quicker and wider sympathies in the coming generations than there are amongst ourselves. i have attempted, in this essay, briefly to delineate the nature of the feelings on which this progress depends, and of the considerations by which it is guided, as well as to indicate some few out of the many directions which it is likely to take in the future. in the former part of my task, i am aware that i have run counter to many prejudices of long standing, and that the theories which i consider to be alone consistent with the fact of the progress of morality, may by some be thought to impair its authority. but if morality has its foundations in the constitution of human nature, which itself proceeds from the divine source of all things, i conceive that its credentials are sufficiently assured. in the present chapter, i have, in attempting to illustrate the possibility of future improvements in the art and theory of conduct, been necessarily led to note some deficiencies in the existing moral sentiment. this is always an unwelcome and invidious task. men do not like to be reminded of their moral failings, and there is hardly any man, however critical he may be of others, who, in the actual conduct of life, does not appear to delude himself with the idea that his own moral practice is perfect. i appeal, however, from the unconscious assumptions of men to their powers of reflexion, and i ask each man who reads this book to consider carefully within himself whether, on the principles here set out, much of the conduct and many of the ethical maxims which are now generally accepted do not admit of refinement and improvement. in the sphere of morals, as in all other departments of human activity, we are bound to do for our successors what our predecessors were bound to do, and mostly did, for us--transmit the heritage we have received with all the additions and adaptations which the new experiences and changing conditions of life have rendered necessary or desirable. morals and the evolution of man morals and the evolution of man by max nordau a translation of "biologie der ethik" by marie a. lewenz, m.a. fellow of university college, london cassell and company, ltd london, new york, toronto and melbourne to my dear wife anna (née dons), the sunshine of my life in happy days, my brave comrade in the storms of the world-catastrophe, with love and gratitude i dedicate this book which helped both her and me to endure the dark years when we were homeless wanderers. madrid, _september th, _ contents chapter page . the phenomenon of morality . the immanence of the concept of morality . the biological aspect of morality . morality and law . individual morality and collective immorality . freedom and responsibility . morality and progress . the sanctions of morality morals and the evolution of man chapter i the phenomenon of morality a very well-known experiment in animal psychology was once made by möbius. an aquarium was divided into two compartments by means of a pane of glass; in one of these a pike was put and in the other a tench. hardly had the former caught sight of his prey, when he rushed to the attack without noticing the transparent partition. he crashed with extreme violence again the obstacle and was hurled back stunned, with a badly battered nose. no sooner had he recovered from the blow than he again made an onslaught upon his neighbour--with the same result. he repeated his efforts a few times more, but succeeded only in badly hurting his head and mouth. at last a dim idea dawned upon his dull mind that some unknown and invisible power was protecting the tench, and that any attempt to devour it would be in vain; consequently from that moment he ceased from all further endeavours to molest his prey. thereupon the pane of glass was removed from the tank, and pike and tench swam around together; the former took no notice whatever of his defenceless neighbour, who had become sacred to him. in the first instance the pike had not perceived the glass partition against which he had dashed his head; now he did not see that it had been taken away. all he knew was this: he must not attack this tench, otherwise he would fare badly. the pane of glass, though no longer actually there, surrounded the tench as with a coat of mail which effectually warded off the murderous attacks of the pike. the fact so often observed, that man in many cases does that which he passionately desires to leave undone, and refrains from doing that which all his instincts urge him to do--this phenomenon of morality is a generalization upon a huge scale of the above experiment on animals with the pane of glass in a tank. jean jacques rousseau thought out a theoretical human being who was by nature good. such a human being does not exist and has never existed. from sheer annoyance at the provoking obliquity of vision which led the enthusiast of geneva to develop such a theory, one is sorely tempted to go to the opposite extreme and declare that man is by nature fundamentally bad; but such an assertion is just as naïve as rousseau's contention. good and bad are values which we can only learn to appreciate when we have felt the effect of the phenomenon of morality. the concepts of good and evil are of much later origin than mankind, and can therefore no more constitute a fundamental characteristic of man's original nature than, for instance, the cut and colour of his clothes; though it is open to wiseacres to maintain that man's nature to some extent actually finds expression in the cut and colour of his clothes--that is, in his choice of them. anyone contemplating primitive man, man as he emerges from the hands of nature, stripped of all the additions which he has acquired in the course of his historical development, is bound to admit that man is neither good nor bad; he is a living being acting according to the instincts implanted in his nature; just like the pike. but in most contingencies he does not obey these instincts, and if he reflects upon himself and his actions, he is astounded at realizing this, and asks: "why do i refrain from revelling in the gratification of my desires?" innumerable times every day of his life he would like to break many or all of the ten commandments; but he abstains from so doing, and, what is more, mostly without effort, without having painfully to suppress his desire. what prevents him from yielding to his impulses? an invisible power which lays its commands upon him: "thou shalt not!" "thou shalt!" often his aims and inclinations come into violent collision with this order, or this prohibition, and are hurled back by the painful impact. man hears the threatening, imperious voice, but cannot see whence it comes. accustomed to reason by analogy, he concludes that it is, like thunder, a voice of nature. when the pike has sufficiently injured his nose against the pane of glass, he assumes as an actual fact that an insuperable barrier separates him from the tench, and, moreover, that it is both useless and painful to come into contact with this. he does not try to discover the nature of the obstacle, and gives up any further attempt upon his mysteriously protected prey. man, with a more highly developed intelligence than the pike, does not accept the phenomenon of morality with dull resignation. since he has become conscious of a mysterious barrier erected between his volitions and his actions, he has not ceased to reflect upon this barrier, to investigate it with a timid yet irresistible desire for knowledge, and to try and discover its nature. it redounds to man's credit that he has devoted so much time and energy to investigating the character and essence of morality. but the result of these investigations does not redound to his credit. with the exception of theology, there is no subject upon which so much has been written as upon ethics. yet whosoever plunges into this boundless sea of literature will emerge with feelings bordering upon horror and despair. here a free rein is given to all man's errors, to his habit of drawing false conclusions, to his faulty modes of thought. incapacity to interpret facts, association of ideas, elusive as a will-o'-the-wisp and uncurbed by any criticism, intemperate mysticism, arrogant dogmatism, shallow self-sufficiency--all these vie with one another in the presentment of theories which either are patently foolish, arbitrary or ill-founded, or else prove to be so when impartially examined. it is hard for the few reasonable thinkers who have taken part in this great investigation to make their voices heard amid the uproar raised by the solemn, unctuous, dictatorial or pedantic tomfools. and even the former are not entirely satisfactory, because they do not distinguish clearly enough between the form and the substance, the externals and the essence of morality, and because they do not discriminate with sufficient care between questions as to its nature, origin and aim, and its powers or sanctions--questions which must on no account be confounded. what is morality? obviously it is necessary to attempt a clear answer to this question before any useful purpose can be served by inquiring into the group of problems to which it gives rise: its aim, its laws, its origin, its method, its assumptions. the stoics answer this question as follows: "morality is living according to nature." furthermore, it is quite in accordance with the doctrine of the stoics that cicero says: "virtue, however, is nothing but nature developed to the highest possible degree of perfection" ("_ad summum perducta_"). moral therefore means natural; morality and nature are equivalent; they are one. really a simpler or more childlike explanation is hardly possible. the most superficial glance at human life and at our own soul teaches us that morality is contrary to nature, that it must struggle against nature to assert itself, that it means a victory over nature, in so far as we understand by nature in this special sense the most primitive reaction of man to simple and more complicated stimuli, the first tendency of impulse, the immediate, instinctive urge to act. further, the definition of the stoics ignores the aggregation of concepts which the synthetic conception, morality, involves; as if this were self-evident and required no definition. the stoics tacitly assume that morality and good are synonymous. cicero makes this assumption clearer by using the word virtue (_virtus_) instead of morality. but in all languages this word implies approbation and praise. it is an appreciation of worth (_werturteil_), to use the expression so appropriately coined by lotze. but the very fact that we recognize morality as being valuable is by no means a matter of course and it demands an explanation. certain actions could only be judged to be good if they were distinguished from others which did not suggest the same judgment, which were felt to be not good, to be bad or indifferent. we come to the question, what is good, what is bad? the stoics reply, "that which is good is natural." it is easy to call facts which please us natural, and such as displease us unnatural. in reality both series of facts are equally natural; because everything that happens is natural; because by definition nature is the synthesis of all phenomena; because nothing exists outside of nature, and within nature everything is a part of her and therefore is natural and can be nothing but natural. if we nevertheless wish to distinguish between natural and unnatural phenomena, if we call good, morality, and virtue natural, and compare them favourably with the unnatural, this only proves that we use the words natural and unnatural as synonyms for good and bad, and that we have a ready-made standard by which we measure the naturalness or unnaturalness (that is, the goodness or badness) of actions, and that there exists within ourselves the law by which we judge them to be good or bad. but how do we come by this law? how, of what material, and why do we fashion this standard? why do we approve of one thing as good and condemn another as bad? what qualities do the former and the latter possess, or what qualities do we ascribe to them? that is what we want to know when we inquire as to the significance of morality, and the definition of the stoics throws no light whatever upon the matter. according to aristotle morality is "the activity of practical reason, which is accompanied by pleasurable emotion." it is not worth while to dwell upon this definition. it is absolutely valueless. practical reason is not a definite concept; aristotle does not say anywhere what he understands by "practical" when he applies this attribute to reason; and to call every activity of practical reason accompanied by pleasurable emotion morality is mere eccentricity. to take only one example: if i have a house built, and accept the architect's plans because they please me greatly, my practical reason is most certainly active; the gratification induced by my reasonable choice of the plans is doubtless a pleasurable emotion; but assuredly no one will characterize as moral this activity of my practical reason which is accompanied by pleasurable emotion. it may be that aristotle was contemplating not a single action, but conduct in life as a whole. in that case he has expressed in an unfortunate, and much too loose a manner the thought that morality is reason plus pleasurable emotion. we shall frequently meet with and have to examine this idea, which omits to explain why pleasurable emotions attend certain activities of "practical reason," whatever that may be, and fail to be aroused by others. judaism, as embodied in its law-givers and prophets, teaches that morality consists in living and acting in accordance with the divine will. maimonides, who, however, was regarded by many of his contemporaries as a heretic, does not consider judaism a creed at all, but a code of morality. he maintains that anyone who repudiates the tenets of the jewish faith, even the most essential one, namely, the belief in a single god, must not be excluded from the jewish community as long as he conforms to its moral laws. this thinker, usually so accurate and nice in his reasoning, overlooks the fact that in this case he is contradicting himself in a manner wellnigh comic. according to him, too, morality consists in the endeavour to live and act in accordance with the divine will. how is such an endeavour possible for a man who does not believe in god and for whom consequently no divine will exists? therefore either morality must be something different from an approximation to the standard set up by the divine will, or else he who denies god cannot be moral. but i will leave the author of the "guide of those who have gone astray" to his self-contradiction, and only retain the jewish definition of morality as based upon the will of god. without any restriction christianity has taken over this definition from the mother-religion. in his zeal to claim that god alone is the source of all morality, st. augustine allows himself to be carried away to such an extent that he libels mankind most hatefully. just as for rousseau man is by nature good, for the bishop of hippo he is by nature fundamentally bad. left to his own devices he would always wallow in the mire of sin and vice, and would never even feel the wish to abandon his wickedness. it is god's mercy alone which rescues him from his depravity and sets his feet upon the path of righteousness, leading him to virtue, salvation and eternal bliss. thomas aquinas is no less definite on this point. the scriptures of judaism and christianity contain the eternal law which god has ordained for mankind. he points out the paths that man should follow. all morality springs from him alone. to this very day true believers adhere to this doctrine. morality did not originate on earth; the knowledge of it is a gift of grace from heaven to mankind. it is derived from god; it is that which god has willed; or else it does not need any special act of volition on the part of god, but is the essence of god himself. that is the teaching of paley, the classical moral philosopher. virtue consists in doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of god, and in order to attain eternal salvation. here stress is laid upon the fact that morality is active love for one's neighbour, and this is a concession on the part of the conciliatory englishman to the utilitarian ethics of his countrymen; but for him the necessary and sufficient reason for this love of one's neighbour is the will of god and the desire for eternal salvation. the german devotee, baader, blustering like a capuchin, preaches this twaddle: "any morality which is not rooted in divine law is the intellectual impiety of our time raised to its highest power; it is the perfection of atheism; for the idea of the absolute autonomy of man atheistically denies the father as law-giver; the theistic denial of the necessity for divine aid in fulfilling the law does away with the son or mediator, and finally the materialistic-pantheistic apotheosis of matter does away with the holy ghost with its sanctifying power." the frenchman jouffroy, though more careful and reticent in his manner, unmistakably expresses his conviction that "ethics, as well as the philosophy of law, inevitably and necessarily lead to theology." but this necessity only exists for minds whose desire for knowledge and truth is easily satisfied by words without a meaning that can be visualized, by fabulous statements accepted without proof, by fictions of the imagination, and by shallow juggling with the association of ideas. even those who do not approve all auguste comte's arguments will agree with him when he classifies the successive steps in the mental development of mankind as the theological, transcendental, and scientific modes of thought. when man's understanding is in its infancy he is content with a supernatural explanation of all phenomena which strike him as mysterious, disquiet him or rouse his curiosity. only i have never been able to understand why comte discriminates between the theological and the transcendental modes of thought, and assigns to the latter a higher place than the former. both are on a footing of absolute equality; both raise arbitrary fictions of the imagination to the position of sources of knowledge; both substitute anthropomorphic trivialities for the observation of phenomena and research into the conditions under which they occur and their relationship to one another. the only difference between them lies in the fact that transcendentalism expresses itself in choicer language than does theology, that it presents formulæ that are more complicated and pretentious, less transparent and honest--formulæ which the unpractised mind does not immediately recognize as mythological dogmas in a pseudo-scientific disguise. the relationship of theological to transcendental thought is much the same as that of superstition to religion. both of them are one and the same. religion is shamefaced superstition, whereas superstition has not yet learned to feel shame. religion is superstition in a dress-coat, and therefore fit for polite circles; superstition is religion in a cotton smock and therefore cannot be admitted to society. superstition is the religion of the poor and unassuming, religion is the superstition of fine folk who plume themselves on their formal and verbal scholarship. ever since man has risen above the level of the beasts, ever since the first faint glimmerings of thought began in the thick-walled, narrow and dark skull of a hunter of the neanderthal or cro magnon, he has ascribed everything unintelligible in life and in the world around him to divine actions and divine sources. how did the world come into existence? a god or gods created it. how does nature work? in accordance with the will of a god or gods, in obedience to divine commands, as a result of divine activities. what is life? a divine gift of grace. what is consciousness? an irradiation of the divinity. what is infinity, what eternity? attributes of the god. god is the name that from the beginning of time to the present day men have given to their ignorance. they find it easier to bear disguised by this pseudonym; they are even proud of it. with cunning self-deception they have endowed the word with the dignity pertaining to a title of the most awe-inspiring majesty, and they no longer feel ashamed of a poverty of mind which can boast of such a magnificent name. morality also is one of those phenomena which are not intelligible as a matter of course. the questions how, whence, why, and to what end morality exists, and what it is, cannot be solved at a glance; its life-history is not apparent to every observer, as is that of the domestic cat. but why cudgel one's brains? cheap explanations are ready to hand. this way mythology, you maid-of-all-work! morality has been ordained by god. a moral life is one in accordance with god's commandments. he who will not content himself with this answer is an infidel and does not deserve to have any notice taken of him. let us leave the paltry statements of theologians and note how men who investigate questions more thoroughly have dealt with morality. descartes defines morality as the sustained endeavour to do that which one has recognized to be right. it is difficult to discern in this definition the father of scientific scepticism. what are the distinguishing marks of right? is the decision as to what is right and what is wrong to be left to the subjective judgment of the individual? in that case descartes must concede that the action of a burglar is moral, if he has recognized that it is right for him to perpetrate his crime between two and three o'clock in the morning, that being the most favourable time for it, and then strives to the best of his ability to effect an entrance into the building he has selected, at the moment which he has recognized as the right one. or shall all mankind, or at least the majority, and not the individual, decide what is right? in that case the definition would certainly approximate to the one which i hold to be true; but for one thing it would suffer from vagueness; and, moreover, its originator would lay himself open to the reproach of not having shown why the individual is worthy of praise when he acts in accordance with the convictions of the majority, though these be opposed to his own, and in so doing allows his action to be determined by a judgment due to a psychic mechanism other than his. spinoza's "ethics" leaves the reader in great discomfort, the result of vacillating and contradictory explanations. obviously descartes' great disciple had no clear conception of the essence of morality and held either consecutively, or may be even simultaneously, divers views on the subject, amongst which those of all schools of thought are either quite clearly expressed or at least implied. "by good," he says, "i mean that which we know for certain to be useful to us."[ ] [ ] i quote the wording of berthold auerbach's translation: "b. de spinoza's collected works. translated from the latin by berthold auerbach." stuttgart, j. g. cotta, . second edition, vol. ii. and again: "to act absolutely virtuously is merely to act, live, preserve one's being (these three mean the same thing) in accordance with the dictates of reason, because one seeks one's own interest." according to that morality is synonymous with egoism, and its aim is man's individual profit or interest. even the most pronounced utilitarians among ethical theorists have not ventured to go to such lengths. true, they have contended that the aim of moral action is happiness, but at least they define it as the happiness of the whole community and not that of the individual, except in so far as he is a member of the community and has his fair share of its well-being. spinoza foresees the objection that the pursuit of one's own happiness cannot possibly deserve the universal esteem in which virtue is held, and he tries to adduce reasons whereby the egoism which he characterizes as moral may be justified and palliated: "everyone exists according to the supreme law of nature, and consequently everyone does, according to the supreme law of nature, that which results from the necessities of his own nature; and therefore every man forms his judgment as to what is good and bad according to the supreme law of nature, pursues his own interest according to his lights, seeks revenge, strives to preserve what he loves and to destroy what he hates." that is possibly the most audacious and at the same time the most ill-founded statement that has ever been written on the subject of morality. morality means behaviour calculated to further one's own interest. morality is therefore utility. but man cannot act otherwise than morally, since he always acts as he is compelled to do by his own nature. there is no sense in discriminating between good and bad, moral and immoral, since one always acts in accordance with the behests of nature. man automatically executes the dictates of nature which is alone responsible for his deeds. for the stoics, too, morality is action in accordance with the law of nature, but spinoza goes further than the stoics, in that he does away with any universally applicable standard of moral conduct, and sets up instead of nature pure and simple, which is the same for all, each man's individual nature as the authority which shall lay down rules of behaviour for him. so morality is something individual and subjective. man acts according to the requirements of his interest; his own nature shows him what his interest requires; no other person has any right or any qualification to form a judgment upon the worth of his conduct, to call it good or bad, for he cannot know what course of action the man's personal nature, peculiar to himself and to no other, may prescribe to him. this is the doctrine of anarchy and amorality put in a nutshell, a more wordy paraphrase of the _fais ce que vouldras_ (please yourself), the terse inscription that rabelais put over the entrance to his abbey of thélème, as the only law governing that abode of alluring wantonness. spinoza certainly does half-heartedly concede to reason the rôle which aristotle positively assigns to it ("to act in an absolutely virtuous manner is merely to act according to the guidance of reason," etc.), but it is impossible to see how reason can exercise guidance and control if "everyone does according to the supreme law of nature that which results from the necessities of his nature." this can surely only mean that everyone may yield to the unbridled desires of his natural instincts, which is the very reverse of self-control by reason. if nature is to rule despotically, there is obviously no place for a constitutional limitation of her sole power by the effective counsel and protests of reason. but spinoza renounces in a much more definite way his views recognizing the right of every individual "to form his judgment as to what is good and bad according to the supreme law of nature," for he calmly adds: "society can be founded, if it reserves to itself the right possessed by the individual to take revenge, and to pronounce a verdict on what is good and what is bad; thereby it acquires the power to prescribe rules of conduct for the community, to make laws, and to enforce them, not by means of reason, which cannot restrict passions, but by threats.... hence in a state of nature, sin cannot even be imagined." this concession to society most emphatically contradicts his first definition of morality. it does away with the right claimed for the individual "to do according to the supreme law of nature that which results from the necessities of his own nature," and by the same "supreme law of nature" to "judge what is good and what is bad." it subjects conduct to the restraint, not of nature, but of society. it bears witness to the admission that "reason cannot restrict passions," although spinoza has just required the virtuous man to "act according to the guidance of reason." spinoza admits that morality is not the consequence of a law inherent in the individual, but of an extraneous law forced upon him by society; that it is not an individual but a social phenomenon. in this he agrees with the conclusions of modern sociological thought, but his merit is much diminished by the fact that he skims lightly over the one great difficulty which sociological ethics is struggling to overcome. he says, society "reserves to itself the right ... to pronounce a verdict on what is good and what is bad, and thereby acquires the power to prescribe rules of conduct to the community," etc. it has the power right enough; police, judge, prison and gallows bear witness to that; but has it the right? that is not clear without further investigation. it requires to be proved. the amoralist can emphatically deny this, basing his conclusion on spinoza's own definition. he can legitimately declare that he need submit to no dictates of society, that he owes obedience only to his own nature and his own inner needs, and the moral philosopher can only prove to him that he is wrong by scornfully indicating the penal code and its stalwart minions. spinoza, we see, has already given a whole series of mutually destructive and contradictory definitions of morality: it is the law of life and conduct which society lays down for the individual, though we do not learn from him on what principles it is based; it is the pursuit of one's own interest as indicated by reason; it is obedience to necessity--that is to say, to the demands of one's own nature. all this does not suffice him. he discovers a new aspect of morality. "recognition of good and evil is nothing but a pleasurable or a disagreeable emotion in so far as we are conscious of it." and again, "pleasure is not actually bad (as the ascetics probably contend), but good; pain, on the contrary, is actually bad." in this case the ideas pleasure and pain are treated as equivalents of good and bad, as were useful and harmful in the former case. according to the axiom that things that are equal to the same thing must be equal to one another, pleasurable is synonymous not only with good, but also with beneficial, and in like manner painful with bad and harmful. brandy undoubtedly produces a sensation of pleasure in the drinker; is brandy, then, good in a moral sense? above all, is it beneficial? many such questions could be put to spinoza, but this one is enough. thus we discover spinoza to be at one and the same time a utilitarian and a hedonist, the champion of impulse and again of reason, an anarchistic individualist and a herald of the right of society to rule the individual. angry and disappointed, we turn from him, for instead of finding in him the definite standard we sought we have met with the shifting hues of the chameleon and the uncanny changes of form of proteus. the views of the english thinkers are clearer and more convincing although they, too, do not carry their investigations far enough. hobbes uses justice and injustice as synonyms for morality and immorality, and he definitely recognizes what spinoza only dimly guessed, namely, that these ideas could only arise in man when living as a member of society and not in a being dwelling alone. according to him, therefore, morality is a social and not an individual phenomenon; just as the moral philosophers of the theological school look upon it as the will of god, so he considers it to be the will of society. but he was under the obligation (non-existent for the theologian) to trace to its source this social will, to show how it is manifested, to explain why the individual not only submits to it, but values this submission far more highly than mere utility. man learns the will of god by revelation, and it is forbidden to inquire into its basis. to the will of society hobbes cannot possibly ascribe the same incontestable sanctity. it should not have escaped his notice that this will is neither uniform nor of assured stability, and that it often wavers and is sometimes self-contradictory. therefore, if he wants to call the will of society justice, as the theologians call the will of god morality, and if he wants to look upon justice and morality as equivalents, then it is his duty to explain how society can make claims which conflict with the principles on which the universal rules it has drawn up are based, and which, consequently, not being just or moral, are unjust and immoral, but which, nevertheless, must be acknowledged by the individual as being both just and moral, simply because they are social claims. in kant's moral philosophy we find the extremest form of mystic dogmatism; its success would be inexplicable did one not know how prone mankind is to be intimidated by brusque statements. kant's dictatorial pronouncements have become common-places. "act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." that is very impressive. but what is "the maxim" on which you act? this maxim is the moral law. now we yearn to know what this moral law is, whence it comes, and on what it is based. but our yearnings remains unsatisfied. the moral law is a secret. it is an incomprehensible power which rules our consciousness. ask no questions. be silent, submit and obey. even the theologian discussing moral philosophy will listen to reason. he gives us the information, sibylline though it be, that the moral law emanates from the will of god, and is shown to us in the revelations of religion. kant does not even give such meagre information. the moral law exists. that must suffice. "the starry heavens above thee, the moral law within thee." you retort that that is a metaphor which you may call poetical, if you like, but it is no explanation. you will get the following reply: this metaphor, rightly understood, indicates that the moral law is eternal, that it is part and parcel of uncreated nature like the stars, that it is a phenomenon of the same order as all the elements that go to make up the universe. "the moral law does not flow from antecedent ideas of good and evil; on the contrary, the moral law decides what is good and what is evil." it is not derived from human experience. the less so since "it cannot be proved by experience that it has at any place or any time become real." in other words, no one can testify that the "categorical imperative" has ever been realized, that the moral law has "at any place or any time" ceased to be a kantian theory productive of sacred thrills, that it has ever emerged from the unapproachable cell wherein it dwells in the temple of human consciousness, to take a place and play an active part among mortals. the lessee of all kant's wisdom, hermann cohen, with the clumsiness of an over-zealous assistant, has expressed his master's thought in a perfectly ludicrous form: "the moral law is to be conceived as a reality of such kind that it must exist, that its being must be" (note the elegance and euphony of the phrase "being must be"!) "even if no creature existed for whom it would be valid." true, the moral law is a maxim on which you should "act," a standard of human conduct, but it would still exist if there were no human beings and no action. it would come to exactly the same thing if hermann cohen said: the railway is to be conceived as a reality of such kind that it must exist if there were no human beings and consequently no travellers; even if there were no earth on the surface of which rails and sleepers could be laid. this is such palpable nonsense that it would be a work of supererogation to prove its absurdity. by this grotesque exaggeration hermann cohen has clearly brought to light the hollowness and weakness of kant's moral philosophy which culminates in the "categorical imperative." in spite of its arbitrary dogmatism, the formula of the "categorical imperative" has taken a hold on the imagination of the superficially educated, and has never ceased to be repeated with the fervour evinced by a devout man at prayer, by several generations of those who have made it their business to cultivate mental and moral science. in one of his early novels, "the island of dr. moreau," h. g. wells has described how an audacious scientist, by performing an operation on the brains of the most savage beasts of prey, such as panthers, wolves, etc., transformed them into creatures with the powers of thought and speech. he succeeds in suppressing, or at least in lulling for the time being, their bloodthirsty instincts, but he is always afraid that these may be roused again, and forbids the animals on which he experiments to touch blood or fresh meat. he takes good care to give no reason for this prohibition. he merely issues it sternly and threateningly. it is "the law," an unknown, inexplicable, but terrible power to which one must submit, because opposition would expose one to unimaginable, but terrible evils. if temptation assails the beasts they flee it, whispering fearfully and warningly to one another: "the law! the law!" wells is a trained philosopher, and often has his tongue in his cheek. i shrewdly suspect that when he writes of the mysterious "law" which fills dr. moreau's semi-humanized beasts of prey with superstitious terror, he is poking fun at kant's "categorical imperative." the great logical mistake in kant's moral philosophy is that he conceives morality as a social or collective phenomenon, and yet defines it as an individual one. according to kant, the categorical imperative exists within us. it is as immutable as the starry heavens above us. it gives us the criterion by which to discriminate between good and evil. its realm is our consciousness wherein it lives and rules; it is not introduced from outside, it springs from no power or conditions outside our person. all the same, the only law which this ultra subjective categorical imperative imposes on us is the most centrifugal that can possibly be imagined: "act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." hence our action is designed to produce an effect on the world around us. it is "to become a universal law" can, of course, only mean, it is to become a universal law of human society, for kant cannot possibly have aspired to make the categorical imperative impose laws upon the stars in their courses. our moral law, in so far as it applies to our actions, deals with society. when we formulate it in our minds, we associate it from its first inception with the notion of the society to which it is to be applied. it would have been logical to say: "your standard of conduct is to be what society recognizes as its universal law." but kant puts the cart before the horse and says on the contrary: "the maxims on which thy action is based are by thy will to become the universal law of society." other philosophers have avoided this mistake. hegel declares: "it is not until man becomes a member of a moral community that the ideas of duty and virtue attain a definite meaning and become direct representatives of a universal spirit in subjectivity, which knows that it is actuated in its aim by the universal and realizes that its dignity and its particular aims are founded upon it." if we translate this horribly hazy language of hegel's into plain speech we find it means: "the ideas of duty and virtue only acquire a meaning when they are applied to the acts of commission and omission of the individual member of a community." (when hegel speaks of "moral community" his use of the word "moral" is inadmissible, for he takes it for granted that the meaning of the word "moral" has been determined and is clearly understood, whereas he ought first to have defined its meaning.) the concepts of duty and virtue denote that the individual in taking action thinks of the community, that regard for its interests determines him, that his actions do not attain dignity and worth until his aim becomes the interests of the community, that these interests must coincide with those of the individual if his actions in his own interests are to merit the appellations of dutiful and virtuous. in short: to act morally is to act so as to ensure the well-being of the community. the real categorical imperative is a social conscience. feuerbach expresses this thought clearly and distinctly when he says: "there can be no question of morality in the strict sense of the word except where the subject of discussion is the relationship of man to man, of one person to another, of me to thee." recent contemporary french writers are in no way doubtful of the meaning implied by the concept of morality. "morality," says littré, "is the whole collection of rules which determine our conduct towards others. moral good is the ideal, which at any period of a civilization forms opinions and customs with respect to this conduct; moral evil is that which offends this ideal." this definition is very incomplete and weak, as will be seen in the course of our remarks, but on one point it is quite clear: it treats morality as a social phenomenon, it paraphrases it as the adjustment of individual action to the standard set up by the community. the question of the origin and the aim of this standard is left open. l. lévy-brühl formulates littré's idea more clearly. "we call by the name of morality the collection of such conceptions, opinions, feelings and customs respecting the mutual rights and duties of men in their life as members of a community, as are recognized and generally observed at a given time in a given civilization." thus, according to some, morality is subjection to an absolute law of divine, or at any rate of unexplained and inexplicable origin, which religion or a mysterious inner voice reveals to man; according to others, it is the recognition that the claims of the community, or at any rate of the majority of one's fellow men, are of binding force upon the actions of the individual. these different answers to an inquiry as to the origin of morality both contain the tacit admission that it is a law which peremptorily dictates to man what he shall do and what he shall not do. but by means of what psychic mechanism does this law enforce obedience in the consciousness of man? it is remarkable that all moral philosophers, no matter to what age, nation or school they belong, dimly feel or clearly recognize that in civilized man at any rate, natural instincts and judgment are always at war; that the latter opposes the former; that in the victory of judgment over impulse lies the very essence of morality; that consequently the essence of morality implies the control and repression of instinct by reason--in a word, that it is inhibition. we have seen that aristotle, in definite though unconscious opposition to the stoics, who consider morality synonymous with nature, defines it as the activity of reason. henry more was the first to express this quite clearly: "virtue is an intellectual force of the soul which enables it to control ... animal instincts and sensual passions." and dr. jodl sums up the character of christian morality in the statement: "moral philosophy under the influence of christian ideas makes morality always appear in the guise of a prohibition; at any rate it is apt to conceive morality as acting in an essentially restrictive and prohibitive manner upon the natural impulses and instincts of man." this is not quite correct. this christian code of morals does not always manifest itself as a prohibition. its main precept is: "love thy neighbour as thyself." that is not a prohibition but a positive command. nevertheless, the point of departure of this command is an inhibition. for the first instinctive movement of man is selfishness and, as its consequence, indifference to one's neighbour; the first imperious impulse is to sacrifice the latter's interests to one's own. but if regard for one's neighbour, nay, love for him permeates our feelings, thoughts and actions, that denotes a victory of christian ideas over the impulse of instinct, a suppression of that impulse--that is, an inhibition which, not content with mere prevention, prolongs its efficacy in the same direction until it changes the impulse of selfishness and inconsiderateness into its very antithesis, that of unselfishness and charity. it constitutes an important advance in knowledge to recognize that morality, and not, as jodl makes out, only christian morality, is manifested as an inhibition, as the victory achieved by reason over instinct which is contemptuously described as animal, simply because its worth is judged by a standard already supplied by current views on morals. it is inadmissible to judge by this standard when one attempts an impartial investigation into the ultimate foundations and the essence of morality. we have no plainly obvious right--no right which does not require a proof--simply to scorn instinct as animal; to run it down from the start and with a respectful bow to give reason precedence over it; to applaud with satisfaction the suppression of rascally instinct by highly respectable reason. instinct is no more animal than any other manifestation of life in man; and he indulges in pleasant self-deception if he imagines that he is other than an animal, that is, a living organism in which all processes take place according to the same laws as in all other living beings, from the simplest one-celled creature to the most highly developed and complicated. in itself instinct has the same claim to dignity as reason; according to some people an even greater one, because the former is more primitive, unpremeditated, self-assured and firmly established than the latter, and if reason claims to be the superior, it must substantiate that claim. as a matter of fact, that claim has never been universally acknowledged. periods during which reason rules at least in name and is treated with the obsequious reverence which the model citizen has, or feigns to have, for his sovereign, are followed by others in which instinct revolts; rebels dethrone reason and set up instinct in its place, or, as they call it, passion and nature. the parties which in turn wield power in these periodic revolutions may be briefly termed classical and romantic. the classicists are the legitimist supporters of reason; the romanticists are revolutionaries, and their leaders are men like cleon or jack cade, cromwell, washington or robespierre; that is to say, rude demagogues or subtle dialecticians in favour of instinct. among the legitimists in reason as in politics, are to be found those who maintain the divine right, who base the right of reason to rule over instinct upon the will of god, and others again, the constitutionalists, who base their support on the will of the people, on universal suffrage, who force upon instinct the law promulgated by society. i need not carry the metaphor to extremes. every reader can work it out in all its details. i only wanted to show quite clearly that almost all moral philosophers conceived morality as a struggle between reason and instinct, as the defeat of lawlessness by law. but their views diverge widely when they try to explain the source of this law and its claim to obedience. the theologians find no difficulty in this explanation. just as the essence of morality according to their ideas is the nearest possible approximation to divine perfection, so the moral law is one enacted by god himself, and it is a sin punishable with hell fire to fail to observe it or to rebel against it. others look upon man as his own law-giver, and trace his moral conduct, his willingness to combat his own instincts, to an inner voice which teaches him what is right. they call this inner voice by different names. they call it nature, reason or conscience, and look upon it as something innate, as a normal constituent of man's psychic nature. that is the meaning of fichte's apodictic statement: "that which does not meet with the approval of one's own conscience is necessarily sin. therefore he who acts on anyone else's authority acts in a conscienceless manner." with this emphatic utterance fichte dismisses both the devout believers, for whom morality is the revealed will of god, and the rationalists who look upon it as the dictate of society. he considers that if man claims to act morally, he can do so only on his own authority, i.e. on that of his conscience. he is not aware that in so doing he frivolously abandons all rights to pronounce an objective moral judgment on any human action. he thereby relinquishes the power to ask any further question except: "did he act in accordance with his own conscience? if so, then he has acted in a subjectively conscientious way, even if it appears to me to be immoral or even criminal and monstrous. if he has acted contrary to the promptings of his own conscience, then he is assuredly a sinner, even if his action be in my eyes splendid and exemplary." thus fichte, with his subjective basis of morality, is led to a conclusion which is a ludicrous reversal of generally accepted ideas. according to him, a man would be acting conscientiously if, despising what all others hold good, right and sacred, he wallows in the satisfaction of his selfish instincts, as long as his conscience approves or even bids him do so; on the other hand, he is a sinner if, in opposition to his inner voice, but according to moral law, that is in obedience to extraneous authority, he practices all the virtues. all these subjective moral philosophers tacitly assume with rousseau that man is by nature good. they take no account of the empirically established fact that there are men whose fichtean conscience, or whose kantian categorical imperative, urges them to a course of action which according to the general opinion is bad, wicked and revolting. this criticism applies to beneke, according to whom morality is "a development of human nature which exists as such within us, and which we need only continue or promote"; it applies equally to reid and dugald stewart, who describe it as an inclination, which has become a habit or a principle, to act according to the dictates of conscience. but conscience must be explained. it is by no means self-evident that each individual conscience will have the same standard of good and evil. the moral philosopher must not shirk the duty of showing how the conscience acquires its concepts of moral values, with what weapons it provides reason to combat instinct, which demands satisfaction without paying any attention to the warnings of conscience. the great majority of moral philosophers do not endorse the view of kant and fichte, that conscience is a piece of human nature, a sense inborn in man, an inner voice that is independent of, and unmoved by, external influences; on the contrary, they are convinced that conscience originates outside the individual, that, in his consciousness, it is the advocate retained by society, commissioned to plead the cause of the community before the reason of the individual even, nay, especially, when the interests of the community run counter to those of the individual. bacon calls the presence in our consciousness of a defender of the interests of society our innate social affection, and treats it unreservedly as the source of morality. long before his time the stoics had noted the existence of this social affection and called it [greek: oikeiôsis]; hugo grotius, with the intellectual perspicuity peculiar to himself, says that "right and morality flow from the same source, and this source is a strong social instinct natural to man, it is solicitude for the community, a solicitude guided by reason." the english philosophers are practically unanimous in ascribing both conscience and morality in general to a social source. the welfare of the community, says richard cumberland, is the highest moral law; hutcheson remarks that, in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence, the decisive factor in favour of the latter is the accompanying feeling, the reflective emotion of approval. in modern parlance we call "universal benevolence," altruism, and the "reflective emotion of approval" is a paraphrase of conscience which contains an indication of its mode of action. for the idea that our action will meet with the approval of the community and the pleasurable emotion of satisfaction are in fact the reasons why we mostly submit to the dictates of conscience voicing the commands of the community. only hutcheson is too venturesome and goes too far, when he maintains unreservedly that the reflective emotion of approval in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence is the decisive factor which turns the scales in favour of the latter. this is by no means always the case. when it does occur we call the action moral, but we characterize it as immoral when, in spite of the "reflective emotion of approval" "universal benevolence" is worsted by egoism. it is unnecessary to quote the opinions of other moral philosophers. it is enough to observe that most of them describe the moral law as a social agreement and make conscience its accredited representative. l. lévy-brühl repeats a doctrine current since the days of pythagoras when he says: "the sense of duty and that of responsibility, horror of crime, love of what is good and reverence for justice--all these, which a conscience sensitive to morality thinks it derives from itself and from itself alone, have nevertheless a social origin"; and feuerbach expresses the same view in an entertainingly melodramatic fashion when he calls the voice of conscience "an echo of the cry of revenge uttered by the injured party." this cry of revenge would never wake an echo in us if we did not possess a sounding board which cries of distress and lamentation cause to vibrate. schopenhauer, digging deeper than his predecessor, clearly recognizes this sounding board, and describes its characteristics when he says that the foundation of ethics is pity, which in its passive form warns us: "_neminem laede!_ do harm to no one!" and in its active form gives the order: "_imo omnes quantum potes juva!_ assist everyone with all your might!" the assumption, that sympathy with his neighbour must be present in man's consciousness before he is capable of moral action, is one that need not be made by subjective moral philosophers, who hold with kant and his school that the moral law is an inborn categorical imperative, which proclaims its commands without reference to any extraneous object, or to the world, or mankind. in the same way the theologians have no need of it, for they consider that what is morally good is the will of god. but he who holds with the moral philosophers of sociological tendencies that morality is regard for one's fellow men, and the recognition that the claims of the real or supposed interest of the community are superior to those of the comfort of the individual, must admit that sympathy is a necessary preliminary to moral action; i.e. that the individual must have the ability to picture the sufferings of others so vividly that he feels their sorrows as his own, and with all his might and all his will strives to prevent, alleviate and heal them. the lack of this ability, psychic anæsthesia, is a symptom of disease. it renders the person affected incapable of moral action. it is a characteristic of the born criminal, and is the essential symptom of that state of mind which alienists term moral insanity. even in this condition, if reason and the power of judgment are not affected, great offences against current moral law can be avoided. but this results from the fear of the painful and ruinous results which a collision with public opinion entails, even if the offender is not actually haled into court. it is not due to any inner necessity, nor to the prompting of one's own feelings. only the rationalists have any cause or reason to inquire into the aims of morality, whether they look upon the moral law as dictated by society or are of the opinion that it is the sum total of the rules by which reason, of its own initiative, successfully combats the urging of instinct. if the moral law is a creation of society, and is obeyed by the individual out of sympathy with his fellow-men or consideration for society, the logical conclusion is that society has set up the moral law to satisfy some real or imagined need. its aim in this case can only be the real or supposed welfare of the community. this is the most widely accepted view. "morality and universal welfare," says macchiavelli, "are conceptions which coincide." in his calm assurance this apodictic writer, who doubtlessly slept well and had an excellent digestion, is never troubled by a doubt as to whether there is such a thing as an absolutely reliable measure of universal welfare, and therefore whether morality, which is termed its equivalent, can provide us with a perfectly unimpeachable standard. he whose ethical conscience is more tender and timid will inevitably anxiously ask himself: who decides what universal welfare demands and what is conducive to it? is it to be the masses? is the mob, incapable of thought, ignorant, swayed by momentary and shifting impulses, to make moral laws for the select few who are its natural guides? what tragedies would necessarily result from this definition! how often a strong personality, trained to come to independent conclusions, refuses to obey the voice of the mob! is the sheep who trots bleating along with the herd to be taken as the type of a moral being? must we necessarily condemn as immoral those who swim against the stream, enlightened tyrants who force upon their people hateful innovations calculated to ensure their welfare,--such men as peter the great, the emperor joseph ii, the reformer who comes into violent conflict with the majority who are creatures of habit? "the aim of morality is the welfare of society; this is indeed the essence of morality." a sufficiently safe and most soothing formula this seems; but really the security it gives is most deceptive, and it leaves unsolved the most important problems relating to the phenomenon of morality. a numerous group of moral philosophers seeks the aim of moral conduct in the individual himself, not outside him. in spite of schopenhauer's sympathy, they doubt that consideration for the well-being of the community would act forcibly enough upon the individual to induce him to wage unceasing war on his impulses and struggle to overcome them. rather they hold that the individual must find in his inner consciousness not only the spur to moral action, but also the reward for the same, and they characterize this driving force as pleasurable emotions in every sense of the words. according to them man acts morally because, and in so far as, he anticipates pleasurable results from so doing. epicurus considers the aim of morality always to be pleasure. he makes only the one reservation, that a reasonable man will renounce an immediate pleasure for the sake of a greater one in the future, and that he may delight in the anticipation of pleasurable emotions which defeat and dull present pains. thus the martyr may be a true epicurean, even if by his actions he exposes himself to most cruel torture and the most painful death, for he is convinced that the everlasting joys of paradise will more than indemnify him for his temporary sufferings. i have already shown that aristotle considers morality the activity of practical reason, which is accompanied by pleasurable emotions. he makes these pleasurable emotions an essential part of morality, and spinoza shares this view, for he says: "knowledge of good and evil is nothing but a pleasurable or a disagreeable emotion in so far as we are conscious of it." no less roundly, one might almost say brutally, leibnitz declares: "we term good that which gives us pleasure; evil that which gives us pain," while feuerbach expresses himself rather more carefully and indefinitely thus: "the instinct for happiness is the most potent of all instincts. where existence always occurs together with volition, volition and the will to be happy are inseparable; they are, indeed, essentially one. 'i will,' means 'i have the will not to suffer, not to be hindered and destroyed, but, on the contrary, to be assisted and preserved; that is, i have the will to be happy.'" this is a wordy paraphrase of spinoza's: "all existence is self-assertion, and morality is only the highest and purest form of this fundamental instinct in a reasonable being." among those moral philosophers who see in pleasurable emotions the aim of morality, its reward and its incentive, we must distinguish two groups: those who understand by pleasurable emotions such as appeal to the senses--the hedonists; and those who spiritualize the meaning of the word and expect of morality not an immediate bodily gratification, a pleasure, or an insipid satisfaction of the sense, but lasting happiness--the eudæmonists. at the first glance the eudæmonists seem to have a higher and more worthy conception of the subjective reaction of moral conduct than have the hedonists; for the satisfaction the former expect and promise does not apply to the lower spheres of our organic life, but to the loftiest functions of our mind, from which alone a feeling of happiness can emanate. but if we look into the matter more closely we find that to draw a sharp distinction between the hedonists and eudæmonists is more than a little arbitrary. for pleasure and happiness differ hardly at all in essentials, but chiefly in degree; and this would at once be obvious if one only took the trouble to define the two ideas, which, however, is mostly not done. and with good reason, for it is impossible to explain pleasure. you can use synonyms for it; you can look wise and say: pleasure is that which is agreeable, or that which one desires, that in which one delights, or a certain quality of feeling which accompanies such organic processes as strengthen or vitalize the system; but all that this amounts to is to say in a roundabout way, pleasure is pleasure. it is a fundamental fact of our inner consciousness, just as inexplicable as life, or as its antithesis, pain. but if we assume that pleasure is something given by subjective experience, then the idea of happiness can be defined. happiness is a flooding of the consciousness with sunshine; it is enjoyment of the moment, a sense of living in the present accentuated by pleasurable emotion. if this feeling is organically differentiated, that is, if it springs from a certain section of the mind or mechanism of the body and can be located there, it is ecstasy. it is only felt as happiness when it is, so to speak, melted, dissolved, distributed throughout the organism, coenesthetically diffused. if we agree to this definition we can take eudæmonism into consideration as an aim of moral action, but hedonism we shall have to discard from the start. if morality is to be inhibition, a victory of reason over instinct, then it cannot possibly arouse pleasure, since the first and most immediate source of pleasure is the surrender to instinct, the satisfaction of the organic appetites; but if one resists them, suppresses them, then one experiences a privation which at best occasions discomfort and may easily cause pain. by its very nature and the mechanism by which it works, morality can therefore give rise to no pleasure, but only to discomfort. all the same, it can afford a feeling of happiness. it may be objected that i am guilty of a contradiction when i assume the possibility of happiness without pleasure, as i have just described happiness as a particular kind of pleasure; but in reality there is no contradiction. for pleasure springs from a special organic apparatus, whereas happiness is not a condition of any particular apparatus in our body, but a general feeling that cannot be located; if it is roused by moral actions it originates in the self-satisfaction of reason, in its pride in the victory over instinct, in the rapture occasioned by one's own strength of will; therefore, it can well exist without any differentiated pleasurable emotion located in any particular organic apparatus. many moral philosophers have for various reasons rejected plausible eudæmonism as well as hedonism, and these reasons can all be traced back to the recognition, or at least an inkling, of the fact that moral action in the nature of things must exclude pleasurable emotions; at any rate immediate ones, and such as are perceived by the senses. perhaps fichte does this in the most naïve fashion, for he rejects every form of eudæmonism as the aim of moral action, but admits as its purpose only bliss, that is to say, the self-satisfaction of reason resulting from action in accordance with its own laws. however, he struggles in vain to deny that this "bliss" is of the nature of a pleasurable emotion, or to interpret it as differing from eudæmonism. he is only giving the latter another name to make it conform in an orthodox manner with his doctrine of the supreme ego. "_baptizo te carpam!_" i baptize thee, carp! in this way the pious man complies with the law enjoining abstinence from meat, and with an easy conscience smacks his lips over a roast pheasant which he has dubbed fish. plato is among those who most emphatically deny that pleasure is either the motive force, the accompaniment, the consequence, or the aim of morality. but a reasonable thinker can derive no profit from his arguments in support of this point of view, for they are rambling, fantastic, mystical and visionary. plato thinks it a necessary consequence of the very nature of good that it should be absolutely self-sufficient. for pleasure is a perpetual growth, a ceaseless longing for more; it can therefore not be self-sufficient, and on this account can not be the foundation of morality. however, it is by no means obvious why morality should not be in a perpetual state of growth (just as pleasure is, according to plato), or why it should not constantly desire an increase of its own activities. on the contrary, this craving is just what one would most wish morality to have. true, it would not then attain self-satisfaction. but what is the good of this self-satisfaction? it is a pleasurable emotion, and according to plato morality is supposed to have nothing in common with pleasure. it is not to be contentment and serene satisfaction, but rather tireless endeavour. however, plato, of course, cannot admit this, because for him good and the deity are identical, and being perfect can therefore advance no farther in perfection; and the striving after good is merely an effort of memory on man's part to call to mind more clearly the deity whom he saw in his spiritual life before birth, and of whom he retains a dim and confused memory in his earthly life. it is plainly idle to waste reasonable criticism upon such visionary arguments. the stoics, too, try to sever the connexion between moral conduct and pleasure, and to conceive the former as a simple activity of human nature, one, moreover, from which they expect no particular satisfaction. they overlook the fact that every activity of the impulses and instincts of man's own nature affords him satisfaction, and that pleasure is nothing but this very satisfaction of natural instincts. if, then, morality were, as the stoics contend, only "life in harmony with nature herself," then, like every other satisfaction of natural desires, it should be an ever-flowing source of pleasurable emotions, and this characteristic would be inseparable from it, though the stoics may vainly try to deny it. christianity has an easier job than stoicism. with harsh severity, disregarding any plea for indulgence in view of the weakness of the flesh, it absolutely excludes the factor of pleasure from the fulfilment of moral duties. but this severity is only apparent. the good and just man can expect no reward for his moral conduct here on earth, but he will find a much more ample one in the life to come. to the devout believer who gives unlimited credit to it, the promise of the joys of paradise has the full value of a cash disbursement. it is somewhat childish juggling with words to deny pleasurable emotion to be the aim of moral conduct if at the same time a most vivid foretaste of the eternal bliss which awaits him after death be given to the virtuous man; as if the anticipation of heavenly bliss were not a pleasurable emotion of the highest degree! kant finds it due to his point of view to spurn every weak inclination to eudæmonism. a categorical imperative cannot issue commands with an eye to profit or comfort. that is as clear as daylight. "all morality of action must be founded on the necessity which arises from duty and respect for the law, and not from love or inclination for the desired result of the action." schopenhauer, feuerbach, and john stuart mill have recorded such irrefutable criticisms of the kantian doctrine of the absolute disinterestedness of moral action, that it is unnecessary to add to their arguments. only some moral philosophers, and particularly mill, are guilty of logical inaccuracy when they reject eudæmonism but retain utility as the aim of morality. why do the utilitarians not realize that they are merely eudæmonists under another name, and that he who disregards his own immediate interests in order to further the well-being of the community experiences a pleasurable emotion of high order in the satisfaction he derives from the sacrifices whereby he has contributed to the good of the community? the useless exertions of a section of moral philosophers to eliminate not only hedonism but also eudæmonism from moral action are a veritable labour of sisyphus. hardly have these two with difficulty been expelled by the door than they return by the window or the chimney. it is a mere conjuring trick to remove them from this world to the next, as do the theologians, or to substitute universal well-being for the feeling of happiness. all the same, the desire to purge moral action of the least admixture of hope of profit or pleasure is comprehensible. common experience, which is equally forced upon the profound thinker and upon the plain man in the street least inclined to cudgel his brain, teaches us that morality consists, with very few exceptions, in acting against our own immediate interest, in denying ourselves some coveted pleasure, in renouncing some attainable profit, in undertaking some disagreeable exertion because reason bids us do so. from this practical experience the man in the street gets the impression that duty is a bitter necessity and that decency is attended by many and varied inconveniences. the theorist, the philosopher, derives a principle from his empirical facts; he observes that the moral man often acts against his own immediate interests, and expresses this in the pretentious axiom: "morality from the very beginning excludes all thought of profit." and yet the philosophers are guilty of the same superficiality as the man in the street. they do not go far enough into the matter to perceive that the morality of pleasure, of interest, and of duty, hedonism, utilitarianism and the categorical imperative, all lead in very slightly different ways to the same goal--eudæmonism. the fulfilment of duty affords spiritual satisfaction, a pre-eminently pleasurable emotion which increases in direct proportion to the effort which its fulfilment demands. interest also implies pleasure, for every interest ultimately comes to this, that it is an attempt to secure a pleasure. this aim lies at the bottom of all interests; it is the fundamental interest from which all seemingly different interests are derived; it is the universal goal to which all human effort tends, whether it be a question of making money to satisfy ambition, of winning love and friendship, of material, spiritual, personal or social values. interest is self-assertion and the intensifying of the zest for life. but these are always accompanied by pleasurable emotions; thus interest is forthwith identified with pleasurable emotion, even though one has to work hard, even though at the moment it entails drudgery and discomfort. hedonism makes no secret of its nature and its tendency. it openly admits what the categorical imperative denies and what utilitarianism veils with vague phrases: that the aim and object of moral action is pleasure and nothing else. in our short survey of the immense field of literature dealing with moral philosophy we have learnt that, although the most various and divergent views are expressed as to the essence and source of morality, nevertheless there is but one opinion, be it clearly or vaguely stated, be it the result of knowledge or surmise, as to the mechanism by means of which moral concepts determine action, and as to the conscious or unconscious aim of moral action: moral concepts do their work by means of inhibition, and the aim of moral action is a feeling of happiness. chapter ii the immanence of the concept of morality it is natural for man's thoughts to be concentrated on himself until he has learnt to rise from the deep and narrow well of his egoism to a higher and wider view of life and, free from the taint of self-love, to form an idea of his place in the world and his relationship to it. not till the development of his intellect is far advanced does any doubt assail him as to the truth of his conviction that all his personal affairs, the least as well as the most weighty, are of the greatest importance to the universe, that every ache or pain he feels must wake an echo in the heavens, that the earth shudders in anticipation when he is about to stumble and sprain his ankle, and that the stars in their courses mysteriously, though intelligibly to the discerning, foretell the hour of his birth and of his death. an indian legend pours cruel scorn upon this childlike megalomania: a fox had fallen into a stream and was drowning. "the world is coming to an end!" gasped the animal in its agony. a peasant standing on the brink replied coldly, "oh, no, i see only a little fox drowning." many moral philosophers, those of the kantian school without exception, labour under the delusion of this same, egocentric view. in their eyes the phenomenon of morality is a cosmic one. morality is the law of human conduct, therefore it is the law of world processes, of the universe. indeed, it is the law of the universe before it becomes that of human conduct. it would exist even if there were no men, no humanity, no human conduct at all. the solemn innocents who weightily give utterance to this doctrine are unaware how ridiculous they are. they do not hesitate to subject sirius to the yoke of the ten commandments. they are convinced that the milky way practises virtue and shuns, or ought to shun, vice, just as we inconsiderable human beings do. the precept, "thou shalt not steal," applies with binding force to gravity, and the warning, "thou shalt not kill," to electricity, though the latter ruthlessly disregards it, as the results of being struck by lightning and accidents with high voltage installations frequently prove. if they do not threaten nature with police and prison it is only because in their eyes morality is independent of all sanctions, is superior to rewards and punishments, depends upon itself alone, constitutes its own aim, is by its very nature a compelling force, and therefore has no need of adventitious compulsion. such profound nonsense cannot lay claim to serious treatment. it is a counterpart to the belief that events in the history of mankind, like war and pestilence, are foretold by heavenly signs such as fiery comets. the stars revolve, the clockwork of the universe continues undisturbed, as though the earth were still uninhabited, as it was when it was a glowing fluid globe or, earlier still, a nebular mass; and this although man's self-esteem be hurt by such a lack of consideration. if we care to call the (so far as we know) unalterable laws, according to which the forces of nature act and the mechanism of the world works, the morality of the universe, that may pass. only we must in that case clearly realize that we are speaking metaphorically, that we are making use of a poetic simile, that we are anthropomorphically attributing human traits to the universe. morality is a phenomenon restricted to mankind, or, to be strictly accurate, a phenomenon which occurs only among living beings; for the beginnings of morality may be traced in creatures of a lower order than man, and it develops simultaneously with the consciousness and the mentality of living beings. morality is a function of life, dependent upon it, begotten and developed by it, to meet life's needs and serve its interests. the existence of morality apart from life is as unthinkable as that of hunger, ambition, or gratitude. morality is a collection of laws and prohibitions which reason opposes to organic instincts, by means of which the former forces the latter into actions from which they would like to refrain, or prevents them from carrying out that which they yearn to do. the existence of morality, therefore, presupposes in the first place that of an intelligence sufficiently developed to form a clear idea of something that is still in the future, namely, an image of the consequences resulting from an action. guided by this inner contemplation of the image of the consequences of an action, reason decides to carry out or prevent the action. this gives us the lowest plane upon which morality can occur as the cause of action and of abstention from action. it implies, above all things, foresight, and can therefore only exist in a consciousness which is sufficiently developed to grasp the idea of the future and form a picture of it. this consciousness must be capable of extracting the elements of a conception from memory according to the laws of the association of ideas, and be able to group them logically in a new order. in other words, as long as the mind cannot visualize the past and from it build up a picture of the future, morality can find no place in it. this statement requires no limitation, but it demands a short explanation. it is quite true that morality is foresight, but it is only among the elect that the latter is developed to such a pitch that it is possible to form images of the consequences of action and abstention sufficiently clear and definite to exercise a restraining or encouraging influence. the average man can act morally without first working out a clear picture of the future. it is enough that he has been trained to the habit of respecting current precepts, and of accepting the views obtaining in his circle as to what is good or bad, what is admissible or inadmissible. this morality, of course, is merely a matter of drill or training; it is unthinking automatism; it is inferior, and not to be compared with the living, creative morality of higher natures, which, as a sovereign law-giver, comes to an independent decision in every case and, like the guardian angel of childlike faith, guides man on his path through life, indicates the right course at the cross-roads, and warns him of pitfalls and stumbling-blocks. but for everyday use mechanical morality may suffice. in the uneventful existence of the average man, which passes in a stereotyped way, this mechanical morality is an acceptable guide and counsellor, but it remains an outside influence foreign to his inner consciousness; he is glad to deceive and outwit it, as a slave does his master's bailiff if he can do so without running the risk of a thrashing; but if his destiny unexpectedly rises above its accustomed dead level, then this dogmatic morality, which he has never really assimilated, leaves him in the lurch, and mournfully, in piteous tones, he utters the well-known cry, "it is easy to do one's duty; it is difficult to know where one's duty lies." reason, then, which is capable of foreseeing the results of actions, teaches a man what he must do and from what he must abstain, where he may follow his instinct and where he must resist it, according as it considers the presumptive results of yielding to impulse good or bad. but whence does reason obtain the standard it applies to the actions of men and their results? how does it acquire the fundamental concepts good and bad, and what is their significance? generally speaking, the answer will be as follows: moral values are appraised by a standard supplied by a general consensus of opinion; reason acknowledges as good that which meets with the approval of the community, that which the latter desires and therefore praises; the community, for its part, echoes the pronouncements of influential personages, i.e. of the most respected, most powerful, and most aristocratic; reason condemns as bad that which the community disapproves, and which it therefore censures and rejects. this definition does not solve the problem of good and bad, it only shifts it. later we shall have to show upon what grounds the community discriminates between acceptable and reprehensible facts, calling the former good and the latter bad. for the present it is enough to observe that reason derives the laws, which it constantly impresses on man, from the opinion of the community. it can happen that reason rejects the opinion of the community and forms a conclusion opposed to it. this revolt of individual morality against conventional morality is the great tragedy of man. it can only occur in the soul of a hero, for mediocre and insipid people always bow to the opinion of the majority. there is clearly imminent danger of making a mistake. not seldom, however, the individual is right in his opposition to the community, and then the latter is fired by his example to examine its traditional dogmas and to correct or reject them. this is not the only, but it is the most common means by which morality is developed and changed. its progress demands martyrs. strong personalities must be sacrificed to force a revision of moral values. socrates has to swallow the draft of hemlock so that unfettered thought may acquire the right to doubt the legend of the gods. jesus has to incur the dangerous anger of the pharisees so that the adulteress may be treated with indulgence and human sympathy instead of being punished according to rigorous law. but the opposition of a self-willed, subjective morality to the accepted moral law is always exceptional; the general rule is submission to the moral law. this is indeed a necessary preliminary to revolt against the moral law of the community, for it is only by means of a vigorous social education that man develops such a nicely balanced and keen sense of good and bad, that he cannot prevail upon himself to carry out generally approved actions which his own intelligence does not recognize as moral. he whose moral sense has not been intensified by strict discipline will never be assailed by doubt, as long as he follows in the footsteps of the multitude. hence, as a rule, reason exercises its control of the actions of man in conformity with the laws prescribed by the community. before morality develops into the practice of good and the rejection of bad it takes the form of consideration for the world at large, since it is the latter which has created the concepts of good and bad as well as the standard by which they are judged, and in order to avoid conflict with the community, and to maintain uninterrupted agreement with it, the individual exerts himself to persist in doing good and to refrain from doing evil. the establishment of these facts gives deep offence to the mystics among moral philosophers. "what a debasement and belittling of morality! what! it is supposed to be nothing more than a sort of obsequiousness towards the multitude? its laws are observed for the sake of pleasing others? it is a comedy played to win applause and a call before the curtain? that is a libel and a calumny. the truly moral man looks neither to the right nor to the left. he does not condescend to ask, 'what will the world say to this?' there is but one judge in whose eyes he wishes to be justified: his conscience." quite right. but what is conscience found to be if we penetrate the fog of mystic words with which it has come to be surrounded? conscience is the permanent representative of the community in the consciousness of the individual, just as public opinion may be termed the conscience of every member of society made manifest. metaphorically, it wields the powers pertaining to society; it praises and blames, it condemns and exalts, it punishes and rewards, as society could do; and it actually pronounces judgment in the name of society, even though it does not preface such judgment with this formula which is tacitly implied and must always be mentally added. conscience is the invisible link which unites the individual with a social group, just as speech, custom, tradition, and political institutions are the visible links. but the social origin and representative nature of conscience set limits to its power. conscience is a respected authority with wide powers only in the consciousness of those individuals who have a highly developed social sense. i purposely do not say those in whom the instinct to follow the crowd preponderates, because this mode of expression might imply blame and condemnation which i do not intend to convey. for social instinct comes natural to an individual born, educated and working in a community, who shares its feelings, views and interests, nay, even its prejudices and mistakes; and if he lacks it, it is a sign of a morbid deviation from the normal. only the decadent man is uncannily lonely in spirit, alien, indifferent or definitely hostile to his human surroundings; he is, according to the violence and polarization of his instincts, the passionate anarchist or the born criminal; the public opinion of his circle is unintelligible to him and makes no impression on him; it has no significance for him; he attaches no importance to its approbation, and its anger leaves him cold; he would take no notice of it, were it not that he knows its power to destroy him, and fears its police, its prisons, and its scaffolds. such a man, organically predisposed to crime, most urgently needs a conscience. it would arrest him on the downward path to which his evil instincts lead. it would warn him to resist the wicked impulses of his selfishness. but he, of all people, has no conscience. he can have none. he is anti-social, he is at war with society, diplomatic relations between him and it have been broken off, and it has no representative in his consciousness. a lively and active feeling of joint responsibility with the community is a necessary predisposition on the part of the individual before conscience can have any power. where the former is lacking the latter is mute and paralysed. the essence of morality, as we have found, is the subjection of instinct and direct organic impulses to the discipline of reason. the latter exercises a censorship in pursuance of a law which it derives not from within, but from without, from the ordinances of the community which instructs reason as to what it should permit, what it should forbid, and what it should demand. conscience ensures respect for its commands, and may be called the executive power or police of reason, acting as the authorized representative of morality. it is the garrison which the community maintains in the individual's consciousness, which it arms and supplies with authority and instructions; the power of conscience lies in the strength of the community at its back, and is without influence only upon those who refuse admission to the troops of the community and yield to none but actual physical force. all this proves irrefutably that morality is a phenomenon arising from the social life of man, and its power is a function of society. if under the conditions in which humanity lives nowadays one could imagine a man totally detached from his species, leading a solitary life, morality would be absolutely meaningless to him. the idea is one he could never conceive. it would have no significance. good and bad would always retain their original meaning as labels for sensual qualities, for pleasant or unpleasant sensations of taste, smell, etc.; they would never be spiritualized or apply to the quality of actions. he would be unable to attach any meaning to the words duty and right. the terms virtue, vice, conscience, repentance would convey nothing to him. morality can only originate when the individual lives united with fellow beings in a social community. it is a consequence of this union. it is the one condition on which alone this union can be permanent. the solitary individual must, however, not be confused with the lonely one. robinson crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island and forced to stay there without companionship, is not primitive man. he is a son of civilization who has fallen upon evil days. in his enforced solitariness he maintains the habits of thought of his original surroundings. he preserves the concepts of morality even though he has no occasion to obey its dictates. he can, if not actually yet potentially, be a paragon of virtue or a sink of iniquity; he can have a very delicate or a very dull conscience. he continues to be a man of social instincts cut off from society, and goes on thinking and feeling in a social manner. by primitive man i mean man as he was before society originated. for, contrary to the sociological school which denies the individual and boldly refuses to allow him any existence, declaring society to be older and earlier than the individual, i think i have conclusively shown ("_der sinn der geschichte_" [the meaning of history]) that man is not by nature a gregarious animal, that he lived alone, being self-sufficing as long as the climatic conditions, under which he first made his appearance on earth, enabled him to exist by his own unaided efforts and capabilities, and that he banded himself together with others in gangs, troops and hordes--the earliest forms of subsequent society--when, after the first ice age following his appearance, the struggle for existence grew ever harder, ever more laborious, transcending the powers of the individual so that he could only overcome nature, now grown hostile to him, by uniting with others of his kind. this primitive man of the golden geological period before the ice age knew no morality, and as far as human intelligence can tell he would never have known of it had there been a continuance of the paradisaic conditions obtaining at the time of his birth, and had the climate not deteriorated. the occurrence of murderous frosts, the necessity of seeking protection from them in natural caves or artificially constructed shelters, and of kindling and maintaining fires, the diminution or disappearance of vegetable food, and the need to replace it by the booty of the chase or fishing--all these forced him to unite his efforts with those of other men who shared his wretched lot on earth. but in order to maintain this community with others he had to learn a new science, one he had hitherto not known because he had had no need of it: consideration for his fellows. he might no longer think of himself alone, consider his own inclinations in all eventualities, give way to all his moods or yield to every whim; he had unceasingly to bear his neighbour in mind and take care not to annoy him, not to make an enemy of him, not to become hateful to him. forbearance towards his neighbour was the necessary condition of their life in common, just as their life in common was the necessary condition of self-preservation. the penalty for selfish indulgence was stern persecution, punishment, perhaps death; in any case, expulsion from the community. man, therefore, stood before the choice of self-control or destruction, and this dilemma taught him morality. such, we must imagine, were the beginnings of morality. it was not prearranged or purposely sought; it grew naturally from the companionship of men and developed simultaneously with society. if the struggle for existence made life in communities a necessity, the first coercive law of the community was to enjoin upon its members a mode of conduct which alone rendered the existence of the community possible, and the fundamental rule of this conduct was mutual consideration. without this two egoisms cannot exist side by side and develop. they either destroy or shun one another. this phenomenon may also be observed among the higher animals. elephants, living in herds, expel quarrelsome individuals and force them to wander alone far from the rest. the natives of ceylon and india fear these "bachelor elephants" as being specially savage and malicious. they think that they grow like this because of their loneliness. that is probably a false conclusion. it is much more likely that these animals have been driven from their herd because they were savage and malicious, because their characters were opposed to discipline. here we come upon the first faint foreshadowing of the phenomenon of morality in an animal community. now that we have introduced the idea of the growth and development of morality, it becomes obvious that it must have begun with mere indications, and that from rude, dim, undeveloped beginnings it gradually grows more perfect, more refined, more nicely differentiated. at first man avoids only the most brutal injuries to his neighbour, such as hurting him, doing him bodily harm, threatening to kill him, openly robbing him. in proportion as he becomes more spiritually sensitive, as he learns to feel the insult and humiliation of injuries other than those inflicted with a fist or club, he is led to refrain from giving his fellow-men similar offence, which though it deals no gaping wounds, yet hurts his spiritual sensibilities. a series of values is developed, growing ever longer, ever more complicated, with more and more gradations, until, going far beyond the simple, artless commandments, "thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt not steal," "thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife nor his goods," it reaches the pitch of agonized self-reproach, because of the slightest and most secret impulses to dislike, injustice, covetousness, dissimulation, etc. morality must be regarded as a support and a weapon in the struggle for existence in so far as, given present climatic conditions on earth and the civilization arising therefrom, man can only exist in societies, and society cannot exist without morality. the chain of thought runs as follows: without morality no society, without society no individual existence; consequently, morality is the essential condition for the existence of the individual as well as for that of the community. however, we must always bear in mind the reservation, "given the present climatic conditions on earth." had the earth continued to be the paradise it must have been at the birth of our species (since otherwise the latter could simply not have originated), the necessity would never have arisen for the individual to band himself together with others of his kind, no society would ever have developed, and there would have been no morality. serious as the subject is, one cannot but smile at the thought of the comic figure the learned, professorial neo-kantians would cut with their dogma of the absolute and cosmic nature of morality, if they propounded it among men whose wants nature's bounty was able to satisfy as easily as the frog is satisfied in his puddle or the crow on his tree top. they would find no trace of absolute morality among mankind, and would be reduced to seeking it among the stars. the very nature of morality, in that it is an aid to man in the struggle for existence, makes it easy to understand the origin and nature of the concepts good and bad. there are propensities and actions which facilitate life in a community which, indeed, alone make it possible: love of one's neighbour, helpfulness, liberality, consideration for the feelings of others, and amiability. there are others which make such a life difficult or absolutely impossible: uncompromising selfishness, violence, cruelty, rapacity, instinctive hostility to one's neighbour. men recognized that the former were beneficial to them, the latter harmful. the former aroused their liking, the latter their disapproval, dislike and animosity. the quality of feeling which accompanied the perceptions of actions of the former kind was akin to that with which they responded to beneficial, profitable, useful and welcome sense impressions. the quality of feeling, which actions of the second category gave rise to, was akin to that due to harmful and repellent sense impressions. following the law of analogy, they placed on an equal footing actions which were felt to be pleasing and pleasant sensations of taste and smell; similarly with disagreeable actions and unpleasant sense impressions; and finally they called the former good and the latter bad, using terms originally applicable only to the realm of the senses. not everything that is pleasant to the senses is beneficial. there are poisons which are pleasing to taste, but none the less noxious for that, such as (to give only one example) alcoholic drinks and impressions of a certain order, like voluptuousness, which man greedily pursues, even though they ruin his health. but these are exceptions. as a rule, not only man, but all living creatures, derive pleasant sensations from beneficial things; and it is probable that that category of sensations, which we are conscious of as being pleasant, is nothing but the state of coenesthesis, when the organism functions particularly energetically under the influence of the absorption of food or of a special stimulus of the senses, when it feels its life processes carried on particularly vigorously, freely and harmoniously; just as we feel that state of coenesthesis to be unpleasant, which occurs when the organism functions badly, slackly, and in a manner calculated to endanger the continuance of life. with the reservation that has been indicated we can say in general that good is equivalent to beneficial and pleasant, bad to harmful and unpleasant. this is true of the transferred and spiritualized as well as of the immediate and material meaning of these expressions of value. the significance of the words good and bad, the point of departure, development and change of conception they indicate, suffice to justify the utilitarians and the hedonists or eudæmonists among the moral philosophers, and to confute the contentions of their critics, who deny all connexion between morality and a practical purpose, profit or pleasure, and declare these to be unworthy humiliations of its majesty. they wriggle, with the agility of a contortionist on the music-hall stage, to get over the obvious and palpable aim of moral conduct. they display all the cunning of dishonest sophistry in their arguments to prove that the element of subjective satisfaction which moral action yields is non-existent, and that, therefore, the hedonists and eudæmonists are wrong. they stir up an opaque cloud of words, phrases and formulæ to hide the fact, which nevertheless emerges clearly, that he who acts morally expects to derive pleasurable emotions from his action, or at least tries thereby to avoid probable painful emotions, and that moral conduct, just as it is designed to give the individual subjective satisfaction which is a kind of pleasure, is also meant to be a benefit, or at any rate a supposed benefit, to the community. morality must never try for a reward and never expect one. it must be absolutely disinterested. it has no business to pursue any aim outside itself. thus say the mystics of moral philosophy, juggling with words; and they think they are doing especial honour to morality and raising it to a particularly proud eminence. but morality has no need of this artificial and false grandeur to maintain its lofty place among the phenomena of life, and it is derogatory neither to its authority nor to its influence to be recognized as a beneficial force conducive to happiness. the opponents of utilitarianism and eudæmonism in ethics, if they speak in good faith, may be excused on the grounds that their analysis of the phenomenon of morality is shallow. for them morality is something absolute, which exists by itself as an eternal and unalterable law of the universe, but which is revealed in the individual and therefore must be conceived individually as a quality which has become human, as a human value. if anyone persists in looking upon morality as an absolutely individual matter, without any connexion with anything outside the individual, if anyone obstinately shuts his eyes to the fact that morality has not been developed by the individual out of his own immediate needs and in consideration of himself alone, but that it is, on the contrary, a creation of society and has no sense or significance except as a social phenomenon, then indeed he can with some show of justification deny utilitarianism and hedonism. for truly, looked at from the point of view of the individual, moral conduct appears neither pleasant nor immediately beneficial. on the contrary, it is, as a rule, directly opposed to his own apparent interest, and it is achieved with difficulty by sacrifice and renunciation, which are never pleasant and often very painful. once in a drawing-room, during a game of definitions, i heard a light-hearted young lady define duty in the following terms: "duty is that which we do unwillingly." a stern professor contradicted her at once with the solemnity he thought due to his position, and assured her reprovingly: "it is my duty to give lectures, and i do this duty gladly. if you were right, madam, expressions such as 'zealous in one's duty' and 'willing performance of duty' would have no meaning and could never have been coined." that seems convincing, but yet it is wrong. expressions such as "zealous in one's duty" and "willing performance of duty" were not coined until society had developed its system of morality and had educated its members to strive for its approval by conducting themselves in accordance with this system, to look on its approval as a flattering distinction and to fear its disapproval as a disgrace. such phrases are pharisaical, calculated to exercise a suggestive influence profitable to society. they are the sugar to sweeten the pill; but the young lady was honest and the professor conventional; the pill is bitter. thinkers recognized and admitted this thousands of years ago. antiphon, the sophist, says: "the law, the outcome of an agreement, coerces nature, the result of growth, and goes against the interest of the individual." the same idea is expressed by the tragic poet in the lines: "the gods have placed sweat before virtue." this was said in the very same words by lao tse, the disciple of meng tse, the pupil of confucius and the reformer of his doctrine. the law, not only the law of the state which antiphon has principally in view, but also the moral law, "goes against the interest of the individual"; not in reality, but apparently, at the first superficial glance. moral conduct is the reverse of natural conduct; it takes place in opposition to instinct by deflecting the original impulse; it is a subjugation of inclination, a victory over the real nature of the man. virtue has to exert its utmost strength in bitter struggles, fought out within the individual, before it can reveal itself actively in deeds. that is a natural consequence of the manner in which morality originated. the point is that it was not created directly for the individual, but for the community, and for the former only in so far as he is a part of the community, and from its stability and well-being derives a benefit which he may, or may not, be conscious of; which he may, or may not, be able to appreciate; which he accepts as something natural and self-understood without further thought; for which he does not consider any return service to be due; but which is nevertheless of real magnitude, profiting the individual, facilitating his existence, or even alone making it possible; and for which, as for every other gift, he must make sacrifices. for within society there can be no gifts. it possesses nothing but what it has acquired from its members, and the latter must pay full value for everything it provides, unasked or otherwise. as the moral law originated to meet the needs of the community, and was gradually formulated in definite precepts, it is comprehensible that the community never paused to inquire what subjective effect its law would have on the feelings of the individual. if you impose a law upon someone you hardly ever consider how great will be the emotions of pleasure or displeasure which its enforcement will entail. the order is, "obey, whether you like it or not; that which deeper insight and more far-seeing wisdom prescribe is for your good." thus the individual is forced to work laboriously for his own good, which in his purblindness he does not even recognize. it would be comprehensible if the individual, who does not see farther than his own nose and does not look beyond the present moment, formed the opinion that morality is not perceptibly beneficial to him and gives him no pleasure, and that, therefore, the utilitarians and the hedonists talk nonsense. but the moral philosopher, who observes the individual in relationship to the community and surveys human actions, the way they are connected, and the way they interact upon one another, has no right to pursue the same line of thought as the individual, and deny that morality aims at utility and pleasure, even though the individual, when he acts morally, does not perceive any personal advantage, nor feel any pleasure except the self-satisfaction which he has been trained to feel, since in the eyes of others he is so good and honest. that morality aims at utility, and is at the same time a source of pleasure and happiness, may seem dark and doubtful while we consider the individual, but it becomes clear as day and indisputable when we regard the community. among creatures of a lower order than man, indeed among all animals that live together in flocks or herds, we find the first beginnings of that mode of conduct which in man we call moral, and which is not intended to be of direct benefit to the individual, or to add to his momentary pleasure, but which subordinates or sacrifices these personal satisfactions to the good of the community. chamois, when they are grazing, set one of their number on guard upon a rocky eminence with a distant view, and this individual is responsible for the safety of the herd. while the others feed in peace and comfort, this guardian chamois forgoes the food which is doubtless just as attractive to it as to the others, and tirelessly keeps a sharp look out over its whole field of vision, warning its companions at the first approach of danger by uttering a shrill cry. when the great herds of buffaloes still inhabited the north american prairies, they had at the head and on the flanks of the herd the strongest bulls, while the centre was occupied by the cows with their calves and the young animals. before civilization came to trouble them, the grizzly bear was the only enemy that threatened them, and with him they were able to deal; one of them would meet the attacking bear in single combat, but did not always emerge from it unhurt. often enough at the end of the fight both the bull and the bear would be terribly injured or even dead; yet by sacrificing his life the bull saved the rest of the herd. the thrilling adventure of the abyssinian baboon is well known; first told by alfred brehm in his "_tierleben_" (animal life), it was afterwards quoted by darwin and many other writers. on a hunting expedition brehm surprised a party of monkeys in a clearing. they fled at once and had found shelter in the wood before the dogs could reach them. only one young one had got separated from the rest and was left behind alone. it had scrambled up on to a solitary rock standing in the plain, round which the dogs were barking furiously, and in its terror the creature uttered piercing cries for help. a little male monkey, hearing it, detached himself from the group, turned back from the safety of the forest, made quietly for the rock and fetched away the trembling young baboon from among the pack, silent now and shrinking in amazement; and then stroking and caressing the little creature he carried it safely in his arms to its family in the wood, unmolested by the stupefied dogs and spared by the hunter, lost in admiration of this self-sacrificing courage. in these three instances we see how the joint responsibility among gregarious animals develops in them an ever increasing sense of duty, which teaches the chamois to forgo its food during the hours it is on guard, rouses in the buffalo a savage lust for battle, and makes the baboon perform a premeditated deed of epic heroism. when men act as these animals did, we ascribe this to morality. this is nothing but joint responsibility in action, the joint responsibility which the species is forced by the conditions of life to adopt, if it is to survive. among the moral philosophers the mystics are prevented, by the haze which obscures all their thought, from seeing that morality originates from this joint responsibility. or rather, if they do see it, they think this origin too low. they demand a more exalted genealogy for the phenomenon of morality. according to them the moral law comes straight from god. the concepts good and evil are revealed. commands and prohibitions are imposed upon the soul by that omnipotence which spiritualizes the universe and of which the soul is an immortal part. if these phrases were anything but moonshine and tinkling cymbals they certainly would make any other explanation of this astonishing fact superfluous; the fact, namely, that man does what is repugnant to him, and refrains from doing what would give him pleasure, that he is content with himself when he has voluntarily curbed his impulses and made sacrifices, and that he feels the pricks of conscience if he chances to experience the pleasure of appeasement because he has satisfied his desires. "man obeys divine commands." that suffices and obviates the necessity of seeking for explanations of this phenomenon, which shall satisfy reason. it is a mere mirage, the reflection of an earthly state of affairs in the heavens, to assume that the universe is governed by an authority devoid of responsibility, which imposes on its subjects, that is to say men, laws and instructions, discipline and order. it is a form of anthropomorphism, the most widespread and stubborn of errors in thought among those men who try to understand the unintelligible, and are content with the most unfounded explanation which their naïve imagination freely invents for them. this same anthropomorphism, not even at a loss to solve the problem of the origin and essence of the universe, replies unhesitatingly that god by an act of volition created it out of nothing to prove to himself his own omnipotence and omniscience; in like manner it has no scruple in ascribing the phenomenon of morality to a creative act of god's, and makes ethics, which properly speaking form the chief part of psychology, anthropology and sociology, a subdivision of theology, that is, of anthropomorphic mythology. critical reason, which realizes that deceptive fictions are not true thought, but dreams--not the result of ripe intellectual effort, but of the childish play of the imagination, seeks the roots of morality not in the air or in the ether, but in the solid earth; not in some indemonstrable, transcendental sphere, but in an obvious need of human nature. the biological necessities of the species, which can only survive by dint of living in communities, sufficiently explain the origin of the feeling of joint responsibility, of consideration for one's neighbour, of the concepts good and evil and of conscience; and we have no use for the dogmas of revealed morality derived from some fabulous, supernatural source, or for the kantian categorical imperative. morality, understood as a form of joint responsibility, determines the inner and outer relations of the individual to the community; that is to say, to as much of it as he comes in immediate contact with, to wit, his neighbour. morality provides him with the notions of duty and right, of the consideration he owes his neighbour and of that which he may demand from his neighbour. it is customary to look upon rights and duties as opposites. this is mere indolence of thought. right and duty are supplementary, forming together one concept. they are in reality one and the same thing regarded from different points of view. my duty is the subjective form of my neighbour's right; my right the subjective form of other people's duty. that which is duty, when i have to do it out of consideration for others, becomes my right, when others have to do it out of consideration for me. respect for the personality of others, which is the feeling from which the concept of right and duty emanates, seems to be a late and noble product of morality and a particularly praiseworthy victory of prescient intelligence over selfishness. this factor of our consciousness which determines our will and which gradually becomes an instinct, is really only a special application of the law of least resistance which governs all organic life. we have no selfless, ideal respect for the personality of another; but, made wise by experience and observation, we assume that that other has the power to resist and to retaliate if a wrong is done to him or he is injured; hence we avoid, to the best of our ability, actions to which he is likely to object, so as not to come into conflict with him, because to overcome his opposition would require effort and expose us to danger. respect for the personality of another and for his rights may be expressed by a mechanical formula which runs as follows: this respect varies directly as the real or supposed might of the other person, and inversely as our own real or supposed might. the society of which he is a member, and which makes his existence possible, prescribes to the individual the laws governing his moral conduct. that which a community at any given time approves and demands, rejects or forbids, constitutes the precept whereby its members regulate their conduct, and offers ample security for their conscience. the concepts good and bad originate simultaneously with society; they are the form in which its actual conditions of existence are conveyed to the consciousness of its members. the only immutable thing about them is the fact of their continued existence. without the coercive discipline of a rule conducive to the common weal and governing the mutual relations between its members, no society could be imagined to exist, unless its members were all similar in nature, reacted in an identical fashion to all impressions and possessed the same feelings and sensations, the same inclinations and the same impulses of volition. in that case no difference could ever arise between one individual and another, or between an individual and the community, which would have to be smoothed over by the moral law emanating from the community and controlling the individual, or be suppressed by the community's order. every individual could be left to the guidance of his own instincts, for he would know himself always to be in agreement with the community; no consideration for others need hamper or modify his actions; he could behave just as if he were alone in the world. but as individuals differ from one another, feel, think and want different things, collisions in which they hurt, cripple or even kill one another are the inevitable consequence of their opposing movements; and the interference of the moral law is absolutely necessary to polarize these movements and guide them into parallel courses, so that they do not run counter to one another. but good and bad derive not only their existence but their measure and their significance from the views of the community. they are therefore not absolute but variable; they are not an immutable standard amid the ever-changing conditions of humanity, a rule by which the value of the actions and aims of mortals are indisputably determined, but are subject to the laws of evolution in society and therefore in a constant state of flux. at different times and in different places they present the most varied aspects. what is virtue here and now may have been vice formerly and at another spot, and _vice versa_. in the royal family of ancient egypt marriage between brothers and sisters was the prescribed custom. we call this incest and it fills us with horror. to the sons of egypt it seemed meritorious and constituted a claim to special veneration. the babylonians and canaanites burnt their first-born in moloch's fiery furnace, and this sacrifice was accounted a highly praiseworthy act of piety and of the fear of god. the spartans taught their sons, their future warriors, the art of stealing without being caught; and he who did this most cleverly achieved the most flattering recognition. the cherusci butchered the roman prisoners taken from the legions of varus as a sacrifice to their tribal gods, and a noble-minded and brave man like arminius considered this absolutely honourable and knightly. the aztecs, who had undeniably attained an advanced degree of civilization, at high festivals used with obsidian knives to cut open the breasts of human sacrifices on the altars of their gods, and tear the heart out of their living bodies. that was an action finding favour in the sight of the gods, and the people watched it with awe and those mystic emotions which religious rites are intended to arouse. moral law in europe, during the middle ages and almost up to modern times, permitted, and even ordained, the punishment by horrible torture and death of those whose religious convictions differed from the teaching of the established church; and with its consent supposed witches were sent to the stake. in feudal times the most terrible and revolting of crimes was felony--that is, a breach of faith on the part of the vassal against his overlord--and no torture was too cruel as a punishment. nobles, who had so delicate a sense of honour that for a wry look or the accidental touch of an elbow they would draw their swords, enunciated the principle: "the king's blood does not defile," and vied with each other in forcing their daughters upon the king as concubines. until wilberforce roused the english conscience at the end of the eighteenth century, and schölcher did the same in france in the middle of the nineteenth, slavery was considered a state of affairs which a moral community could tolerate. the north american descendants of those puritans whom no persecution and no martyrdom could prevent from leading a life consonant with the dictates of their conscience, did not scruple to exercise proprietary rights over human beings who, in the case of octoroons and even of quadroons, did not even differ from them in colour, supposing that difference of colour could be considered an excuse. the code, which began with the "declaration of rights," contained heavy penalties for those who helped a slave to escape. men, whose uprightness no one could doubt, did not hesitate to set bloodhounds on the track of an escaped nigger, and four years of a bloody civil war were needed before refractory slave-owners were forced to acknowledge the immorality of forced labour. these examples have been taken from the customs of civilized nations. amongst races that have not attained the high degree of development to which the white man has risen, we meet with much more revolting deviations from the moral law obtaining among white men. tribes are known in which the commandment, "honour thy father and thy mother," is interpreted so, that the children kill and eat their parents as soon as the latter have attained a considerable age. the north american indians, who had a well developed sense of honour, were capable of chivalrous feelings and kept their word with absolute loyalty, used to torture helpless prisoners and scalp their defeated enemies, even the women. among the dyaks, who are under dutch rule and are familiar with the laws and customs of christian europe, a marriageable youth must first cut off a human being's head before he is allowed to wed. he need not overcome his victim in honourable combat; he may creep upon him surreptitiously, and even fall upon him in his sleep and murder him in cowardly fashion without danger to himself. all these are instances which we unhesitatingly condemn. to our idea they are crimes and misdeeds which among us would make their perpetrators liable either to contempt and expulsion from decent society or to the extremest penalties of the law; yet at their time and in their place they were considered meritorious and virtuous, and were approved by public opinion and the conscience of their authors. but we can go farther and subject our own moral law to a similar independent consideration. we shall find that to us also deeds appear permissible, virtuous and even splendid, which do not differ essentially from the thefts of the spartans or the head-hunting of the dyaks. a company promoter who sells on the stock exchange shares that he must know to be worthless, can with spartan cunning rob thousands of trustful victims of the fruits of their labour and economy, and reduce them to beggary; and not only does he go unpunished, but if by his knavery he becomes a millionaire and uses his wealth cleverly, he can attain the highest political and social honours and distinctions. we may admit that financial roguery of this sort can now no longer be classed among strictly moral actions, that public opinion is on the verge of placing it in the category of vice and crime, and that legislators are beginning to make attempts to inflict severe and humiliating penalties on its perpetrators. but another series of deeds is still generally considered so undoubtedly virtuous and laudable, that it evokes the highest homage from the best intellects of the age, poets, musicians, scientists, teachers, sculptors and painters, and the leaders of the people--the deeds of war. the most horrible butchery of men, the theft of property and liberty, ill-treatment, destruction are not only permissible but obligatory and laudable, if they occur in war, and if their authors can point to the fact that they are acting in the service of their country at the order of a legitimate authority. neither the soldiers nor their leaders are bound to inquire whether the authority, whether their mother country is waging war for a purpose that moral law can approve. "right or wrong, my country." in the eyes of her sons the country is always in the right, even if it be objectively in the wrong, and by its orders every soldier murders, robs, burns and ravages, plays the executioner to harmless, unarmed, innocent strangers, compels prisoners to forced labour, steals letters that fall into his hands and prevents families who are cruelly separated from communicating with one another; and his conscience does not reproach him in the least, nor is he conscious of being a criminal deserving of all the penalties of the law. every single one of these actions, if perpetrated by an individual on his own account and for his own purposes, would result in the death penalty, and it would be richly deserved, too. but in war, carried out collectively at the bidding of a government, they become deeds of heroism, filling the doer with pride, moving the community to tears of enthusiasm, and they are held up to youth as shining examples to be imitated. it is more than likely that future times will judge the esteem in which these deeds are held not otherwise than we do the value placed by other forms of society on human sacrifices, the slaughter of parents and head-hunting. it is hard to determine the exact part which conscience plays in the changes undergone by the concepts good and evil. as conscience is the voice of the community in the consciousness of the individual, it approves on principle what seems right and praiseworthy to the community. just as little as conscience prevented a babylonian mother from sacrificing her child to moloch, does it in these days stop the average citizen from doing a soldier's work of killing and destroying in time of war. if an individual knows himself to be in complete agreement with the general opinion, then he lives at peace with his conscience. no impulse to change the customs, to set up a new morality, to condemn long-established usages, is to be expected from such an one. the mechanism whereby changes are wrought in views on good and evil is quite different. everywhere and at all times there are exceptional persons whose abilities render them specially fit to feel and think independently. to their idea the community has no determining but only an advisory voice. they reserve to themselves the right of decision in every case. in their consciousness there persists a clear recognition of the fact that the essence of morality lies in consideration for others, and when the current acceptation of the moral law among the majority allows them, nay, commands them to disregard this consideration, they experience a feeling of discomfort which dull, unthinking imitation of the general example does not soothe. they meditate upon the deviation from the fundamental rule of considering one's neighbour, they test its justification, and they condemn it, if its difference with the general moral law cannot be adjusted. if the essence of morality is consideration for one's neighbour, its purpose is the well-being of the community; its essence must be adapted to this purpose, that is to say, consideration for one's neighbour must be subordinated to the general welfare. the thief, the robber and the murderer have no claim upon consideration, and even a man with the most delicate sense of morality will agree that coercion of the criminal is desirable. tolstoy's warning: "do not oppose the evildoer," is not morality, but an exaggerated parody of it, which renders it nugatory. thus the most moral person will not raise any objection to a war waged in defence of hearth and home when their safety is threatened by a ruthless attack. but, if a mode of action which, though it be generally practised and approved, injures the individual and causes him to suffer, cannot be justified on the grounds of an obvious benefit to the community, then a small, sometimes an almost infinitesimal minority of independent thinkers will rise against the custom; they are not afraid of coming into violent conflict with generally accepted views; they defend the fundamental principle of morality, namely, consideration for the individual, against the exception, namely, oppression of the individual for the ostensible good of the community; they brand as immoral what is generally accounted moral; they announce that the current acceptation of the goodness or badness of a certain order of actions must cease. the intervention of such reformers always gives offence, and arouses anger which at times rises to murderous fury. but this wrathful indignation is just what makes a break in the automatic fashion in which the majority of average men act according to traditional custom; the attention of more and more minds is arrested, critically they examine the accepted moral law, they are penetrated first by the suspicion and finally by the clear conviction that it is contrary to the essence of morality, and they swell the ranks of the innovators who inveigh against the tradition. the struggle lasts long and is carried on pitilessly. the preachers of the new morality seem corrupt and criminal to the supporters of the old. they are persecuted and slandered and not seldom have to suffer martyrdom, but they always emerge victorious if their doctrine is in agreement with the logic of the fundamental principles of moral law. that is the history of the abolition of human sacrifices, of the vendetta, of slavery, of legal torture, of religious coercion. whoever looks about him with open eyes will note that civilized men are at the moment adopting new ideas with regard to the operation of state omnipotence, to war, to the right of the economically strong to exploit others, to the rights of women, to sexual morality, to the penal system. the advocates of a new morality must still put up with the most humiliating abuse. he who wishes to defend the individual from coercion by the state is an anarchist and deserves to be hanged or broken on the wheel. he who maintains that war is immoral belongs to the rabble of vagabonds who own no nationality, for whom no contempt is too deep and no punishment too severe. he who refuses a duel is a dishonoured coward, and thereby cuts himself off from decent society. he who recognizes woman's right to motherhood is a dastardly purveyor of opportunities for prostitution. he who attacks the present relation between capital and labour as a hypocritical continuation of slavery is an ignorant agitator or an enemy of society. he who would like to see the idea of punishment excluded from the law, as being retrograde and unscientific, and who wishes only the point of view of the defence of society to be recognized as valid, talks sentimental nonsense, disarms justice and places the community at large at the mercy of criminals. but the issue of the struggle is not in doubt. the present systems, which present exceptions to the moral law of consideration for one's neighbour, must go. although they are considered moral to-day, are, in fact, morality itself, to-morrow they will be felt to be immoral and be abhorred by all men of moral feelings. thus the concepts good and bad gradually change their meaning; views on what is moral and what immoral are constantly in a state of flux; and the only permanent thing is recognition of the fact that man's actions must be withdrawn from the control of subjective choice and whim, and must be subject to a law set up by the community; the justification of this law lies in its being necessary to the existence of society. every revision of moral values originates in some vexation, and ends by refining and deepening moral sentiment. in this chapter only the scheme of development of moral views and of their changes has been indicated. the question of moral progress will be dealt with fully later on. to sum up the arguments of this section, morality is not transcendental but immanent; it is a social phenomenon and restricted to the sphere of living beings. its beginnings may be traced in animal societies, it is developed among mankind. the preliminary condition necessary for this development is the ability to visualize future happenings, since moral conduct is determined by estimating its effects and results, that is, by conceiving something in the future. morality has a positive, concrete aim. it makes the existence of society possible, and this, given the circumstances obtaining on our planet, is the necessary condition for the preservation of each individual, and it originated from the instinct of self-preservation in the species. its essence lies in consideration for one's neighbour, because without this the communal life of individuals, that is, a society, would be impossible. if individuals had been able to live alone, morality could never have come into existence. the concepts good and bad characterize those actions which society feels to be beneficial or harmful to itself. as moral conduct implies consideration for one's neighbour, it is often, if not always, in conflict with selfishness, that is, with the immediate and instinctive impulses, and is, in the first place, accompanied by disagreeable sensations. the pleasurable emotion of satisfaction arises later through habit and reflection; it accompanies the thought of the merit and praiseworthiness of the victory over self. conscience is the voice of the community in the individual's consciousness. the idea of duty is the subjective conception of the rights of our neighbour; the idea of rights is the subjective conception of our neighbour's duty to us. morality is not absolute, but relative, and is subject to continual changes. to maintain that morality is cosmic, eternal, immutable, that it aims neither at profit nor pleasure, but constitutes its own aim, is pure anthropomorphic superstition. chapter iii the biological aspect of morality morality is a restraint which the community imposes on each of its members. it demands from the individual the sacrifice of his transitory and momentary comfort in favour of his general welfare which is dependent on that of the community. it prohibits the pleasure of gratifying his desires in order that by this unpleasant renunciation his lasting well-being may be ensured. subjectively experienced and viewed, therefore, morality always implies the limitation of free will, the curbing of desire, opposition to inclinations and appetites, and the diminution or suppression of free, or let us rather say of unbridled, action. before morality can profit the community, it disturbs and incommodes the individual, it rouses in him disagreeable sensations which may reach such a pitch as to be intense pain. it is only after deep reflection, of which not everyone is capable, that the individual realizes that morality is an essential condition of the life of society, and that the preservation of society is an essential condition of his own life; before he investigates, before he even meditates on morality, the individual feels it directly to be unpleasant, laborious, stern--nay, hostile. the control which morality exercises over the actions, and indeed in many cases over the most secret thoughts of the individual, appears at the first glance to be somewhat paradoxical. it is by no means obvious why the individual should always take sides against himself and, adopting a defensive and disapproving attitude, hold his instinctive tendencies in check. moral conduct would be intelligible if the community were always ready with means of coercion and could constrain the individual by brute force to place its interest before his own pleasure. but the individual does not wait for police intervention on the part of the community. he frowns upon himself with the awful severity of the law. he threatens himself with a cudgel. he divides himself into two beings, one of which wants to follow its instincts, while the other curbs them vigorously; one is a rearing, often a refractory, horse, the other a rider with bridle, whip and spur. this reduplication of the ego, one-half of which establishes control over the other, one-half of which tries to remain true to itself, while the other divests itself of its identity and denies itself--this is the inner process, the outward manifestation of which is moral conduct. this demands investigation and explanation. we must show how the organism could develop from within itself the power to paralyse, or completely repress, its own elemental activities, and how morality was able to become an integral part in the general scheme of life processes. the mechanism whereby the mind, appraising, foreseeing and judging, checks the first movement of impulse, is inhibition or repression. without inhibition moral conduct would not be possible. the mind would have no method of indicating the path and prescribing rules to the organism's instinct. it would have no means of making its insight prevail over the desires of the senses. it would have no weapon with which to force its being to actions opposed to its organic inclinations. without inhibition the individual would never give precedence to the demands of the community and lay himself open to disagreeable emotions in order to please the community. inhibition was the necessary organic preliminary to the phenomenon of morality. it had to be pre-existent in the individual, so that morality could make itself at home in his intellectual life, so that it could acquire creative, ruling and practical power among the elect, and become an unconscious and easy habit among the average. morality took possession of a pre-existent organic aptitude and made it serve its own purposes. but organic aptitudes are not alike in all individuals. in some cases they are more or less perfect; in others they may be lacking altogether. indeed only individuals with highly developed powers of inhibition are capable of that heroic morality which liberates them from the weakness of the flesh and makes them independent of the demands of the body; those in whom this power of inhibition is scantily developed evade the influence of morality entirely, and it has no authority over them. that which is called character is at bottom the name we give to the power of inhibition. where it is weak we speak of lack of character, whereas by strength of character we mean that the power of inhibition is great. the will makes use of inhibition. with its help the will guides the living machine in a certain direction and urges it to perform given tasks. at the first glance it may not seem obvious that positive actions can come of repression, which is something negative. but if we analyse psychologically the actions demanded and promoted by the will, and trace them back to their organic origins, we shall find that, as a rule, the first elements consist in the prevention of impulsive movements, and that the impetus to positive effort is given by the will, which converts these movements into contrary ones. a few instances may make this psychic process clearer. winkelried, at sempach, cleaves a path through the cuirassiers while they bury their lances in his breast; he becomes capable of this great deed of self-sacrifice in that, by a mighty effort of will power, he suppresses the strongest of all instincts, that of self-preservation, and forces all his energies, which are naturally directed towards flight from danger, to challenge danger and yield completely to it. the lover who overcomes his passion and renounces its object, because his idol is the bride of his best friend, begins with the determined inhibition of the impulse which urges him towards the woman, and attains renunciation by the suppression of his desire; this renunciation finds expression in positive actions, in the rupture of relations which bring him happiness, the avoidance of meetings which would prevent the wound in his heart from healing, and so on. the brave rescuer who plunges into the waves to save a drowning man, or enters a burning house to save a fellow creature threatened by the flames, must first overcome his natural shrinking fear of the water and the fire; and not till after the suppression of strong impulses to avoid the uncanny adventure, does he succeed in making his muscles obey the impulse to save life. inhibition, therefore, is the organic foundation on which morality builds, not only that morality which consists in abstention from certain actions, but that which is manifested in active virtue. but inhibition is a faculty which the organism has developed for its own ends, the better and more easily to preserve its own life, and to render its power of achievement greater. morality makes use of this faculty, which it finds ready to hand, for the ends of the community, and very often against the immediate interests of the individual for whose advantage it is nevertheless intended. now the individual would not put up with this inexpedient use, one is tempted to say this clever misuse, of one of its organic capacities, if this yielding up of the mechanism of inhibition to morality were not beneficial to life and therefore came within the sphere of the biological purpose of inhibition. by being grafted on a pre-existent organic faculty morality becomes such itself; it forms a link in the chain of biological processes within the individual organism; it ceases to be purely a product of society forced upon the individual to his molestation and in spite of his annoyance; it acquires the character of a differentiation of inhibition in order to help the individual, or even to make it at all possible for him to adapt himself to life in a society. that under the present conditions obtaining on our planet the human individual can only live in society demands no proof. and as he can only live in society if he submits to its rules of good and bad, morality, which urges him to this submission, aids and even preserves his life. we shall now show that inhibition, of which morality is a differentiation making it easier for the individual to adapt himself to the conditions of social life, is of the greatest value to the individual from the biological point of view. the lowest forms of life it is possible for us to observe show nothing which can be interpreted as inhibition. all external influences to which they are not indifferent invariably produce the same effects. they respond to every stimulus with a reflex action which reveals nothing that we should be justified in describing as an activity of the will. the reaction follows with strictly automatic regularity upon the stimulus, and nothing intervenes between the two which would permit the conclusion that in the simple organism there is any faculty that could delay, modify or change the reaction to the external stimulus. just as iron filings always respond to the attraction of a magnet in the same way, just as certain combinations of mercury at the impact of a blow flare up with an explosion, just as ice when warmed melts and becomes water, and water when cooled to a definite point freezes into ice, so do the simplest living things seek out certain rays in the spectrum, certain temperatures, certain chemical conditions and avoid others. not only unicellular organisms do this, but also comparatively highly developed animals, such as the daphniæ, for if light is sent through a prism into a vessel containing water, these little creatures collect at the violet end of the spectrum; such as the wood-lice, which hate the light and creep into dark crevices; such as gnats, which are attracted by the sun and dance in their hundreds in its rays. moreover, we meet with a similar phenomenon in man. we, too, in winter and spring seek the sun and in summer the shade; in the cold season the warm stove attracts us; bad smells put us to flight, sweet scents of flowers allure us. the simplest automatic reflex actions are at the root of these attractions and repulsions, exactly the same as with the daphniæ, wood-lice and gnats. only we are able to control and suppress these reflex actions which the lower animals apparently cannot. anthropomorphic modes of thought easily mislead us into thinking that the processes we observe in lower animals are due to an exercise of will power. we draw near to the fire in winter because it is pleasant, but we can quit it if duty calls us into the cold streets. one is apt to imagine that the simple organisms also experience pleasant and unpleasant feelings, that they try and avoid the latter, that the daphnia seeks the violet rays because it likes them, that the wood-louse flees the light because it dislikes it; in fact, that these creatures possess a consciousness which becomes aware of and distinguishes between pleasing and displeasing impressions, and that they possess a will which responds to these impressions with suitable reactions. very distinguished scientists have been unable to resist the temptation to assume in the lower animals, even in unicellular organisms, the existence of processes with which we are familiar in the human consciousness. william roux introduces us to a "psychology of protista," and w. kleinsorge goes so far as to maintain the existence of "cellular ethics," and to devote himself to research into its laws. the work of both these biologists is as fascinating as the most beautiful fairy-tale, but it is probably the creation of a lively and fertile imagination, just as the fairy story is. more prosaic and less imaginative scientists do not see evidences of psychology in the signs of life in the protista, or ethics in the movements of a cell, but merely the effects of universal chemical and physical laws which also control lifeless inorganic matter. to these laws they trace the tropisms of simple organisms which tempt the imagination, prone as it is to anthropomorphism, into errors; such tropisms, that is to say, as their tendency to seek moderate warmth, certain rays of light and weak alkaline solutions, or to avoid acids, heat and ultra-violet rays. the little organisms probably do not obey these impulses for reasons of pleasure or pain any more than the iron filings obey the attraction of a magnet for such reasons. they do not fly to it because it gives them pleasure; the little metal leaves of an electroscope do not move apart because contact with each other displeases them. all forms of tropism, chemicotropic, thermotropic, phototropic manifestations, active and passive tropisms clearly show that minute organisms involuntarily and unresistingly respond to the influence of natural forces, just as if they were inanimate particles. microscopic investigations reveal many phenomena which one is tempted to consider signs of life, but which cannot be such, as they occur in connexion with inanimate matter. the brownian movements are rhythmical molecular changes of position, not due to any mechanical impulse emanating from the surroundings, nor to a current in the fluid in which the object of investigation is immersed, but arising from the object itself, mostly very finely divided, tiny balls of mercury. a very small drop of chloroform introduced into a fluid of different density behaves exactly like a unicellular organism. it sends out pseudopods, wriggles and draws them in again. the pseudopods seem to feel and examine particles of matter with which they come in contact, and then either to withdraw quickly from them or to surround and incorporate them in the drop. this is deceptively similar to the behaviour of a living cell absorbing food, though there can be no question of this in the case of the drop of chloroform. in the latter it is merely a question of the effects of surface tension, that is, of the normal behaviour of matter in accordance with the laws governing the forces of nature, the investigation of which lies in the domain of chemistry and physics. impartial thought comes to a conclusion about these phenomena different from that derived from anthropomorphic delusions. it does not try to smuggle dim, dark life into the collections of mercury molecules apparently obeying some inner impulse, or into the seeking or feeling about of a pseudopod of chloroform. on the contrary, it understands life as the play of natural forces under the conditions supplied by a living organism, as the automatic working of a machine-like apparatus to which natural forces supply the motive power. similar manifestations in inanimate matter and in elementary organisms seem to justify the conclusion that the distinction between living and non-living matter is arbitrary, that there are only forces, or perhaps one single force, that is to say, one movement, in the universe, whose activity is manifested in the most manifold forms, of which life is one. modern monism has come to this conclusion, but it is not alone in so doing. long before monism there was a philosophy which conceived all cosmic energies to form a unity; and really it is only an obstinate quarrel about words, for the hylozoists regard the universe as something living and ascribe life to all matter and all atoms of which matter is made up, while the materialists regard life as a play of forces in matter. fundamentally the hylozoists and materialists hold the same views, only that the former call force life and the latter call life force; just as the only point of difference between them and the pantheists is that these have given the majestic title of god to the universal life they assume--as spinoza has it, "_omnia quamvis diversis gradibus animata sunt_." the question, what is life? is the greatest that the human understanding can ask of itself. for thousands of years man has cudgelled his brain over this, and is as far from finding an answer to-day as he was on the first day. the definition most often repeated runs thus: life is the ability possessed by certain bodies to react to stimuli, to absorb nourishment and to reproduce themselves. that is a statement of observed facts, but it is no explanation. it informs us that we are familiar with bodies which behave in a way distinguishing them from other bodies; but why they conduct themselves differently from others, what the particular thing is which is present in certain combinations of matter and absent in others--that is an impenetrable secret. science has tried by the most varied methods to solve the problem. it seemed a triumph of research that woehler produced urea, that chemists later on manufactured carbohydrates, that fischer is on the high road to the production of synthetic albumen. what is gained by these discoveries? we bring about the same combinations as the living cell does. that is, no doubt, an interesting achievement, but its value as an addition to our knowledge on this point is infinitesimal. for we accomplish the production of sugar, urea and amine in a manner very different to that of the living cell, and he who copies the things turned out in a workshop has contributed nothing to our knowledge of the workman who plies his trade in the workshop. the dividing line between life and lifelessness was supposed to have been obliterated when elementary manifestations of life were proved to exist in inanimate matter; the brownian movements in the smallest particles; the growth of crystals immersed in a solution of the same chemical composition as themselves; crystallization itself which represents a kind of very simple organization of matter, and at any rate proves the sway of a regulating and directive force; the tendency of certain elements to combine, which has been called their affinity. but this name is only a poetical metaphor which no one will take literally. the growth of crystals in their mother liquor is merely mechanical precipitation on their surface, an external addition of layers of the same material; but not growth by the incorporation of such matter, that is, through the absorption of nourishment. these and similar results of observation do not suffice absolutely to justify the assumption, seductive though it be, that life is a fundamental attribute of matter, that it is present everywhere though graduated in intensity, that therefore apparently inanimate matter differs not qualitatively, but only quantitatively from living beings, that life stretches in an unbroken line from the block of metal or rock, in which it is completely obscured, to man, the most highly developed organism we know of; and that at a certain point in its range it reveals itself in a form which permits no distinction between organic and inorganic matter. the origin of life is as completely unknown to us as its essence. for thousands of years the assumption was lightheartedly made that under certain, somewhat vague circumstances, life originated of its own accord. pasteur showed that a _generatio spontanea_ cannot be proved to exist, that every living thing comes from another living thing, a parent organism, and that the old philosophers were right in propounding "_omne vivum ex ovo_" as a law, although they only guessed it and had not proved it experimentally. a very few critics, who are hard to convince, still dare to assert in a small voice that pasteur's work and all the facts established by microbiology do not prove conclusively that life does not nevertheless originate from inorganic matter under conditions which we cannot nowadays reproduce in our laboratories. no answer can be made to this objection. an experiment is only conclusive for the conditions in which it is made, and not for others. all that we can positively assert is that on earth the genesis of life without a demonstrable parent organism has never been observed. to go farther, and to assert that a _generatio spontanea_ is absolutely impossible under any conditions, on earth or elsewhere, is arbitrary, just as it is to assert the contrary. those who are supporters of the theory that life can be developed from non-living matter for a long time thought they had conclusively proved their case; they argued as follows: at the present time life exists on our planet; according to the kant-laplace hypothesis our planet was formed from a cosmic nebula and passed through a state of fluid incandescence; in this state life is impossible; therefore life must have originated spontaneously one day after the earth had cooled down; consequently either the kant-laplace hypothesis is wrong or the assertion that life can only be generated by life is erroneous; the two assumptions are incompatible. this conclusion no longer presents any insuperable difficulties. it has been observed that spores which have been kept for months at the temperature of frozen hydrogen, that is, very nearly at absolute zero, have retained their germinative power and have developed when they were brought back to a favourable temperature. therefore they would not be killed by the cold of interstellar space on their way from one heavenly body to another, and could become the seeds of life on another hitherto inanimate star. that large numbers of tiny particles of matter exist in interstellar space and are precipitated on the heavenly bodies is proved by the cosmic dust that arctic explorers have collected from the surface of snow and ice. therefore the earth may well have been in an incandescent state, and may yet have received from interstellar space the germs of life which developed and multiplied when the earth's crust had cooled sufficiently to provide the conditions favourable to their existence; and these germs may have been the ancestors of all the life that exists on earth to-day after a period of evolution lasting hundreds of millions of years. this would account for the origin of life upon the earth, but not of life in general. the germs, which travel as carriers of life from an older heavenly body to a younger one, must have sprung from parents, and however far back we trace their genealogical tree we are always finally faced by this dilemma: either life did, after all, originate at one time from something lifeless, and what has happened once must be able to happen again, now and always; or life never originated at all, but has always existed; it is eternal like matter, in forms whose variety we cannot even dimly grasp, its threads, having neither beginning nor end, wind through eternity. of these two assumptions the latter is incomparably more in harmony with our present-day views on the universe. we believe the matter of which the universe is built up to be everlasting. it costs no great effort to believe life to be eternal too. true, the idea of eternity is inconceivable to us; it is a dim conception which has given rise to a word, a tone picture which portrays something indefinite, but within the bounds of the inconceivable there is room for both semi-obscurities, the everlastingness of matter and the everlastingness of life. but the most enigmatical point in the riddle of life is not life itself, which is a form of being, and is neither more nor less comprehensible than the existence of an inanimate object, of a stone, of water, of the air; it is consciousness. descartes proves his own existence to himself by the fact that he thinks. life must be accompanied by consciousness in order to convince the living being that it exists. the formula: "_cogito ergo sum_" has been admired for hundreds of years. it certainly is specious. but how many questions it leaves unanswered! has it the right to deny life to an entity that does not conceive itself? must it not be completed by the proof that life without thought, that is, without consciousness, does not exist, that consciousness is the necessary complement of life? and, above all, ought not descartes to have given us an explanation of what thought and consciousness are? i will attempt to answer the questions left unanswered by descartes. but i must premise one thing. every definition of consciousness implies a postulate: life. though at a pinch we can picture life without consciousness, consciousness without life is absolutely inconceivable. i do not undertake to explain what life is, any more than i attempted it above. we must take it as something given. consciousness, then, is the subjective realization of something objective, the inward realization of something outside. if in a living being a picture of its surroundings is developed, then it absorbs something which is not a necessary part of itself. of course, this inner image must not be understood to imply an absorption of matter. it is a process in the matter of which the living being is built up. but, all the same, the image of the outer world in the inner being does signify a penetration of the latter by the former. this image, which follows the changes of the outer world and repeats them in the inner being, is consciousness. it may be shadowy and blurred, or clear and distinct; it may in rapid succession be formed and pass away, and it can be preserved as a memory; it may reflect a greater or a lesser portion of the outer world; consciousness is accordingly duller or sharper; its contents are scant or plentiful, it retains the images of a shorter or longer series of conditions in the surrounding world. between nutrition, which is recognized as an essential phenomenon of life, and consciousness a surprising parallelism subsists. both consist in an absorption of the outer world by the organism; nutrition is the assimilation of matter, consciousness that of stimuli. in the process of nutrition the organism digests small quantities of the outside world; in consciousness it digests the world as a whole. this parallelism is no mere play of the intellect. if it is followed out it leads to significant ideas if not to actual knowledge. what penetrates from the outer world into the inner being of the organism is vibration, movement, force. is the matter which is absorbed as nourishment ultimately anything different? here we come up against the ultimate problems of physics, the various hypotheses regarding the nature of force and matter, the theories that in addition to matter there is an ether, or that the ether is a different, more subtle, form of matter, or that neither matter nor ether exist, but atoms out of which everything is built up, which themselves consist of electrons which are centres of force, motions without material consistency. all these theories, of which the last cannot be grasped by the human understanding, we can leave severely alone. this is not the place to investigate them. but the attitude of the living organism towards the outer world from which it absorbs nourishment and impressions, converting them into power to drive the life machine and transmuting them into consciousness, lends peculiar support to the supposition that force and matter are not only inseparable but identical, that in them we must seek a principle, or perhaps regard them themselves as a principle, which must be of the same nature as consciousness, for otherwise it could not be transmuted into the latter. the senses are the means by which the outer world penetrates as an image into the inner being. before the senses are differentiated the living organism possesses a general sensitiveness; that is to say, that under the influence of the outer world its cell protoplasm undergoes a process of regrouping, resulting in chemical and dynamic changes. the chemical results of stimulus are anabolism and katabolism, a building up and breaking down of the cell content; the dynamic results are movements which in the lowest forms of life are purely mechanical, but in the higher forms adapt the organism to the external influence in so far as they place it either so as to be affected by the latter as long and as powerfully as possible, or else so as to evade it. the living organism can experience no stimulus and respond to it without absorbing and transmuting it, converting it into a chemical process or a movement. this inner process is a subjective realization of something objective, a penetration by the outer world, therefore an elementary consciousness. in proportion as the general sensitiveness becomes differentiated into specific ones, as the image of the outer world filters through the different coloured glass panes of the various senses into the inner being of the organism, this image becomes multicoloured and varied. it lies in the nature of this mechanism that the subjective image is not identical with the objective original, but is modified and even distorted by the panes through which it penetrates to the inner being of the organism. what the subject perceives is never anything but a symbol of the object, never the object itself; but this symbol suffices to enable the consciousness to form an idea of the object, just as letters enable the reader to take in words and thoughts. we must conceive the development of consciousness to go hand in hand with that of the senses. the more windows the organism can open to the outer world the more easily and the more clearly does its image penetrate. the number of objects which the subject can take in is the measure of the perfection of its consciousness. the protista, lacking specific sense organs and possessing only the general sensitiveness of protoplasm, can form only to a very limited extent and with very little variety an inner realization of the stimuli of the outer world. its consciousness is necessarily very restricted and exceedingly dim. consciousness is enlarged and grows clearer as the organism develops and its general sensitiveness is differentiated into specific senses, until we reach the level of man whose consciousness embraces far more of the outer world than does that of any other living creature; because, lacking new senses, he has succeeded in amplifying and enlarging those he possesses, and has by artificial means made himself capable of perceiving stimuli to which he is not directly susceptible and which therefore would have remained unknown to him; to a certain extent he has translated them into a form which his senses can perceive. i do not overlook any of the difficulties which my attempt to explain consciousness leaves untouched. on all sides the most urgent and disquieting questions arise. above all, the fundamental question, the most enigmatic of all: how is an external stimulus, that is a movement, a vibration, converted into a sensation, a perception? further: must we in the consciousness distinguish between the frame and its contents, the conceptual mechanism and the concept? or do the two coincide? is there no consciousness without a conceptual content? and is it the movement entering into the organism, the inner realization of the outer world which, transmuting itself in an incomprehensible manner into a concept, creates consciousness, becomes consciousness? is the consciousness of the man standing upon the highest plane of intellectuality the greatest consciousness possible? does there exist anywhere in the universe a more abundant, perhaps an infinitely more abundant consciousness than that of human beings on the earth, and will the latter ever rise to this height? it is obvious that a development is in progress. there was a time when the most comprehensive, the clearest consciousness on earth was that of the trilobite or the cephalopod. evolution has gone as far as man. does it stop at that or will it continue? according to herbert spencer evolution is progress from the simple to the complicated. let us accept this definition. have we the right to set up a scale of values and place the complicated above the simple? is the latter not the more perfect because it has more power of resistance, greater durability, and can hold its own triumphantly against all destructive influences? is not evolution, then, a retrogression from the perfect, because simple, to the more complicated, and therefore more fragile, more easily upset and less capable of resistance to harm? is it not sheer egocentrism if we appraise the value of living beings according to their greater or less resemblance to ourselves, and judge them to be less or more worthy in proportion to their disparity with us? are the fish which, living in the sea wherein we cannot exist, can inhabit the greater part of the globe, are wild duck which fly, swim and walk, not more perfect than we, who have had to conquer the air and the water by artificial means? is not the mouse's hearing sharper than ours? the eagle's sight keener? the dog's scent incomparably more delicate? has not the carrier pigeon an infinitely better sense of locality than we have? are not many beasts physically stronger, more nimble and agile than man? his only claim to superiority rests on the greater perfection of his consciousness. why do not all living creatures participate equally in the evolution to which this superiority is due? why does it not take place in every organism and lead the unicellular living being in an unbroken ascent to the level of goethe or napoleon, or to a still more lofty one, if such an one exist anywhere in the universe? if one could believe in a ruling power and the plan of the universe as its work, would it not be terribly cruel and revoltingly unjust that this power, instead of treating all living beings alike, should make a kind of selection of grace and lead some up to a higher level while it condemned others to lasting lowliness, and that it should ordain that on the road from the unicellular organism to man, countless connecting links should be left hopelessly behind and not be permitted to continue their ascent? or must we admit the humiliating conclusion that a greater amount of consciousness does not necessarily imply higher rank and greater dignity, and that a protista, with its almost unimaginably pale and narrow consciousness, can have just as great a feeling of well-being as man with his immeasurably superior intellectual life; that therefore the protista suffers no wrong if it never gets beyond its present stage of evolution; and finally that the amount of the outer world which man can absorb in his consciousness is as far removed from the entirety of the universe as the contents of the protista's consciousness are from that of the human mind? no answer can be found to these questions. whatever purports to be an answer, be it introduced as theology or as philosophy, is visionary or nonsensical. we must resign ourselves to moving in a very small circle moderately illuminated by reason, while all around, if we seek to penetrate beyond it, we perceive gruesome darkness. evolution, that is a progress from the comparatively simple to the more complicated, is a striking fact--i say comparatively simple advisedly, for even in the unicellular organism the processes are far removed from the absolutely simple. we do not know from what part of the organism the impulse to evolution comes. here we meet with the same mystery which shrouds growth, its duration, its measure and its bounds. as the conception is lacking, a word has been found, viz., entelechy, which driesch introduced into biology, the co-operation of all parts of the organism for the purpose not only of preserving it but also of making it more efficient in the matter of self-preservation and more perfect. a critical investigation of entelechy would involve the broaching of the whole question of life. it does not come within the scope of this work. i shall therefore content myself with a very few remarks. entelechy works as if it were reasonable and acted with a set purpose. if you think it out exhaustively it forces you to the assumption that life is an intellectual principle, even in the protoplasm of the cell, long before there is any perceptible trace of consciousness; that this intellectual principle makes use of matter, builds it up, organizes it, moulds it into material and tools for construction, and sets up a mechanism in which and by which it develops itself. as far as we can see the purpose of life is life itself. entelechy directs all the work of the organism in such a way that it becomes more and more capable of self-preservation, that its efficiency becomes greater, that it can absorb more of the outer world and can react more vigorously upon the outer world. in other words, life strives continuously to make its embodiments more permanent, securer, richer and more manifold. however, if we do not know how the impulse to evolution originates, we can at least form an idea of the mechanism of evolution. fundamentally life consists in the absorption of cosmic movements or vibrations, and their transformation into another form of movement. the living cell is a machine which makes use of cosmic energy for physio-chemical work. metabolism, warmth, electric manifestations, movement, and as their concomitant a graduated consciousness, are the result of this work which is carried out by cosmic energy in the cell power machine. to start with, this machine works in the very simplest fashion. it uses up its motive power as fast as it acquires it. energy flows in and immediately flows out again in another form. the organism is like a pipe or a vessel without a bottom, so that its contents cannot be stored. the lower organisms which obey tropisms are such bottomless vessels. they are continually and inevitably subjected to the same attractions and repulsions and have no means to withstand them. but at a certain stage of evolution--how? why? driesch replies: entelechy!--a new part is developed in the machine, something like the cam on a cogwheel which forces it to come to rest. or, to keep to the earlier simile, the bottomless vessel acquires a bottom with a tap that can be opened and closed. with this arrangement the organism is able to store the energy it has received and then to make use of it according to its needs, to do much more or much less work with it, to achieve much greater or much smaller effects, than it would be capable of doing with the amount of energy it receives from outside in a given unit of time. it is obvious how much more efficient the organism becomes if it can store up energy and can adapt to its needs the amount used up. this new part of the machine is inhibition. it appears early, and takes part in the general development of the organism; it is indeed the strongest factor in this development. before inhibition intervenes the organism has only one response to stimulus: reflex action. this is of the character of an electric discharge. it may be stronger or weaker, but is uniform in kind. it varies quantitatively but not qualitatively. in the lower organisms it is a contraction of the cell protoplasm, a movement. in the higher organisms, in which the life processes are carried out on the principle of the division of labour and which have developed various organs for this purpose, each organ performs the action of its specific function; the muscle contracts, the nerve sends out a nervous impulse, the gland forms a secretion, and so on. all reflex actions have this in common, that they serve no other purpose than that of relaxing tension in the organism. they do not imply any co-ordinated effort to promote the comfort and the welfare of the living being. they cannot fulfil any complicated task. they exhaust the organism which, after a series of reflex actions, becomes insensitive to stimuli and must rest for a time before it can react again. beginning from that stage of evolution where inhibition intervenes, reflex action loses the character of an automatic response to impulse and becomes disciplined. inhibition tries to suppress reflex action. its success is more or less complete according to the sensitiveness and life energy of the tissue receiving the stimulus and the degree to which the mechanism of inhibition is developed. the organism retains its tension, remains charged with energy, and is able to carry out work for definite purposes. in place of anarchistic reflex action which occurs regardless of the needs of the organism, we find economy of energy, co-ordination of effort, movement directed to a profitable end. it is only inhibition which can raise the organism from its state of passivity, its helpless dependence upon tropism, to a being in which a will is beginning to dawn and which by its will becomes self-determinative. inhibition is a function of the will; it is the will's tool. even plato dimly perceived this, and he expresses it in the metaphorical language peculiar to himself, when, in the "republic," he compares a human being to a creature made up of three animals: a hundred-headed sea-serpent which must at one and the same time be fed and tamed, a blind lion, and a man who tames the serpent by means of the lion. these three animals are desire ([greek: epithumia]), courage ([greek: thumos]), and mind ([greek: nous]). we say in biological language, reflex action, inhibition, and will or volitional reason. all the concepts that are referred to here: purpose, co-ordination, inhibition and will, are every one of them dependent upon one fundamental concept, consciousness. without it they are unthinkable. schopenhauer's unconscious will is a word without meaning. i have postulated consciousness as the inseparable concomitant of life. it is probably the essence of life. in its lowest stage it is too dim, its contents too meagre and blurred, properly to distinguish the organism in which it dwells from the world around. in a higher state of development, when it gradually grows clearer and begins to be filled with more sharply defined ideas, it learns to keep its organism and the surrounding world apart, and tries to make the attitude of the former to the latter one of self-defence, self-preservation and self-development. from this stage of development onward, concepts begin to connect and group themselves in such a way that consciousness contains not only an image of the immediate present, but also memories of the past and a forecast of the future. the ability to prolong the present into the future, to understand the actual as a cause of the effects that follow and to foresee these effects, that is the starting point of logic and reason. it is the necessary antecedent of the will, which would have no meaning if it were not the effort to realize a conception of actions and their consequences, previously worked out by consciousness. will is a function of consciousness which, in pursuance of the well-known biological law, creates an instrument for its purposes, and this instrument is inhibition. the higher an organism stands on the ladder of evolution the more energetically and surely does inhibition work, the nicer and the more masterly does its intervention in the original reflex actions grow. thanks to the piling up of reserves of energy, which is a result of inhibition, the organism can carry out its work of differentiation, can develop organs and organic systems, and obtain the power to perform more complicated functions; these render it ever more independent of the outer world and enable it to affect the outer world to an increasing extent. inhibition plays an important part in differentiation. its apparatus becomes organized. the nerve centres from which the inhibition proceeds form a ladder of which each rung is subordinate to the next. the peripheral nerves are controlled by the nerve centres in the spinal cord, these again by the centres in the medulla oblongata, and then in succession by the cerebellum and the cerebrum, and finally by the corticle. on the principle of least resistance, on which all life is based, the highest centres of inhibition unburden themselves by granting the lower ones a certain measure of independence. the reaction to the most ordinary and frequent stimuli is controlled and organized in its character and strength by the apparatus of inhibition, so that it ensues automatically, and no active inhibition, that is, no conscious effort of the will, is required. the simplest of these automatic reflex movements take place below the level of consciousness. those organized complexes of movement, however, which we call instincts, are carefully watched by the consciousness and subjected to severe check if they appear to run counter to the supposed interest of the organism. the hereditary complexes of movement constituting instinct are highly organized and oppose inhibition, only yielding to it when it is stronger than they are. this can be observed in animals which are capable of taming and training. all the artificial actions and omissions that man teaches them are triumphs of inhibition over automatism. among human beings it is only the elect who can vigorously suppress their instincts by inhibition directed by reason. the being that has attained the summit of organic evolution on earth is man, in whom only the lower, vegetative life processes are liable to the influence of tropism and primary reflex actions, while all the higher and highest functions are the work of reason, which arms the will with inhibition and suppresses all impulses and actions that hinder its purposes. it is characteristic of these functions that they are first worked out as concepts by the consciousness before they are realized as movements. it was essential for morality to find this whole organic structure ready to its hand before it could become a factor in human life. this structure had been developed and perfected by the organism for its own purposes, for the defence and enrichment of its life, to ward off painful and obtain pleasurable feelings. morality took possession of it and used it for its own ends, which do not at the first glance coincide with the aims which the individual immediately perceives and imagines, and may indeed be diametrically opposed to these, preventing pleasurable emotions, causing him pain and even endangering his life. but morality, which is a creation of society, was only able to dominate the individual and gain control of the organic apparatus of his vital economy, because its purpose is directed towards the same goal as the tendencies of the individual organism, prolonging them beyond the individual's scope, aiming at his preservation, and thus coinciding with his instinct for self-preservation. morality limits the individual's vainglory and subordinates him to the community; it is the condition on which the community allows the individual to participate in the mightier and more varied means of protection and the enrichment of existence which it has to offer. but apart from this somewhat remote advantage of morality, there is another immediate one for the individual: it consists in the continual exercise and consequent strengthening of inhibition; therefore, as we have learnt to see in inhibition the main factor in the development and differentiation of all living creatures, it offers a means of raising the individual to biological perfection. the faculty of inhibition, being in a continual state of strong tension, makes automatic reflexes subject to the will, makes blind impulses obedient to the somewhat less blind reason, and helps man along the path of evolution from the status of a creature of instinct to that of a thinking personality of strong character, capable of judgment and foresight, a personality which does not seek to attain the pleasurable emotions necessary to every living creature by pandering to his senses and satisfying the appetites of the flesh, but achieves them by gratification of a higher order, by the triumph of the intellect over vegetative life, by strengthening the will in relation to the stimuli of the outer world and the organs, by taking pleasure in the fact that the will is content with its sway. these are harsh but subtle pleasures which, when they continue to preponderate in the consciousness, bring about that state of subjective happiness which is in the highest degree beneficial to life. morality is an arrangement which has arisen from the needs of society; that is to say, it is not innate, but is an artificial institution of the race. however, it grafts itself upon the natural organs and attributes of man, and thus, from being a sociological phenomenon, it becomes a biological one. the idea that morality is something absolute, a cosmic force, and that it would still exist and be valid if there were no human beings, and even if the earth had no existence, i have refuted with scorn. we must hold fast to the fact that morality is a law of human conduct, that it is in force only among mankind, and that apart from mankind it is unthinkable. as, however, it becomes a differentiated function of the apparatus of inhibition, it participates in the general processes of life and leads us to that point where, indeed, we face the unnerving outlook upon the absolute and the question of eternity. my arguments have led me to many phenomena that can be established and interpreted as facts of experience, but the explanation of which lies beyond the power of the human mind. we have examined the riddle of life, and we have distinguished therein a number of inexplicable things: the lack of a beginning, sensitiveness to stimuli, consciousness, the transformation of vibrations into sensations and concepts, the will, and inhibition. we are forced to the conclusion that the only discernible aim of life's activities is the preservation of life, or, more shortly, that life is its own aim and object. morality, too, either openly or by implication, sets itself the one clearly demonstrable task of ensuring to the individual the preservation and security of his existence in a higher sphere than that of individual vegetative life processes. thereby it fits into the scheme of existence, its mysteries and aims, and becomes an integral part of the cycle of life which emerges from eternity and returns to it. chapter iv morality and law the coercion which the community exercises upon its members, by means of which it forces them to adapt their actions and abstention from action to the standard it has set up, has two forms: custom and law. are the two really different? what is their relation, one to the other? these are questions worth investigating. ever since the earliest times, grave men have meditated on the relation between custom and law. they were forced by evidence and practical experience to note a difference between the two institutions, but at the same time they had the definite impression that they trace their origin to the same source. socrates distinguishes between the written laws of his country and the unwritten ones which express the will of the gods. the former constitute positive law which the citizen must observe and to which he must submit; the latter, however, are higher, for they emanate from the gods themselves. the immutability of the unwritten laws is a proof that they are superior to the written ones. written laws vary from state to state. they are the work of individual law-givers who were sometimes wise men and sometimes unreasonable tyrants. but all contain certain precepts which are everywhere alike, which everywhere impose the same rules upon man. it is almost as if one and the same law-giver had co-operated in the making of all the laws that obtain in the different towns and countries, and are so unlike one another in many points. this common law-giver, whose will is manifest in all laws, however far removed they be from one another, is the deity. that is essentially socrates' train of thought as given by xenophon in his _memorabilia_. the attic sage speaks the language of his time, which, by the way, is still that of many present-day people. the deity, whose will permeates all written laws and to whom they may be traced, is the principle of morality. hugo grotius, in a manner more appropriate to modern thought, expresses it thus: "law and morality spring from the same source, namely, the strong social instinct natural to man. they bear witness to reasonable solicitude for the welfare of the community." this placing on an equality of law and custom, of _jus_ and _mos_, is very remarkable in such a strictly professional thinker, such a positive jurist as grotius. kant discriminates between the doctrine of virtue and the doctrine of law; he keeps them apart, but he emphasizes their connexion, and the two together make up his doctrine of ethics. as a matter of fact, no fundamental difference between law and custom exists; only law is enforced differently to custom. it would be going too far to say: law has sanctions and custom has none. the latter has sanctions too, but they are of a different kind to those of the law. he who transgresses custom will suffer the contempt of his fellow men, and this may become so penetratingly severe that the most hardened and shameless rascal must feel it. in an old, loose form of society where individualism is highly developed, and each one goes his own way, paying little regard to the others, there an unscrupulous, conscienceless rogue may sin against socrates' unwritten law without being penalized. in a young, closely-knit community, however, in which the feeling of intimate connexion between the members is lively and vivid, he would be proscribed, as soon as he was found out, and it would be impossible for him to remain, say, for example, in a small town of the united states. public opinion would make it so hot for him that he would be glad to escape with a whole skin. but this punishment is exceptional for transgressions of custom, whereas it is the rule for those of the law. the sanction of the law is stricter than that of custom, just as the law itself is stricter than is custom. the law concerns itself with concrete cases in which consideration for one's fellow men must be practised, duties to him fulfilled, and his claims respected. these cases are defined by law as clearly as possible, whereas custom confines itself to generalities and determines the whole attitude of the individual to his neighbour. custom embraces the outer and inner life of man and supervises his opinions, which are the parents of his deeds, and also his deeds themselves; law is only concerned with actions, and refrains from penetrating to the intimacy of thoughts, unless the latter alter the essential character of the action, as premeditation in an act of revenge and temporary or permanent irresponsibility alter the judgment of offences and crimes. law is a miserly extract of custom, a meagre selection from its variety, a concentration and embodiment of its surging vagueness. it may be compared with crystals, which in their geometrically accurate forms are crystallized clearly and definitely out of a liquid, the mother liquor; or with the heavenly bodies which agglomerate out of surging primal nebulæ. custom is the primitive thing, law is derived from it. it appeals to its descent from custom, and founds, at any rate tacitly, its claim to respect on these grounds. a law which ran counter to custom, which was confessedly in opposition to custom, could never be maintained or prevail, though it bristled with the menace of the most dreadful punishments. the relationship of mother to child between custom and law may be obscure to the majority; it is clear to the analytical mind. recognition of the essential unity of both phenomena explains an assumption which was widespread among the best intellects from the middle ages until well into the eighteenth century, but which has now been abandoned as erroneous by more positive, though indeed narrower, legal minds. this assumption is that there is a natural law antecedent to historical law, which exists and acts beside and above the latter, and which forms the basis and the measure of every positive law, of every concrete legal judgment. it is comprehensible that the nineteenth century swept away the idea of natural law and freely made fun of it. to a sternly disciplined legal mind it must indeed seem grotesque if a judge, in order to arrive at a verdict in some concrete dispute, cites the rights to which man is born instead of a certain text of the law, or even, following schiller's advice, reaches up to the stars and brings down thence the eternal law. even this procedure is not so farcical as it seems to stupid article-mongers and hair-splitting paragraphists, for the procedure of equity of the english judges, who are not prone to clowning, is at bottom nothing but this reaching up to the stars and this judging by the rights to which man is born. the feud between natural law and historical law was really a quarrel about a word. jean jacques rousseau, his contemporaries and disciples, simply made a mistake in their choice of an expression. they were guilty of an inaccuracy when they spoke of natural law. they should have said: "the innate claim of man that his person should be respected," or, "natural consideration for one's fellow man," or, most shortly and simply, "morality." to the latter legal lights would have raised none of the objections with which they victoriously opposed natural law. the beginnings of morality coincide with the beginnings of society, as the latter could not have existed for a single day without the former. since men, forced by the struggle for existence, emerged from their original, natural solitude and united in a community, they have had to watch over their impulses, suppress their desires, do things they disliked, and in all their actions and abstentions from action consider their neighbours' feelings, as they demanded that their feelings, too, should be considered. that was morality which limited the vainglory and arbitrary conduct of unfettered man. it included all rules that determine the attitude of man to man. there was no distinction between custom and law. men were ruled by custom which was traditional in their community and observed by all; and their custom had the force of law. formulated laws, and more especially written laws, appear comparatively late. true, asia has old examples of such; the manava dharma shastra, the book of laws of the indian manu, the chinese chings, the law of hammu rabi, and that other law, akin to this, though not derived from it, but probably drawn from a similar older source, the law of the pentateuch. the laws of draco, solon and lycurgus and the roman twelve table law are appreciably younger; much later still the _leges barbarorum_ were written down, some of them, like the prescriptive law of the germans set down in the "_sachsenspiegel_," not till the end of the middle ages. it is peculiar to most of the old asiatic laws that they contain both rules of conduct and legal regulations, and that they do not differentiate between these two kinds of precepts. let us take one example: the ten commandments. beside such positive orders as "thou shalt not steal"; "thou shalt not kill"; "honour thy father and thy mother"; we find such as give rules for the character and course of spiritual happenings, regarding which others cannot observe whether they are obeyed or not, like the commandments respecting man's relationship to god, or admonishing man not to covet his neighbour's wife or goods. those are subjective impulses, spiritual moods which are revealed only to the eye of conscience as long as they do not betray themselves in action, and which by their very nature cannot be the subject of law which deals only with outward manifestations of thought and will, and is concerned only with things done. in constitutional law, too, no less than in criminal and civil law, the eighteenth century tends to preface certain laws with universal moral principles, and to establish by formal law that the former are derived from the latter. the declaration of independence of the united states in july, , says: we consider the following truths self-evident: that all men are born equal; that the creator has bestowed upon them inalienable rights, amongst which are the right to life, to freedom, to the pursuit of happiness, etc. so before these rights are guaranteed by the law, they are announced to belong by birth and nature to man, to be independent of any particular and express bestowal by the law-giver, and beyond all dispute or even argument. of the thirteen states which formed the original union, ten accompanied their constitution by a bill of rights which repeated the essential contents of the declaration of independence of july, ; seven of them placed them as an introduction before their fundamental law, and three of them incorporated them in the latter. two others, new york and georgia, distributed them among various articles of their constitution. rhode island alone refrained from a general declaration. the states which joined the union later, with few exceptions followed the example of their predecessors and built up their constitution on the foundation of an explicit statement of the natural rights of man. the french revolution followed the course which the united states had indicated, and began its constitution of with the "declaration of the rights of men and citizens," which is not a law in the technical sense of the word, but is superior to all positive law, constitutes the latter's standard and touchstone, and straightway makes all laws invalid which are not animated by its spirit or which contradict it. in the beginning, therefore, there was morality, and the first laws, which formulated its precepts either in oral tradition or in writing, recommended without distinction what was good and desirable, and what was necessary and expedient. the differentiation of the morality, which the commonwealth felt to be its code of right and wrong, into custom and law took place in late times. it was most definite in rome, where for the first time a clear distinction was made between men's relation to their gods and their relation to one another; the former was left to the individual's conscience, the latter subjected to the power of the state; the elements of feeling and of dim perception were banished from the law which confined its attention to deeds which it regulated in a high-handed manner. law chose from out the all-embracing sphere of morality one narrow area, that of mankind's immediate, material interests, and took this as its sole theme. the object of all morality is to enable men to live together in a community peacefully and prosperously; within the bounds of this more general purpose, the task of the law is to suppress by force the grosser hindrances to this harmony among individuals, and by material means of coercion emphatically oblige everyone to respect the interests of his neighbour. what every responsible man of sound mind demands first and foremost is a proper respect for the possessions that are his by birth and acquisition, that is for his life, for his bodily welfare, for all the goods he owns that minister to his needs, his comfort and his pleasure. he who lays violent hands on these possessions, or threatens to endanger them, is recognized to be an enemy; man arms himself against such an one, fights against him, tries, if he have a strong character, to destroy him, or flees from him if he is too weak to triumph over him; man only yields to such an one if he simply cannot help himself, but he does so with hatred and revenge in his heart, and in a state of mind which, if it becomes fairly widespread, sets every man's hand against his fellow-men and leads to the ruin and even to the dissolution of the community. hence the task of law is effectively to protect the individual from the infringement of his rights by others. it places the organized forces of the community at the service of the individual whose interests are threatened, for the criminal law penalizes more or less severely attempts against life and health, unlawful seizure of property whether by force or cunning, malicious molestation and offence; the laws of commerce keep watch over the faithful fulfilment of contracts dealing with the fair exchange of goods or the execution of work, and in case of need enforce it. a select few, everywhere only a small minority, has a different scale of values to that of the masses. for them "life is not the supreme thing." there are things they value more highly. the masses have no understanding for these people's needs and fine feelings. their self-respect and their dignity are dear to them as wealth, their honour more sacred than life itself. unhesitatingly they sacrifice their property to freedom, and more unbearable than anxiety for their material interests is life in surroundings in which brutality, vulgar sentiments, harsh egotism, malice, hypocrisy and treachery preponderate. the law does not consider this minority. it is the creation and the servant of the great majority. it clings to earth and is incapable of lofty flights. it is of no service to the elect in the preservation of their noblest spiritual possessions or the defence of their ideals against clumsy maltreatment. it declares itself to be incompetent to deal with any but material affairs. therein lies at one and the same time the strength and the weakness of the law. its strength lies in the fact that it definitely limits its sphere of action and strives to achieve positive results by positive means, results intelligible even to a mean understanding. its weakness lies in the fact that it ignores man's highest and noblest interests. and these interests are there, they too deserve consideration and protection, they have a right to demand that the guarantee of the community should embrace them as well. the well-being of the community, which is the object of morality and of law too, demands that such conditions should be created and maintained, as should enable the elect also to enjoy life or at least find existence bearable. but law does not suffice for that. no law enjoins upon the careless throng of pachyderms to spare the tenderest and noblest sensibilities of lofty natures; no judge punishes thoughtless or purposely malicious injury to them. to remedy this evil we must rise from the lowly plain of law, the natural dwelling-place of the masses, to the heights of morality, the habitual abode of superior minds. at the theological stage of civilization refuge is sought with the gods in whose hands the protection of essential, spiritual possessions is placed. they are expected to punish the wicked whose evil deeds are beyond the reach of any penal code, they are expected to soothe and comfort when life is hard or even unendurable. that is the compromise that the elect made with life in the hard times of european barbarism. they escaped from the world and thus avoided contact with the repugnant masses. they shut themselves up in cloistered cells away from mankind and held mystic intercourse with god. among the people, cruel authorities with difficulty maintained discipline and scanty law and order by means of flogging and the pillory, torture, the gallows and the wheel. the minority of the elect disciplined themselves, suppressed their lower impulses by self-imposed mortification, and with the help of prayer and belief in god's promised millennium managed to keep their heads above water despite the crushing spectacle of the life of those times. long before the christian era, the greeks of noble disposition felt the need of living in an atmosphere of higher intellectuality and morality than that of the market-place, and they hid themselves behind the cloud-curtain of the eleusinian mysteries, where they kept to themselves, escaped the rule of the rude law, and followed the nobler precepts of morality. whenever the measure of morality contained in positive law did not suffice for the minority with higher aspirations, this minority adopted the same expedient, a form of esotericism; small circles were formed outside the community in which there was added to the current legal code a superstructure of stricter rules, more finely shaded duties, more courteous consideration. present-day life also offers examples of this tendency which is met with in all ages. there are select circles and professions in which the standard of irreproachableness is far higher than among the mass of the people. there a man is not held blameless, simply because he has never transgressed a positive law, never come into conflict with the powers of justice. he must be as unspotted in the eye of moral justice as he is in that of the law. a club or association that is self-respecting will not admit to membership a candidate reputed to lie, to have an evil tongue, to break his word, to be a toady and a snob, though none of these offences are punishable by law. it has happened that a corps of german officers has forced one of their number to send in his papers because he has seduced and deserted a respectable girl, an adventure flattering to the vanity of puppies who, as like as not, boast of it, and with which a judge can only deal if the injured girl appeals to him--and even then he cannot punish the offender, but merely sentence him to pay damages. almost the whole world is agreed on the point that the law does not sufficiently protect honour. positive law evidently does not consider it of such value as material possessions, for the defence of which it knows itself to be qualified. but there are numbers of people whose honour is dearer to them than their fortune, even than their life, and trembling with indignation they see that a thief who steals their purse with a few shillings is haled off to prison, while a slanderer who sullies their honour either goes unpunished, or at most gets off with a fine, which merely adds official insult to the injury. in this case the law has lagged so far behind morality that individuals try of their own accord to bridge the gulf without counting on the intervention of the community. for aspersions of their honour the masses take revenge with fists and cudgels, often with bloody results; and among the elect they resort to duels with lethal weapons, a preposterous proceeding due to desperation, and a bitter indictment of the prevailing laws. it is a deed of self-help, like the formation of a vigilance committee among the anarchical throng of a lawless rabble. hardly to be justified on reasonable grounds, it is intelligible from the point of view of historical tradition, and as a survival of dim and primitive ideas. in early days a properly regulated duel was an ordeal showing the judgment of heaven. it was the general conviction that god would give victory to the right and crush the wrong. when human law failed, the injured party appealed to the source of all law and placed his cause in the hands of the almighty. from this point of view the duel is no unsuitable means of preventing plots to evade the law. even if the injured party is inexperienced in the use of the weapon, even if his opponent is skilled and vastly his superior, he need not worry, for god fights on his side. therefore he is more sure of success than if he entrusted his cause to fallible human judges. but from the moment that the duel ceases to be regarded as a means of arriving at the verdict of god, nothing can be urged in its defence, and that it nevertheless persists is a fact that can only be accounted for by the inadequacy of the current laws. it really is astonishing that the law does not yet appraise honour at its true value. educated people almost unanimously regret and condemn the backwardness of the law in this respect, all the more so because the tremendous development of the respectable, as well as of the disreputable, press facilitates and aggravates libel to a hitherto undreamed-of extent, and no defence can overtake the slander which is quickly spread broadcast. doubtless public opinion will urge that measures be taken to bring the law into line with the views now held on all sides on the significance of honour, its defencelessness and its need for protection. that this has not yet been done is due to the slowness with which the law adapts itself to the demands of a morality which grows ever more profound and more refined. law, which originally devoted itself only to the crudest material interests, very slowly extends the range of its protection, but it does so continually, with an ever-widening embrace, including more and more delicate, more and more noble, possessions, taking into consideration ever higher and ever finer needs. what early legislator would have thought of man's needing protection not only against murder, grievous bodily harm and maltreatment, but also against the dangers due to ignorance and carelessness in light-heartedly spreading infectious diseases, and contaminating water and the air? who would have dreamed in former times that positive law would consider the sensitiveness of nerves, desire for beauty, dislike of ugliness and forbid disturbing street noises, protect the countryside from wicked disfigurement, and prevent the construction of buildings which would spoil the artistic architectural plan of a city? these little traits, these concessions to personal demands, which to a coarse mind do not seem obviously justified, go to prove that positive law continues to grow beyond the bounds of its unavoidably crude materialism, and strives to rise into the regions of the unwritten law of the peripatetics, where ideal possessions are of more importance than those which have traditionally come within the scope of criminal and civil law. law and custom have a natural tendency to approach more and more nearly to one another, to become merged in one another where the line that divides them is but faintly indicated. the closer the union between them, the more perfect is the morality of a society. absolute perfection would be reached if law, which has been derived by differentiation from morality, should, after a protracted period of development, return to its source and be completely merged again in morality. but that is a dream which can never be realized as long as man is constituted as he is at the present time. enthusiasts have dreamed of it, and in their imagination have seen an anarchical and lawless society in which no positive law, no sanctions of force were needed, and in which the understanding and conscience of individuals would suffice to ensure the rule of good faith and goodness, and the curbing of selfishness. as far as man can tell we shall never attain this utopia. we shall never be able to do without positive law, not only on account of undeveloped and perverse natures, in which animalism has the upper hand of humanity, and which must be kept under strict discipline, but because a sure guide is needed in cases of doubt and irresolution which confuse even the good, nay, the best, men when passion and violent desire, with their heavy thunderclouds, darken the outlook of reason, and judgment wavers amid the hurly-burly of a spiritual tempest. all that we may hope for and should desire is that law should be filled with the spirit of morality and embrace as many moral ideas as possible. it lies in the nature of the thing that morality was never clearly and definitely formulated, for as soon as this was done it assumed the character of law. it remained general and slightly vague, it spoke to men in such indefinite terms as "good," "virtue," "duty," "love of one's neighbour," "unselfishness," "patience"--terms into which everyone can read the meaning which suits his thoughts and feelings. mankind has never lacked moral teachers. the indian shastras and the chings, confucius and meng tse, the prophets of israel and ben sirach, plato and the wise men of the stoics, the zend avesta, jesus and paul, the platonic ethics of nicomachus, those of epictetus and marcus aurelius, thousands of years ago preached the principles which exhaust the whole field of morality, and beyond the essentials of which none of the later moralists have gone; neither the "imitation of christ" nor ibn bachia, spinoza, the scotch school and kant, up to wundt and guyau. but what about the effect of the doctrines which they advocated gently or passionately, adducing proofs or uttering threats? to lend weight to them they either appealed to god, threatening mankind with his wrath and vengeance, or to reason, which, according to them, could advise man only for his good. perhaps they could intimidate those who had blind faith and convince the reasonable. but there are many of little faith, and more still who are unreasonable, and on these the persuasion, warnings and conclusions of the moralists had no effect. for these it was imperative to clothe the minimum of morality, the minimum without which no society can exist, in the definite form of laws, and so create the law to which the weapons of the community lend compelling force. thus the whole material of ethics is divided into morality and law. the theologians and scholiasts who trace all binding rules of human conduct back to revelations of the divine will recognized on principle only one single law: but the aspect of practical life made even them distinguish between the "_lex indicativa_" and the "_lex præceptiva_," between an indication or counsel and precept or command. the "_lex indicativa_" is morality, the "_lex præceptiva_" is the law. codes are the normal expression of the law. not all law is formulated in this way, for there is a recognized law of custom, but all laws, codified or not, become a part of the prevailing law. naturally, and as is only reasonable, all law is pre-existent in the consciousness of the majority, and the law-giver's rôle is limited to setting down in paragraphs universally acknowledged principles dictated by public opinion. however, there are an appreciable number of historical instances in which this procedure is reversed; the law-giver, without inquiring whether his ideas were in accord with the general conscience, arbitrarily clothed his dictates to the community in paragraphs which it had to accept as law. it is clear that this procedure is extremely risky. even if the law-giver possesses superior wisdom, even if he is far in advance of his people and his age, even if his intentions are of the best, there is grave danger that the moral feeling of the people will revolt against the laws thus forced on them. outwardly they yield to the pressure of public authority, but they obey the law with a keen inner sense of opposition; a chasm yawns between conscience and the practice of the law, ideas of morality and law become confused, the moral foundation of all laws totters, and the public gets into the habit of regarding the law as something alien and hostile, which cannot be disregarded with impunity, but which it is not only not culpable, but even meritorious to evade. an enormous amount has been written on the subject of what a law is, and all this literature expresses in endless words very few and, almost without exception, very mediocre thoughts. i should consider it an unpardonable waste of time to devote any considerable space to this rubbish, either in order merely to quote opinions or to investigate and confute them. perhaps the best thing said of the laws is hobbes's description: civil law (the law of the country) is nothing but a guarantee of natural law. it is true that this definition implies a supposition: the existence of natural law which, however, is not binding in itself but requires the sanctions of the law of the country. moreover, it is only correct if we add the limitation that it does not guarantee all natural law, but only a part of it. hobbes is also forced by his definition of the law of a country to explain what he means by natural law, and he does not evade this duty. "natural law," he says, "is the decree of true reason (_ratiocinatio recta_) with regard to what we must do and what avoid for our self-preservation.... transgression of natural laws is due to false reason (_ratiocinatio falsa_)." in spite of its vagueness this explanation of hobbes's shows that what he really means by natural law is morality, and in this respect his views on the relation of natural law to civil law, that is, of morality to law, practically coincide with mine. nevertheless, he ignobly denies the moral decency of his doctrine of law when later on he coldly and dryly remarks: all that the state commands is just, all that it forbids is unjust. saying this he stupidly and obsequiously makes the civil code the source of law, whereas by his own definition law (he says "natural law") is the source of the civil code. it is more pardonable for pusendorf, a formal jurist, to say: "law is the decree (_decretum_) with which a superior binds his subject (_sibi subjectum_)." that interpretation of law is possible if it is considered from outside; it is a means of coercion in the hands of the mighty to subjugate the dependant; this point of view ignores the essential; but pusendorf has no concern with this, for he makes no claim to be a philosopher, he keeps within the bounds of juridical practice. the bishop of seville, saint isidor, the most respected theologian of the time between the last patristic writers and st. thomas aquinas, gives the following definition of law: "law is an institution (_constitutio_) made by the people, by which the nobles (_majores natu_), together with the common folk, have given a sanction to some ordinance." this says little about the essence of law, but it leads to the question of the origin of laws. on this subject, too, whole libraries full of books have been written since the time of plato and aristotle; luckily, for the most part, they now only serve as food for moths and worms. from this tangle of hair-splitting and sophistry, from this muddle of syllogisms, dogmatism and deep-sounding phrases which mean nothing at all, one thought emerges pretty clearly, to wit, that only the highest authority in the state has the right to make laws. on this point there is perfect unanimity; and that is natural, for it is so obvious that it has no need to be circumstantially investigated and proved in the fifty thousand books that have been written on the subject. it is perfectly clear that one cannot possibly force all the members of a state to obey certain commands and prohibitions which the law contains, unless one is stronger than each one of them, and therefore the law must necessarily emanate from the highest power in the state. it is beside the point to obscure this simplest and most transparent fact by questions as to the right of the law-giver. he needs no theoretical right since he has the might. to use kant's expression, positive law is not a creation of the mind ([greek: noumenon]), it is a phenomenon; its existence is a matter of empiricism, not of reason; it is a matter of fact and is under no obligation to justify itself intellectually to the intellect. no law-giver has ever troubled to tack on a preamble or an addition to the law he promulgates proving that he has the right to enact it. but in the literature dealing with this matter opinions differ widely as to who embodies or possesses the highest power in the state. according to some it is the king, because he wields the sword and therefore can enforce unconditional obedience; according to others it is the church, because the law, to be binding, must be moral, and morality is established by god since the church is the representative of god on earth. others again regard the people as a whole as the highest power, because without their assent no law can prevail, and because even the king only has the power of which the people divests itself to transfer it to him. history has advanced beyond this quarrel. to-day no one dares to dispute the fact that the nation alone is qualified to enact laws for itself through the agency of its chosen representatives, and that no law can be binding for the people without their explicit or tacit consent. in switzerland, where they have instituted the referendum, the people by their vote can repudiate a law, made by their representatives in their name, before it comes into force; and in the other constitutional states they have recourse to the following expedient: whenever a law is promulgated which seems inacceptable to them, at the next parliamentary election they vote for men who are pledged to do away with it. the people have the power to make laws, therefore they also have the right to do so, and they do not hesitate to revolt if this right is tampered with. in recent times no nation outside russia has submitted to having laws forced on it, in framing which it has not co-operated, and which it has not expressly accepted. the united states tore themselves away from the mother country with the cry: "no taxation without representation!" and more than a hundred years before that the english people had irrefutably proved to the stuart king, charles i, that he had no right to make and unmake laws, by condemning him in a court of law with legal formalities and then having his head cut off by a masked executioner. the legal code is the concrete form of the law, and the law is the crystallization of the most material part of morality. and as morality binds every member of the community, as man is only tolerated in the community on condition that he respects morality, it is a matter of logic that he should also respect the law; that is to say, that he must not only submit to it because he fears punishment if he fails to do so, but that he must feel obedience to the law to be part of his morality, that he must act lawfully at the dictate of his own conscience, and not because of the threat of the power of the state. this might be enunciated as a principle without reservation and without limitation, if in practice the laws always were, as in theory they should be, moral. but this is not necessarily the case. the law is a form, and every form can be abused by filling it with unlawful contents. if an unscrupulous adulterator of wine fills a champagne bottle of the usual shape, complete with metalled and wired cork and a label recommending it, with some disgusting mixture and puts it on the market, he is severely punished for adulteration of food and infringement of the law protecting trade marks. but if the government publish in the _gazette_ foolish, risky, and perhaps absolutely immoral orders in the form of a law, duly arranged in chapters, articles and paragraphs, as the people are accustomed to seeing their moral laws expressed, who impugns them for it? the examples of this in history are only too numerous. to this category belong all laws seeking to maintain the validity of state authority at the expense of the natural rights of thinking and feeling men, e.g. all religious persecutions, the maltreatment of socialists, excise laws and duties which hamper freedom of work and movement, or are tantamount to robbing a particular man or all citizens. as a rule, laws of this kind can be imposed upon the people only in a despotically ruled state, since the people in this case has no share in legislation; but constitutional government is no guarantee against it, for parliamentary majorities can be forced to enact tyrannical laws, by fanning the flame of national or party fanaticism, by encouraging prejudices, or by intimidation; this is proved by bismarck's may laws and socialist laws, and also by the laws passed by the national assembly at versailles against the rebels of the commune and against paris. obedience to such laws cannot reasonably be demanded. only a hobbes will dispute this, for whom "everything that the state commands is just, everything that it prohibits is unjust," or the digest according to which "_quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem_" (what pleases the ruler has the force of law). legal enactments, though they be immoral, are yet formal law; as a matter of fact, however, they are wrong, and even if their originator has the power by brute force to secure obedience to them, no man who tries to evade them and to get them abolished will be accused of immorality. a trivial objection strikes one at once. only a despotic megalomaniac will forbid his subjects to make representations in the proper quarters, and in the proper way, for the purpose of getting a bad law abrogated; but as long as it is in force it must be obeyed. for if every citizen were allowed to make a selection of the laws according to his choice, acquiescing in some and rejecting others, this would lead straight to anarchy. the reply to this is that anarchy, although a terrible evil, is notwithstanding a lesser one than an immoral law, that is, a law which sins against morality. for the maintenance of law and order which the state guarantees is only preferable to anarchy because it enables individuals to live together in peace, and guarantees liberty of movement and respect for persons, life and property. but if the state acts wrongly, and interferes in the feelings and convictions of individuals, if it uses brute force to compel them to actions and abstentions against which all the good in them rebels, then its law and order is law and disorder, and it is the state itself which brings about a condition of anarchy by making force the ruling factor in the life of the individual. for the latter it is all one whether he has to yield to the force of the state or that of his neighbour. nay, more, his position is worse in a condition of anarchy caused by the state, than in that which existed before the state was formed, because it is easier to meet force with force, when this emanates from an individual who is one's equal, than when it is exercised by the superior organization of the state. the state which enacts immoral laws denies its own principle and causes its own dissolution. the intellectual constructions of the eighteenth century, of which the most famous is j. j. rousseau's "social contract," are not taken literally by anyone nowadays. nobody seriously believes that one day individuals living in a state of nature banded themselves together and made a contract, by virtue of which they renounced certain liberties and rights and transferred them to a superior authority which was to rule them so as to promote the general welfare, peace and happiness. but if the procedure was not quite so simple as this, at least it is certain that the state undertakes the task which rousseau expressly prescribes as its aim. if, however, through its fault, the fault of its legislation, the welfare of the community suffers, and peace and happiness are not promoted but hindered, disturbed and destroyed, then every citizen has the moral right to revolt against the state and paralyse its pernicious might; not because it has broken a formal contract with its citizens, but because it has become inimical to the peaceful life of mankind, the purpose of every social community. if anyone is troubled at the thought that there is no reliable standard whereby to test the morality of a law and no place indicated where such a measure can be applied, he may take comfort by remembering that all morality is surrendered to the feelings and judgment of the majority and has no other sanction than this. history teaches us that the majority does not acquit itself too badly of its duty. public opinion suffices to maintain morality at a certain level in a community. and if public opinion is capable of ensuring respect for the unwritten law of morality without the sanctions of state law, it may surely be recognized as a fit judge of the morality of a law. that is the theory of the right of citizens to defend themselves by all means, even by force, against immoral laws. practically, it is of no importance, because nowadays, at least in all progressive and liberally governed states, the people have constitutional means at their disposal to prevent or quickly to rid themselves of laws that are obnoxious. morality includes the law, whereas law is only a part of morality. owing to its coercive nature, the law is obliged to be concrete and material and to ignore all the imponderable, barely perceptible, spiritual and dream-like things which hover round morality, surround it with an atmosphere and transport it beyond definite boundaries into the realm of the unconscious and visionary. the total exclusion of the element of feeling which morality includes, constitutes the most profound difference between it and the law. law protects order but knows no love. the separation of law from morality is due to the pressure of selfishness which thinks it has made the greatest possible concession when it rises to the height of saying with ulpian: "_neminem laedere. suum cuique reddere. honeste vivere._" injure no one; that is, refrain from the ruthless use of force; render to each his own; that is, do not retain in rascally fashion what belongs to another; live honourably; that is, give no offence to your neighbour by disorderly conduct and depravity. well and good. at a pinch one can live like that. but the words pity, kindness, love of one's neighbour do not occur in ulpian's pithy statements, and the law knows nothing of them. the law guards each man's well-earned possessions, but it bids no one make sacrifices. morality can demand these. it can insist that the individual should freely, and urged by his own inner impulse, impose sacrifices upon himself, reduce his possessions in favour of another, disturb his personal comfort at any moment, perhaps even risk his life; that is to say, that of his own free will he should do just those things from which the law carefully shields him. where the law says: injure no one! morality says often enough: injure yourself to do good to your neighbour. where the law says: to each man his own! morality not seldom says: to each man your own if he needs it more than you do. morality counts on the existence of a quality of which the law has no need: sympathy. to be moral we must feel in our own being at the time, or retrospectively, the subjective experiences of our neighbour, with the same quality of emotion that he feels; his pain must be our pain, as his pleasure must be our pleasure. for the man who cannot do this--who realizes in his mind the circumstances of his neighbour only as an image, and without the concomitant note of feeling--it is impossible to rise to the height of morality. it is not his fault, for the gift of sympathy is an organic disposition, which you either do or do not possess, which you can develop or suppress, but which you cannot create if it is lacking. nevertheless, the lack of sympathy is a pitiable infirmity, for it prevents a man from scaling the heights of morality. to respect the law is to practise a wise selfishness. to act morally is to divest oneself of selfishness and attain the privilege of unselfishness. to behave in strict accordance with the law earns the merited praise of civic blamelessness. but to act morally is a virtue which is of incomparably higher quality than that of mere blamelessness. the law-abiding man, the honest man, is praised as having been "_integer vitae sceleris purus_." that is an acceptable epitaph. but the man of active morality, willingly suffering for others, provides an example which reconciles millions to the hardships of life. the former is a worthy man, but the latter is a saint. chapter v individual morality and collective immorality men, who would be deeply offended if their morality were called into question, quite coolly investigate the problem as to whether the state in its actions and omissions is bound by the same moral laws as the individual, and the majority of them come to the conclusion that in its relation to other states, the state must not be guided, that is to say, hampered, by moral considerations. they go further than this and not only liberate the state in its dealings with other countries from the trammels of morality, but claim for the government the privilege of standing beyond and above the moral law in the conduct of public affairs, because to their mind both foreign and home politics move on a different plane to that of ethics. if anyone objects to this shameless contention, its advocates contemptuously dismiss him with the disdainful remark: "that is the drivel of a layman, and no man of science would waste his time on it." and if you were to reply: "your views are those of gaolbirds who try after the event to hatch a theory justifying their misdeeds," they would probably shrug their shoulders and murmur scornfully: "the man is obviously mad." professorial wisdom has formulated pedantically what practical politicians, the heads of states and leading ministers have thought, said and done. napoleon remarked at st. helena to count de las cases, who respectfully notes the fact in his "_mémorial de sainte hélène_": "the actions of a ruler who labours for the community, must be distinguished from those of a private individual who is free to indulge his feelings; policy permits, nay, commands, the one to do what in the case of the other would often be inexcusable." perhaps it was under the influence of this remark, with which he, no doubt, was familiar, that professor nisard one day in a lecture at the sorbonne in paris propounded the theory that there was a dual morality, one public or political, the other private, and that these two did not follow the same rules. that was shortly after the coup d'etat of napoleon iii, and it was easy to descry, in the words of the celebrated professor of literary history, obsequiousness towards the new emperor and the effort of a courtier to excuse the violence which the emperor had just done to the constitution he had sworn to uphold. nisard was one of the ornaments of the university, a teacher of youth, who was as popular as he was respected. but the sound ethical feeling of his hearers revolted against the depravity of the principles he had just enunciated, and the violent expression of their indignation drove him in shame and disgrace from his chair and out of the lecture hall. macchiavelli is the most famous advocate of the immorality of the state and the right of politics to be unethical, and his name is identified with this infamous theory. an enormous amount has been written about the florentine statesman, his book of the "prince" and the doctrines he advances in it; among these works those in which his theories are endorsed preponderate to a horrifying extent over those which oppose and refute them. mohl and paul janet have furnished us with the best abstracts of these very numerous writings, and i refer the reader to them. here i can only dwell on the main points of the investigation. macchiavelli writes: "a man who wishes to be perfectly good is without doubt in danger among those who are not good. it is therefore advisable that a prince should learn not always to be good, so as to be able to put these rules of life into practice, or not, as circumstances may demand." "a prince cannot maintain loyalty to a treaty if it become dangerous to his interests." in short, the prince not only may, but must, do what is in his own interests. he need not stop to think whether his actions are honest. the only measure of their worth and appropriateness is the profit they promise. their success always justifies them, only their failure proves them to be bad. the most revolting thing in the arguments of the "prince" is the equanimity with which the author adduces them. never does he let slip a word of excitement, never does an indication of feeling appear. he treats his subject not as an investigation of principles to which one adopts a mental attitude and which one should approve or disapprove, but as a description of existing facts which arouse one's emotions as little as, for instance, the enumeration of the qualities and characteristics of a mineral. it has been said in his defence that his book is a concrete study, the presentation of the character of cæsar borgia, of his psychology and of his principles of government; and that macchiavelli wished to give an objective account of the philosophy of the events he had observed, but did not wish to judge them subjectively; and this, if for no other reason, because an expression of his own opinion would have been too dangerous for him. it is further urged that his personal views are revealed in the treatise on livy. this defence, however, is far from convincing. in the "prince" macchiavelli maintains the same unconcerned and cool note that prevails in his account of the treacherous assassinations perpetrated in senigaglia by his hero cæsar borgia. the only personal feeling, which peeps out occasionally in both works, is a certain perverse, æsthetic satisfaction, experienced by the artist with the eye of a connoisseur who lingers over a work of nature, perfect in its way, and delights in the harmony of actions which, with absolute logic, almost with mathematical precision, result from the definite premise supplied by a certain character. des esseintes, the ideal æsthete invented by joris karl huysmans, may appraise the worth of a monster solely by its beauty, without a thought for its morality. but by such appraisement he cuts himself off from the community of men, though he, in his arrogance, being morally insane, may abuse them as philistines. since it first appeared, macchiavellism has found disciples and admirers in every age; and these, in liberating politics from all fetters of morality, go further than its originator. the german jurist of the century of the reformation, schoppe ( - ), declares sententiously that politics differ from morality and have their own principles, just as morality has: he considers that the chief difference between them is that the latter takes as its subject of study that which should be; the former, that which is. for this one phrase this pedant, who has otherwise rightly deserved oblivion, has some claim to be remembered. for here he consigns morality to the realm of pure thought, of theoretical and meditative idealism, while for politics he claims the sphere of practical reality and shows the first dim dawning of that practical policy (_realpolitik_) which, two hundred and fifty years later, was to be as the light of the sun to statesmen. the frenchman, gabriel naudé, almost a contemporary of schoppe's, constituted himself the champion of coups d'etat, if they promised political advantages; further, he justifies and praises the night of saint bartholomew, a very energetic measure taken in his lifetime to put an end to the religious strife which was weakening france and causing the government much embarrassment; his only regret is that the happy idea of slaughtering all the huguenots was not carried out more completely; in other words, that the massacre of the obnoxious protestants was not continued until they had been completely wiped out. even in descartes, who confessed to a somewhat shady opportunism in questions of state and, for instance, concedes reasonable and moral justification to absolutism, we find the depressing statement: "against the enemy one is, so to speak ('_quasi_'), permitted to do anything," a conscious and determined denial of the christian commandment "love thine enemies," which perhaps demands too much of the average man and can only be expected from saints, but which, anyway, contains an exhortation for all the world at least to be just to one's enemies and act according to the dictates of morality. d'holbach does not beat about the bush, but declares roundly: "in politics the only crime is not to succeed." even macchiavelli did not express it as baldly as that. to quote the duke of la rochefoucauld, he at least pays virtue the compliment of hypocrisy, for he gives this advice: "do (the evil which is profitable) and excuse it afterwards." this is a paraphrase of the old advice given by a pettifogging lawyer for the benefit of the criminal: "if you have done it, deny it," and of the well-known phrase of frederick the great which runs something like this: "if i have a desire for a foreign country, i begin by seizing it, then i send for lawyers who prove that i had a right to it." this, then, was the opinion of that king who wrote an "anti-macchiavelli," of whom, however, paul janet neatly remarks: "nothing is more typical of macchiavellism than as heir presumptive to the throne to refute macchiavelli's principles, and then as ruling monarch to apply them with the more determination." for the sake of the incorruptible morality which kant defends in his little work "_vom ewigen frieden_" ("of eternal peace"), he may be forgiven for his weakly worldly wisdom in following up the "critique of pure reason" with the "critique of practical reason." in "_vom ewigen frieden_" he bravely demands harmony between politics and morality. more sweepingly than the english proverb, "honesty is the best policy," he demonstrates that honesty is better than policy. it is an old tradition of all governments, and especially of diplomacy, to affect secrecy, since their inavowable intrigues shun the light of day and the eye of outsiders. to-day the democracy in all constitutional states demands that foreign policy should be given full publicity. kant expressed his opinion shortly and sharply a hundred and fifty years ago: "all political actions which cannot be made public are unjust." in the eighteenth century, in which he lived and which began with the war of the spanish succession, went on to the wars of frederick the great, and ended with the war of the coalition against the french revolution, he does not dare to make a definite claim that force should be expelled from inter-state relations and law put in its place, but he does say, if somewhat timidly, that one may "dream of" an ideal in which the quarrels of nations are adjusted, like those of private persons, by laws which have been framed and approved by all. kant is a comforting exception amid the many teachers of constitutional law who are almost unanimously macchiavellian in their attitude, and who regard his point of view with contemptuous and condescending leniency because he was an unworldly philosopher, a theorist in politics. the english and scottish moral philosophers, from locke to j. s. mill and herbert spencer, are all untainted by macchiavellism and recognize only one morality for the state as for the individual, for political as for private action. but it must be admitted that their doctrines have not yet been generally assimilated by the consciousness of their own people. now, as ever, it is a fundamental principle of english law that "the king can do no wrong." that means that the king, the embodiment and epitome of the state, as the source of law is law itself, and is superior to all the laws of the country, which is a still more drastic paraphrase of the doctrine of the digest: "_quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem_"; every whim of the potentate has the force of law, and the english have coined the horrible phrase, "my country, right or wrong," a dictum which allows ruthless deceivers of the people and destroyers of their country to hide their most appalling misdeeds beneath the mask of patriotism and to disguise deeds worthy of a criminal in the habiliments of virtue. real patriotism demands that a true citizen and an honourable man should with might and main, even at the price of his life, oppose any injustice about to be committed by his government and his misguided compatriots; and, further, that he should strive to maintain his country in the path of right and morality even if, as sometimes happens, in a dispute between his nation and a foreign one the latter has right and morality on its side. on the plea of inevitable partiality a judge may refuse to try a case in which a near relative of his is involved. that is a permissible concession to that human imperfection which causes reason to fall silent when feeling raises its voice; and justice does not suffer, for there are other judges who can take the seat that has been voluntarily vacated. no citizen has the right to evade the duty of judging his country, because, if he fails, there is no other judge who can be put in his place and fulfil his duty. every citizen is personally responsible for the just and moral behaviour of his community, responsible to his own conscience, to his nation, to the world, to the present and to the future; and if he is powerless to prevent depravity and misdeeds, he must at least solemnly and loudly condemn them, as this is his only means of avoiding joint responsibility for the infamy. if he fails to do this, the public crime becomes his personal crime as well. the elder brutus, so much and so justly admired by the romans, is an example to all, for without mercy he handed his own flesh and blood over to the executioner, when according to the law his life was forfeit. the state has no greater claim to indulgence and mercy than had brutus's son, if knowingly and intentionally it indulges in vice. for if you allow the dictum, "right or wrong, my country," to be valid, then you must also apply it to the state of filibusterers that once existed in the antilles, and must demand of its citizens that their patriotism should approve and defend theft, piracy, rape and assassination, for the systematic perpetration of which their state was founded. in contrast with this wretched "my country, right or wrong," the inflexible dictum of the ancients stands out: "_fiat justitia, pereat mundus!_" (let justice be done though the world perish!). and what does most honour to the french revolution is the phrase so often mocked by political profiteers: "sooner shall the colonies perish than a principle!" that was the standpoint of the prophets of israel, who truly did not love their people less than do the wretched scoundrels who shout "hurray!" and yell songs, when their country deals morality and right a brutal blow, because the leaders think that this will profit the country, or themselves. frederick the great and napoleon, as heads of the state, acted in accordance with macchiavelli's views. at their time this was expressed by saying that they were guided by the necessities of the state. in the second half of the nineteenth century macchiavellism received the name of practical policy (_realpolitik_). the despisers of morality, who call the misdeeds of the state _realpolitik_, apparently do not know that this one word implies a very comprehensive admission. to their idea _realpolitik_ is a policy which reckons only with realities, not with desires, yearnings or hope, or as schoppe brutally expresses it: with that which is, not with that which ought to be. it is active in the domain of facts, not in that of principles. but, according to the advocates of _realpolitik_, facts and realities mean nothing but the sole rule of interest, selfishness, ruthlessness, force, cunning and contempt for all foreign rights; whereas fairness, justice, the curbing and suppression of one's own desires, consideration for one's neighbour, love of mankind--all these are phrases, or let us rather say ideals, which are to be found, not in the world, but in the brains of a small minority of enthusiasts without influence. he who confesses to such views, to whom the worst impulses alone are real, while he relegates morality to the sphere of the unreal, of visions far from reality, is a pessimist as long as his convictions remain theory; but if he puts them into practice, or urges the leaders of the state to do so, then he is an evildoer who breaks the moral law as soon as it appears unaccompanied by the police, the prison and the gallows. in private life a man with such views is a criminal who obeys his evil instincts whenever he may hope to evade the law of the state. the bandit, who is clever enough to manage so that police and court of justice cannot touch him, is a practical politician, for the riches he acquires by theft, robbery and murder are realities; the criminal code is but a scrap of paper, something visionary, as long as its minions do not seize him by the collar. the immorality of politics, the way in which the foundations of morality are ignored by the state, is the natural consequence of the power of rulers; for in them all the original instincts of the human beast still untamed by moral law are exaggerated by the intense realization of their loftiness, the glory and the illustriousness of their position, and they are not forced by wholesome fear of the means of coercion wielded by the moral administration to control themselves, to exercise and develop their organic powers of inhibition. the elevation of this fact of the immorality of the state to a theory that the state is not bound by moral law, is derived from the conception which philosophers of all ages, from ancient times to the present day, have formed of the character and the purpose of the state. plato, in the republic, maintains the omnipotence of the state, which nothing and no one can limit; and aristotle, not rising to such heights of error as his master, says more soberly: "it is a grave mistake to believe that every citizen is his own master." the italian philosopher filangieri considers the guiding principle and motive power of the state to be "love of power," which a fool three centuries later called the "will to power," whereupon other fools declared this to be a brand-new discovery. hegel goes farthest of all in his idolatry of the state; according to him the state is not alone moral, but morality itself, just as god is according to the theologians. as it would be arrogant blasphemy to characterize anything that god ordains as immoral, as it would be nonsensical to wish to impose upon god a moral law from outside, not emanating from him, to which he would have to submit even against his will, so it is reprehensible to judge the actions of the state by the standard of individual morality; and it is equally absurd to admit any moral coercion imposed on the state from outside, any guiding principle other than the law of its necessities and the logic which indicates the means needed to attain the necessary end. according to treitschke the state is the highest form of human existence; nothing higher than the state exists. he has never asked himself the question whether, after all, humanity itself is not superior to the state which is the form, a form, of its existence and therefore not its essence. from his conviction that the state is the highest thing existing, treitschke concludes that certain moral duties, e.g. that of self-sacrifice, cannot possibly exist for the state. "the individual is to sacrifice himself for the sake of a higher community of which he is a member; but the state is itself the highest thing in the outer community of mankind, therefore it can never be confronted with the duty of self-destruction." how obvious that seems! how grossly mistaken it is all the same! first of all the state is not the highest thing; there is something higher, and that is humanity; if then we recognize a moral duty of self-sacrifice for humanity, theoretically this duty may arise just as much for the state as for the individual. secondly, the idea that owing to morality the state might one day actually be in such a position as to be forced to sacrifice itself is the most shocking nonsense. how could that possibly be? if the state always acts with strict morality towards its citizens and foreign states, it is simply impossible that it should have to sacrifice its existence in the fulfilment of some task; for tasks only arise when, and as long as, the state exists. once it is disintegrated there can be no task, either theoretically or practically, for it to accomplish, therefore it cannot have to sacrifice itself for such a task. but if the immorality of another state, or of a minority of its citizens, should endanger it, threaten it with an unjust attack from within or without, then there is no rule of morality that can forbid it to defend itself to the last, and its self-sacrifice could then only be a result of its complete annihilation in a justifiable war of necessity. on the other hand, even the most unscrupulous practical politicians do not possess any absolute guarantee against defeat, though they declare a war of aggression to be permissible, whether waged on account of an itching for power, for purposes of conquest, for the winning of prestige, predominance or economic advantages. thirdly and lastly, the duty of self-sacrifice for the state can only be envisaged and seriously discussed, if the state be conceived as a person to whom the duty of morality applies in every way; but this conception is mystic anthropomorphism, not sober, sensible recognition of realities such as the practical politicians love to boast of. for, as a matter of fact, the state is not a person but a concept, an institution created by man in the interests of one individual, of a few, of many or of all; an organization of habits and interests, a relation in which individuals live together. the mysticism of the weak-minded has transformed it into a person with human features, with the qualities, desires, duties, and aims of an individual; these men are intellectually incapable of penetrating to the fundamental facts underlying the concept, and cling entirely to word-pictures which are mere verbalism. scholasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was chiefly occupied in a quarrel about nominalism and realism. it was allowed to drop and was not fought out to a decision. perhaps because it is impossible to convince these superficial babblers who take a name or a word for an object actually existent in time and space, that they are in error. the fight between abelard and roscelet and that between the two of them and duns scotus ought to be taken up again. above all, one ought to knock it into the heads of those who make a fetish of the state that it is a mere word, the famous "_flatus vocis_" of the nominalists, which they worship, to which they build altars and make human sacrifices. this humiliating form of idolatry is practised by the school of sociologists known as organicistic, as well as by the practical politicians. this school maintains that the individual has no independent existence at all, that he continues to exist only in the community, by the community, as a totally subordinate, dependent and incomplete fraction of the community; that the only real thing in the species is society, the state; that this must be regarded as a living organism, in which the individual human being is merely a cell which in solitude, outside the community and detached from it, is as little capable of life and has as little significance as a cell separated from a highly differentiated creature, such as a man or some other mammal. in my book "_der sinn der geschichte_" (the meaning of history), i threw as much light as i possibly could on this superstition, and i pointed out in detail its lack of sense as well as its dangers. i can, therefore, content myself here with a résumé and a few indications. there is nothing mysterious or supernatural about the historic or even the prehistoric origin of the state; part we can learn from reliable documentary evidence, part we can gather with certainty from obvious facts. from the primitive human family, which more probably consisted of a pair than of a man and several women, there arose the formless horde, a crowd of individuals of all ages, connected by blood; this developed into a tribe in which age, strength, courage and intelligence were appreciated in a certain order, and thereby were produced the beginnings of discipline, co-operation and regularized mutual relations; that is to say, of organization. this embryo of later formations, this sketchy beginning of an economic and political community, evolved more definite and differentiated forms when the wandering huntsmen and shepherds, seeking prolific hunting grounds and pasture lands, and later on arable land too, came upon other groups of men and fought with them for the possession of the desired domain. in the conflict strong and brave men came to the front, and the victor became the natural, and for the most part willingly recognized, leader and master of his companions, while any who opposed him were reduced by force to submit to his authority. the state crystallized around this war-hero, and by all its members its aim was clearly and obviously recognized to be defence and the increase of property outside the state; that is, the warding off of attacks by foreign robbers and acquisitive invasions of neighbouring domains--wars of defence and conquest, but always war; and within the state the maintenance of a certain measure of safety for individuals. this safety, however, had to be purchased dearly by the limitation, often enough the complete surrender, of the right of self-determination, of independence of will and freedom; so dearly, in fact, that the price was far higher than the value of the advantages acquired. the leader in warfare became the ruler and bequeathed his privileges to his descendants. the state was he himself, the land his property, the people his family in the old sense of the word--that is, his kindred, his servants, his slaves. his comrades in arms who had most distinguished themselves became an aristocracy of the sword, the supporters and tools of his power, though often enough they became his rebellious rivals and overthrew him. defeated enemies were robbed of all their possessions and slaughtered; later on they were degraded to serfs, a position little better than that of beasts of burden. a regular parasitism developed, by means of which the ruler and his companions in arms exploited the subjugated and productive masses for their own profit. the acute form of this parasitism was warfare in its chronic form, its prolongation in times of peace, the extortion of contributions and duties, the imposition of taxes and forced labour from the people. the ruler was clever enough to provide himself with a moral right to his exercise of brute force, by inventing a divine origin for his person and power, and making worship of his person an essential tenet of the national religion. the systematic suppression of the masses without rights became the universal practice of the ruler and of the instruments of his power, and this gradually spread to the higher classes who could still play the master to the lower strata, but were of no more account than the vulgar herd in the eyes of the ruler, having to bow their proud heads beneath the same yoke. a very few races followed a different course of development from the primitive horde to an organized state. they remained free members of the community with equal rights, they allowed no hereditary ruler from among themselves to become their superior, and governed themselves as republicans, who nevertheless also waged war without exception, either forced thereto by the attacks of greedy neighbours or lured into doing so by the example of the monarchies within their purview or by lust for booty. in warfare they won slaves and subjects, and changed into oligarchies, most often into despotic states, and before they ultimately declined to the parasitism of a single man and his aids fell victims to a collective parasitism which gave the conquered and subjugated population up to the spoliation of the victors. up till modern times the state preserved the character of a private domain belonging to the ruler and his house. wars were waged in the interests of dynasties, and as late as the eighteenth century the succession in spain and in certain provinces of austria was the origin and purpose of various campaigns. the french revolution first wrought a change in this. since this great event it has been impossible to plunge any european state into war in order to support the claims to property, more or less legally justified, made by its ruling house. the people have taken the place of princes, and now the principle of nationalities furnishes the reason or excuse for bloody conflicts between states; and this has become a factor in modern politics and history merely because dynasties had built up their realms regardless of the origin and language of the inhabitants of the districts which they had conquered, stolen, bought, or acquired by exchange, by marriage or by inheritance, and were indifferent to the national unity of their subjects as long as they could gain possession of the country and the people. from the time of its first vague beginnings up till the rise of modern democracy, the state has been nothing but a means of parasitism in the hands of the ruling person or group, and an instrument for the preparation for, and the waging of, war. all the state's tasks, which apparently lie outside the sphere of war, if they are carefully examined, will be found, after all, to aim at efficiency in war, and it has gradually selected these tasks from the simple consideration that their execution increases the guarantees of success in warfare and in government. the deification of the ruler in asiatic and egyptian lands, the unconditional identification of the realm with his person, the uniform enslavement of the whole people, its naïve exploitation for the sole benefit of the sovereign and his assistants are no longer possible in europe at the present day. the development of the nations to a higher plane of civilization and a clearer consciousness of their own worth forced the state to alter its constitution to a certain extent and to devote itself, at least theoretically, more to the interests of its citizens than the service of its prince. the intellectual constructions of the eighteenth century correspond to no historical reality. the social contract, the inception of which j. j. rousseau described so graphically, was never made. hutcheson, who had expressed the idea long before the enthusiast of geneva, conceived it only as the epitome of the principles which the state should embody; according to hume, the relations of the citizens to each other and to the state are a tacit contract which need not be explicitly formulated, because it originates in human nature; and fichte even assures us that rousseau himself did not mean his social contract to be taken literally. according to him it was only an idea. but societies must act in pursuance of this idea, and they were founded, if not actually, yet legally upon an unwritten contract. anyway, the ideas of hutcheson, hume and rousseau have nowadays been assimilated by the general consciousness. the masses believe in the natural, inborn rights of man, some of which he certainly has surrendered in favour of the community; they demand and expect of the state that it should serve their just interests, and they are no longer ready to be made use of by the ruler and a powerful, often very small, minority, for purposes which are foreign to them, which they do not know, and for which they do not care. those who juggle with words, who talk dark and mysterious nonsense about the concept of the state, or dogmatize fanatically on the subject, contemptuously call this conception of the nature of the state and the relation of its citizens to it shallow rationalism, and from the heights of their supposed knowledge they look down disdainfully upon arguments which they libellously call the laymen's babble. they are only in part bumptious fools who pretend that uncritical, parrotlike repetition of traditional formulæ is erudition and confused thought is profundity, and who declare the clear-headed men who mock their silly mysticism, their superstitious dread of word phantoms, to be simply incapable of understanding their depth. partly they are very sly toadies, very cunning sycophants of power, or ruthless egoists, unscrupulous freebooters, who pretend to be enthusiastic and devout apostles of the divinity of the state and demand the most humble submission, adoration and unconditional devotion in order that, as priests in its temple, they may grind their own axes at its altars. such are those folk who maintain the double thesis that the state is everything, the individual nothing, the former the sole reality, the latter without any separate existence, and that the state, as mankind's highest form of existence, need recognize nothing as superior to itself, neither right nor law, and may therefore take as sole guide for its actions its own interests and not morality. you cannot maintain a single one of these contentions unless you and all men are deprived of reasoning power; they crumble away instantly in the light of reason. it is not true that the state alone is real and that it is superior to the individual, not only because of the forces at its disposal, the complex of which it represents, but also as an entity, as a thought, a principle. the individual alone in the species, that is, living, feeling, thinking and acting man, is real. the individual created the state out of himself. he can also destroy it. the practical politicians above all people should be of this opinion; as he can do it, he may do it; as he has the power to do it, he has the right to do it. the individualist will not make this a question of law, but will simply assert that, though the individual is the father of the state, yet he has no reasonable grounds for destroying it, so long as it makes no murderous attacks on its creator. the individual did not create the state consciously, intentionally and formally by means of a social contract, but naturally and organically, under pressure of circumstances. it is clearly to his interests to maintain it, to furnish the necessary means for its existence and efficiency, but always on the one condition that the state should really protect and promote the interests of the individual, lighten his burdens in the struggle for existence, and make that prosperity, comfort and happiness possible which he cannot secure unaided in his struggle with the hostile forces of nature and with rival fellow-men. but if the state oppresses the individual with burdens and duties which he feels no inner necessity to fulfil, if it confiscates him, body and soul, instead of respecting his freedom and his right to self-determination, then the assumption falls to the ground; the state is no longer an institution which benefits the individual; it is inimical to the individual, hinders him in his struggle for existence, destroys his happiness; and he obeys his primitive instinct for self-preservation if he turns against it, masters it as he would a monster, draws its teeth and claws, and forces it back to the place it was meant to occupy, that of a docile and industrious servant of the individual, not of one individual who aspires to rule the others, but of all individuals who are of the people that make up the state. i consider it unnecessary and a little ridiculous to quote authorities in support of the statement that twice two are four; what is reasonable and clear is convincing without further recommendation; nevertheless, it is a fact that may be worthy of mention that some of the best intellects of all nations have sided with the individual against the state. on the one side we have plato, whose ideal is sparta and who would like to see the despotism of this model state and its communal meals completed by the addition of community of property, of wives, and of children; we have hegel, who has gone farther than any one in his idolatry of the state; we have auguste comte, who, in his zeal for his newly founded science of sociology, conceives society as an organism biologically superior to the individual, and thereby has become the father of the organicists. but against these we can put the englishman, jeremy bentham, the embodiment of sound common sense, whom the muddle-headed fools that pose as deep thinkers have good reason to hate and fear, and whom they try to depreciate as vulgar and shallow; further, his compatriot, herbert spencer, who is his kindred spirit; the frenchman, frédéric bastiat, whose writings sparkle with flashes of wit; the german, wilhelm humboldt, who bravely and successfully combated the state tyranny defended by fichte. all these are convinced individualists who adduce irrefutable reasons for their views. we may also include kant among them, as he gave utterance to this decisive sentence: "man is his own aim and end, and must never be a mere means"; consequently it is never permissible to sacrifice the sovereignty of one's own person to that of the state, or make use of it for the realization of political aims by disregarding, and doing violence to, one's right of self-determination. harald höfding contends that progress should be measured by the extent to which, in kant's sense of the words, man is recognized to be his own aim and end; but that is not only a measure of progress, it is the measure of all civilization. for civilization, to my idea, means a state worthy of man, implying his mental, moral and material independence of all motive forces other than those of his own nature; its aim is the most complete attainment possible of this independence; its measure the extent to which the individual determines his own fate and is able to ward off from it undesired outside influences. at the first awakening of his consciousness primitive man was aware of being exposed to unknown forces which controlled him at will and against which his will was powerless. from the very beginning, at first dimly and then more and more clearly, man has felt this to be unworthy and intolerable. the best of the species have always laboured with all their strength to liberate themselves, and the great ambition of man throughout his development has always been not submissively to accept whatever fate was accorded him, but to work out his destiny according to his needs and his own ideas. the anguish caused by wretched dependence upon external forces is the origin of religion as of superstition, which both spring from the same root. with the anthropomorphism peculiar to the earliest stages of thought, man personified the mysterious powers which ruled his fate. he created gods for himself, and then, as far as his knowledge permitted, he sought some relation between himself and them, and tried to get at them by every means available. he imagined them like unto himself, that is, vain, capricious, greedy, easily frightened by dark threats, and then, very reasonably on this hypothesis, he importuned them with prayers, sacrifices, hymns of praise and vows, as well as magic formulæ and incantations, always with the inflexible intention of making them serve his purposes, not of serving theirs. the contrite jewish prayer: "thy will be done, lord, thy will, not mine," is a new trait in the religious thought of man. the heathen always strives to have his will done in opposition to that of the gods, and to divert them from their decisions if he dislikes them. in a state of advanced development theological thought gave way before the scientific. man learnt to conceive nature's rule, not transcendentally, but intrinsically. he recognized that the forces around him, which so often crossed his purpose, are not to be influenced by prayer and sacrifice, but that it is expedient and possible to discover their character and the conditions of their activity. by dint of long-sustained efforts he has succeeded in effectively standing up to hostile nature and in warding off her undesired interference in his destiny. if the tribulations, which formerly suddenly brought his schemes to nought and often destroyed him, are not entirely overcome, it is merely because his practice does not conform closely enough to the directions evolved by his theoretical knowledge, because he is too careless or too clumsy to make proper use of the weapons against the elements with which science has armed him. but this same man, who has learnt to be a match for nature, his creator, is powerless against his creature, the state. he can neither evade it nor escape from it. the state disposes of him without his consent, against his most obvious interests, in spite of his powerless opposition; it hurls him hither and thither, annihilates him, crushes him by its will and is unmoved by the will of the individual. true, man has sought to maintain his right of self-determination against the forces of politics, as against all others that broke his will and intervened in his life without his consent. for thousands of years all state development has tried to protect the modest individual, lost in the crowd and featureless, but nevertheless a person, that is, a world to himself, against the arbitrariness of rulers or leading statesmen. that is the one unchanging tendency which leads from harmodius and aristogeiton, the slayers of a tyrant, the rebellion of the elder brutus, the murder of cæsar, by way of the revolt of the netherlands and the execution of charles i of england, to the great revolution, the risings of and the struggle for constitutional government in all states of the old world and the new. the formula has long been discovered whereby the individual can maintain the dignity of his sovereign personality and his own responsibility for the shaping of his destiny. it is civil freedom, constitutionalism, sovereignty of the people. there are arrangements, carefully thought out, nicely weighed, cleverly worked out to the smallest detail, by which the individual is fitted into his place in the community without being deprived of the management of his own affairs, by which the sacrifices needful for the fulfilment of collective tasks are exacted without his being reduced to a condition of slavery, by which the independence of the individual is safeguarded and yet a state of chaos and anarchy is avoided. but this formula fares as do the doctrines of science: hitherto it has remained a theory everywhere. the franchise, representation of the people, responsibility of ministers, constitutional limitation of the ruler's power, are infallibly effective weapons or instruments, but no people has yet learnt how to handle them rightly. that is why pessimists speak of the bankruptcy of civilization, that is why the aim of civilization, the liberation of the person and the enforcement of its sovereignty, has nowhere been attained, that is why, to quote napoleon i in his interview with goethe at erfurt, "in our times the power of fate is politics." and yet all these institutions of a modern constitutional state, from the ballot-paper and the voting of taxes in parliament to the enforced resignation of the ministry on a vote of censure and the oath of the ruler to observe the constitution, recognize the rights of the individual as opposed to the state, and at least theoretically give the lie to the bold declaration that the state is everything and the individual nothing. it is no less untrue to say that the state is superior to morality and is not bound by it. in order to prove this we need only be brave enough not to be intimidated by the mysterious mien and gestures and the dark, pompous phrases of the mystics who worship the state, and to penetrate to the real, conceptual idea of the word. the hocus pocus that the worshippers of the state perform around their idol puts one in mind of kempelen, who created a sensation with his automaton in the beginning of the nineteenth century. this figure, got up as a turkish woman, gave rise to astonishment and, among not a few, to superstitious fear. it played chess, and so well, too, that it almost always succeeded in winning, even against its most skilled opponents. people cudgelled their brains to solve the riddle, all sorts of explanations were suggested, one more impossible than the other, but still the mystery remained dark, until the owner, having made enough money and sick of the part of an itinerant swindler, revealed the trick. in the hollow figure there sat a clever chess player who worked its hands and with them carried out the moves on the board. this anecdote can be applied literally to the state. simpletons, drunk with phrases, and cunning cheats contend that the state is a supernatural creation in which the "spirit of the universe," the "spirit of history" takes shape, and through which it realizes its aims; these aims, utterly transcending the understanding of the individual, are unintelligible to man. such overwhelming phrases strike the simple, credulous hearer dumb and send cold shudders of awe up his spine. but let us look at the inside of this magic machine whose works are driven by the "spirit of the world" and with whose help this spirit fulfils its impenetrable designs. what do we find? men, quite ordinary mortals, who sit in the machine and work its levers; men whose intellectual powers are only in rare cases superior to those of their enslaved subjects bereft of will; men who are, as a rule, of average intelligence and not seldom even below the average. these men are the rulers, ministers who cling to office, high officials, party leaders and professional politicians who would like to become ministers, generals who seek to make themselves conspicuous, publicists who hope to derive personal profit by dint of bowing and scraping before the men in power, by flattering the stupidest and most despicable prejudices of the masses, or even by implanting such prejudices with persuasive talk and purposely leading them astray. these men are formed on the same model as all individuals of the species and are therefore full of human weaknesses, a prey to all human desires, moved by all human impulses. they are selfish, vain, the sport of likes and dislikes, of self-deception as to the value of their ideas, opinions and judgments, disputatious, arrogant, greedy of possessions, power and pleasure, spurred by the instinct to magnify and swell their personality and impose it upon others. and these men are to be liberated from the discipline of the moral law? they are to be superior to the moral law? for whom, then, was the moral law created and developed if not for these men--whose actions, although they spring from the same motives and aspire to the same satisfaction of self as those of all other men, can be fraught with consequences incomparably more evil, because they make use of the state machine for their purposes. through the force and momentum given by the machinery of the state these actions are boundlessly augmented, their range being indefinitely increased and their results multiplied a thousandfold. the simplest logic shows that these men within the state machine, rendered so specially dangerous by their terrible armament and weapons, far from being liberated from the coercion of moral law, ought to be subjected to it with extraordinary severity, a severity which should be greater than that which suffices for the average man, in proportion as their power to do harm is greater than that of the man in the street. now all this time, rather carelessly, or at any rate weakly, i am making a concession to the pious devotees of the religion of the state, by speaking of the state machine,--a dubious expression, coined to deceive by rousing superstitious ideas. the phrase is a picture, a rhetorical figure that one must be careful not to take literally. there is no state machine. there is only a relation of men to one another and to traditional habits, organized rules of command, obedience and equable conduct--habits into which the community of men has fallen in accordance with the law of least resistance, in order to promote their own interests, at least theoretically, without being forced to exert themselves continually to form new judgments, decisions and arrangements which the ever-shifting, ever-changing conditions of life render necessary. here again, behind the word, we find men, always only men. just as those who command, from whose will all state action emanates, are men, so also the instruments by which they carry out their decisions are only metaphorically speaking, levers and wheels, parts of a machine of steel and iron; in reality they are officials, soldiers and policemen, they are judges and bailiffs; in short, they are men. and these men, who in all private relations with their fellow men are sternly required to submit to the dictates of morality and the demands of the law, are the same on whom other men, the leaders of the state, impose the duty of breaking all these precepts and laws; as ambassadors they must deny and dishonour the signatures to treaties; as leaders or paid servants of the press bureau they must systematically spread lies; as attorneys of the state they must persecute and maltreat those who tell the truth; as policemen they must tear the fathers of families from wife and children and hunt them into the barracks; as soldiers they must invade a foreign land, murder unknown and innocent men, rob them of their property, burn down their houses, lay waste their lands, in a word, do everything that is punishable with prison and gallows; they must perpetrate all crimes which the aim and end of morality and law are to prevent and condemn. if one defends such action, where can one find the courage and the justification to require these men at one time to honour the ten commandments and at another to disregard them, to be criminals in the name of the state in the morning and to be moral private persons and law-abiding citizens in the afternoon? after all, they only have one nature, one mind, one character and one set of perceptive faculties. to realize the monstrosity of this doctrine of twofold morality, public and private, and of the non-compulsoriness of moral law for the state, it suffices to refer again to the fundamental concepts of morality. individuals have banded themselves together in a community in order to be able to live more easily, or to live at all, under the present conditions obtaining on our planet. lest society should be disintegrated by the quarrels of its members, and the latter should find themselves exposed single-handed to a hopeless struggle for existence, a limitation of their unfettered whims and desires, the curbing of their selfishness, control of their impulses and the exercise of consideration for their neighbours have been imposed upon them. this coercion is morality, and society can enforce it by vigorous measures; but for the most part this is unnecessary, for society has inculcated in its members the faculty of urging upon themselves in every situation the dictates of the community and of insisting on obedience to them. this faculty is conscience. the means by which conscience, inspired and assisted by reason, determines the will to keep in check or to suppress organic impulses and inclinations, desires and appetites, is inhibition; moreover, the development and strengthening of inhibition does not alone promote the aims of the community, but is of the highest biological importance to the individual himself, apart from his relations to society, as it renders him stronger and more efficient, differentiates him more subtly, and raises him to a higher level of development. now the state is a special development of society; it owes its existence to the same necessities as the latter, its task is to minimize the struggle for existence for the individual, to protect him from avoidable dangers and to ensure the safety of his life, the fruits of his labour and that measure of freedom which is compatible with life in a community. but if the state puts an end to the coercion instituted by the community and therefore by the state itself; if it does away with morality for itself, that is, for a number of individuals, be they few or many, that act in its name; if it allows selfishness, appetites and ruthlessness to have the same free play as with creatures of a lower order than man, or as with men before they formed themselves into communities; if in the pursuit of its plans beyond the bounds of morality it intensifies the struggle for existence in a tragic manner, exposes men to the most terrible dangers, brutally destroys their liberty, gravely threatens their life and property or even devotes them to ruin--why, then it destroys the assumptions on which the state itself is based, denies its own aim, deprives itself of any right to existence, and the individuals have thenceforward but one interest, namely, to drive away this bogey of the state and with all possible means to force the men, who make use of it and the superstitions clinging to it, to respect the moral law which the community has created to overwhelm anti-social, immoral individuals, to render them harmless and if necessary to destroy them. one point there is on which the machiavellian or practical politicians are particularly fond of talking nonsense, and that is the state's loyalty to treaties. is the state bound by a treaty? must it honour its signature? must it perform what it has undertaken to do? the detestable, unanimous answer is "no. a treaty cannot hinder the state from doing what its interest demands." prince bismarck is often cited on this point, as he once said: "the only sound foundation for the state is state egoism." and another time: "a treaty is only valid _rebus sic stantibus_, if the situation is the same as when it was concluded; if the circumstances change, it becomes invalid by the very fact." such views are revolting, however great a name be appended to them. contract, or treaty, is the basis of the law. whoever breaks it is dishonoured, and doubly dishonoured is he who from the beginning enters upon it with the idea at the back of his mind of deriving every possible advantage from it and of breaking it when the time comes to fulfil obligations. the phrase, "sound egoism," whether it refer to a private person or to the state, must make every decent man blush for shame. egoism may be sound, but it is always the contrary of moral. it is just as convenient for the individual as for the state to think only of his own advantage and unhesitatingly to sacrifice his neighbour's rights to it; but morality arose and was constituted a rule of human relations in order to break the back of this selfishness and to teach man consideration for his neighbour. it is no valid excuse to say that state egoism is no sin, but a virtue and a merit, that it is different in character from the egoism of the individual. that is not true. it is not different in character. it is of exactly the same character as in private life. the responsible leader of the state who is guilty of a breach of treaty makes believe to himself and others that he does not do it for his own sake, but in the interests of the state. but who is the state? i have already given the answer to this. the state consists of men, the interests served by a breach of treaty are those of men, not, as a rule, of all, not even of many members of the state, but of a few, of a class, a group, perhaps of only one family whose power, wealth and reputation it is intended to increase. so-called state egoism is in actual fact the private egoism of many individuals, who break the law, or tolerate and condone a breach of the law, for the sake of pocketing ill-gotten gains; and no one is so stupid as to let himself be bamboozled into believing that the shameful crime of breaking a treaty for the purpose of "sound" egoistic grabbing becomes moral when it is perpetrated not by one individual but by thousands or millions of individuals. the _reservatio mentalis_, too, of "_rebus sic stantibus_" is an unwarrantable and wicked reservation. nothing prevents a decent man when making a contract from adding a clause reserving the right to terminate it if the essential conditions should change. if the other party to the contract does not agree to this, well, then the contract cannot be concluded. but to sign it with the mental reservation that one will disavow one's signature if the obligations undertaken become irksome, that is swindling. there is one consideration so simple that it is inconceivable that those who break contracts do not realize it. in some concrete case the leader of the state judges it to be profitable to the state to disregard good faith. what guarantee has he that his judgment is right? he is a man, and no man is infallible. but all mankind have made good faith the foundation of their life in communities, and if a single man has the temerity to draw a conclusion violating the immutable convictions and doctrines of all mankind, he must be mad not to see that most probably he is wrong and that all mankind in every age and every clime is right. i have left out of consideration the fact that any possible advantage arising from the breach of faith would not excuse him morally, and setting aside the ethical aspect of the case, i dwell only on the logical argument. there is one case and one only in which a contract is not binding, either on the state or on the private individual, and that is when the signatory was forced to enter upon it with a knife at his throat. obligations which a victor imposes on his defeated and disarmed opponent are by their very nature invalid. the old cry of brennus: "_vae victis!_" is might and cannot constitute a right. civil law calls this kind of thing compulsion and decrees that it invalidates any contract. only a pedantic mind, stupid and depraved, immersed in hair-splitting trickery and incapable of a straight thought, could complacently maintain in the face of all common sense that might and compulsion, far from doing away with right, are the source of all right. the silly formula coined for this is: "might is right." might may be a fact, but it is not right. the source of right is not might but morality, which might disavows and destroys. the necessary condition of any obligation which is to be valid is freedom. kant proved this, but his proof was unnecessary, for it is self-evident. a forced treaty is no treaty, for it is the victor's fist which has guided the hand of the vanquished, and it is he who wrote the latter's signature under the document. the will, the consciousness of the seeming signatory were absent at the time. but the worst and most immoral action of the state, beside which a breach of treaty for selfish reasons pales to insignificance, is the war of aggression for purposes of profit, that is, for the conquest of territory, extortion of money, increase of power, or fame. war is the quintessence of all crimes against life and property, against the body and mind of a person, the prevention of which is the aim and object of all morality and all laws derived from it. any means are permissible whereby this wickedness may be prevented; the war of defence, waged by the party attacked, is not only justified but sacred, as are the functions of the institutions that society has developed to hunt down and punish those who do not respect morality and law. and just as it is the duty of every society to maintain courts of justice, police and prisons, so it is the duty of every state to be well armed, well versed in the use of weapons and strong, so long as it must count on the fact that there are practical politicians who do not recognize morality as binding the state, and nations that are ready on the first hint of their leaders to perpetrate every crime that conscience, the ten commandments and penal law forbid. it is idle, in my opinion, to discuss the question whether war will ever disappear from the world. it serves no purpose to contradict those who declare it to be eternal. it is possible that it will continue to exist as long as there is vice, sin and crime; and i do not believe that these will ever be completely exterminated. among mankind there will probably never be a lack of sick and depraved people whose selfishness is monstrously exaggerated, whose instincts urge them with stormy violence, whose powers of inhibition are scantily developed or altogether wanting, who suffer from anæsthesia of the feelings and are therefore incapable of any sympathy with their fellow men and who are mentally too weak to foresee the results of their actions. individuals of this kind are born criminals whose existence society will probably never be able to prevent and against whom it is obliged to protect itself. now war arises from the same psychic conditions as the antisocial actions of these born criminals, and therefore the pessimists may be right in maintaining that it can never be abolished. but it is one thing to assert the existence of a deplorable fact and quite another to glorify it. to say that war is a part of the universe constituted by god is blasphemy, even though the saying emanates from moltke. to extol war ecstatically and to sing hymns of praise to it, to declare that it evokes the highest virtues of man is a panegyric of crime, a thing anticipated and punishable in the penal code. i am not here attempting to solve the problem of what practical measures can be taken whereby right may be set in the place of might in inter-state relations, and instead of ruthless selfishness, morality, that is, self-control, consideration and respect for the just claims of one's fellow men and love of one's neighbour. that is as far beyond the scope of this work as is the investigation of the methods of education, criminal justice, police organization or prison conditions intended to deal with the tide of crime and to stem it as far as possible. i am concerned with moral philosophy, and from that point of view i show that all morality is rooted in the desire of men to live together peaceably in a society, to have greater security of life and property, greater possibilities of happiness, and that the same needs must impose the rules of morality upon states in their relations to one another. according to hobbes the primitive condition of mankind is that of a war of every man against all other men, and only the creation of society makes an end of it. but if the state unleashes the dogs of aggressive warfare it hurls mankind back into its primitive condition and destroys the work it was created to do. the stoic seneca says: "_homo sacra res homini_," "man is sacred to man." the practical politicians who praise war repeat with hobbes: "_homo homini lupus_," "man is a wolf to man." the moral man demands a return from hobbes to seneca. if it has been possible in the state to tame the wolfish instincts of the individual and to make him bow down before custom and law, it must be equally possible to do so in the relations of states to one another. he who denies this in principle disavows morality altogether, not only for the state but also for the individual; he who admits it in principle but in practice scornfully disregards it is a bandit, and it is desirable to treat him like any other robber and murderer who, to satisfy his wolfish appetites, tramples on morality and right and acts like a wild beast. to this, however, the moralist will object sadly, and the practical politician with scornful superiority, that the state has created institutions for suppressing the bandit, but that there are none such to control bandit states, and that self-defence alone, the only means of self-protection for man in hobbes's primitive condition, can gain a footing between them. clearly only the party attacked is in a state of self-defence, but the bandit who has a sufficient sense of humour to play the pettifogging lawyer can always maintain that attack is also self-defence, the preventive form of self-defence. the answer to this is: if society has managed to provide judges and police in order to secure peace, then mankind will for the same purpose learn how to provide courts of justice and a police force to deal with the bandits of practical politics who endanger peace among nations. but that is a practical question, not a theoretical one, not a principle of moral philosophy. the latter shows irrefutably that there is only one morality, not a private one and a public one which is its negation, not one kind for the individual and another for politics, for the state. he who defends the thesis of a twofold morality merely shows that he does not possess simple morality. chapter vi freedom and responsibility theological thought is faced with a problem in ethics which presents the greatest difficulties. it is the problem of free will. is man who perceives, judges, has volition and acts, a free being inwardly? can he, guided only by his own reasonable thoughts and conclusions, determined entirely by his own inner impulses and uninfluenced by outer circumstances, choose one or the other of two conflicting possibilities? when he has to make a decision, is he always like hercules at the cross-roads who has to make up his mind alone as to which path he shall take, whether he is to follow quiet, modest virtue, or alluring, voluptuous vice? does he do evil because he willed to do so and not otherwise, although it was in his power to avoid it? does he decide for the good, because after due investigation and consideration he recognized it as preferable, though he might have rejected it? or is man always subject to coercion from which at no time and no place he can escape? are all his actions determined by the law of nature which regulates every one of his movements just as mechanically as the course of the stars or the fall of a body to our earth when its support is removed? is he an automaton, set going by cosmic forces, who possesses the doubtful privilege consciously to be able to follow the turning of his wheels, the action of his levers, rods and indicators and to listen to their humming and knocking without being allowed to interfere in their movements or to change the least thing in their functions or work? is he fettered by the chain of causes which have existed eternally and continue to act immutably to all eternity? theological thought is condemned to find an answer to the question of freedom or determinism, as it is the necessary condition for the essential concepts of the theological doctrine of morality, that is, the concept of responsibility and those consequent upon this, namely, sin, reward and punishment. for the true believer god is the source of morality. he himself is morality. what he ordains is good in itself and cannot be otherwise, for there is no room for evil in his nature, since if he could be conceived to do evil, it would by the very fact of his doing it become good. a man, to be moral, must approximate to the nature of god as nearly as it is granted to mortals to do. the moral law is revealed by god's mercy to give man a light which shows him the right path and lights him on his way. thanks to him the poor mortal is relieved of the incertitude due to his limited mental powers and is endowed with the priceless possession of a certain precept which he need only obey in order to be sure of salvation. however, granted the correctness of this assumption, it is not comprehensible how evil came into the world. it contradicts all attributes with which faith has endowed the deity. it cannot appear without god's knowledge, for he is omniscient and nothing is hidden from him. it cannot occur against his will, for he is omnipotent and nothing resists his bidding. but least of all can it rage with his knowledge and consent, for he is infinitely good and therefore does not permit his creatures to fall victims to evil. but experience teaches us that evil has a permanent place in human life, and this forces one to the conclusion that either god is hard and cruel, and therefore not infinitely good and not morality itself, or that he has no knowledge of evil and therefore is not omniscient, but, on the contrary, blind as well as stupid, or that he sees the evil but cannot prevent it, and therefore is not omnipotent and must recognize the existence of higher powers than himself against whom he is impotent. these terrifying conclusions have not escaped the notice of the devout, and they have always made the most desperate efforts to evade them. some have chosen the easiest way out of the difficulty; they close their eyes before the yawning abyss, fold their hands devoutly and invent pious phrases about the inscrutable ways of providence and its infinite wisdom, which the weak intelligence of mortals cannot grasp. others take infinite pains; in the sweat of their brow they with difficulty evolve tortuous and hypocritical explanations, which in reality explain nothing, but in a mind which lends itself willingly to them give rise to the illusion that the contradiction has been solved. perhaps the most astounding piece of work accomplished by this miserable juggling, or this delusion of self by means of an exuberant flow of words, is presented in the four volumes of the "théodicée," by which leibnitz made himself a laughing-stock. mazdeism has invented an alluring but at the same time risky expedient. it lightly assumes that two principles obtain in the universe, a good one and a bad one, the creator and the destroyer, the merciful god and the cruel demon, ormuzd and ahriman. in this way everything is easy to understand. good is the work of radiant ormuzd, evil the deed of dark ahriman. the two fight together with very nearly equal forces, but this doctrine reveals the comforting prospect of a distant future in which ormuzd shall finally triumph over ahriman, and fills the trembling believer with elation at the thought that after æons of the tragic struggle between good and evil, at the end of the world the curtain will fall on the victory of good. by this victory mazdeism, which claims to be monotheistic, rescues its single god, although the introduction of a second principle of very nearly equal power, which holds the one god in check for an immeasurable period of time, brings this system perilously close to polytheism. to the purer monotheism of christianity there is indeed something repugnant in the assumption of a second, opposite principle of almost equal power, but yet it has admitted the existence of the devil, who is undoubtedly reminiscent of ahriman. only he lacks the independence of the mazdean demon. he is not on a footing of equality with god, but is subject to him as is every creature. he is not strong enough to oppose god and can only do evil because god allows it. but why does he allow it? why does he tolerate the devil? why can the latter proceed with his evil work with god's consent? to this theology gives a crafty answer which goethe has clothed in the glorious beauty of inimitable poetry. god has assigned to the devil the task of tempting man with all the arts of seduction in order to give him the opportunity of testing and developing his moral strength in resistance, of purging himself, of attaining purity and salvation by his own efforts. in short, he exists in order to give man a sort of swedish gymnastics in virtue. the struggle is not quite fair, for the devil is held by a halter and is pulled up if he gets too big an advantage, and man is always assisted by redeeming mercy, a hand being stretched out to him from the clouds which sets him on his feet as often as he stumbles. but theology is not bound by rules of sport. that is how the picture of the universe is presented in "_faust_." but he who painted it is the same goethe who on another occasion angrily complains: "you allow man to become guilty--and then leave him to his suffering." does the divinity allow man to fall a victim to evil without turning it aside from him? does he only try him in order mercifully to rescue him at the moment when he is about to succumb? goethe does not answer this question without ambiguity. that is not his business either. he may contradict himself. he is a poet who is allowed to express contradictory views. he is not a theologian whose duty it is, by means of a definite dogma, to support those who totter in doubt. all these attempts to reconcile the attributes of the deity with the fact that there is evil in the world which continually leads man into danger, emanate from the explicit or tacit assumption that man possesses free will. for if his will is not free and he does evil, then he does it because he must and because he cannot do otherwise. but this must can only come from the deity who is almighty; it is the deity who condemns man, who forces him to do evil. man therefore does evil as god's tool without volition; therefore, as a matter of fact, it is god himself who does evil. but if god is capable of doing evil he is not morality itself, or every distinction between good and evil is destroyed, and we must recognize what seems evil to us to be just as moral as what seems good, because the one is as much the work of god as the other. but if this is admitted, and it is logically impossible not to admit it, then the whole foundation of transcendental, that is, of theological, ethics breaks down. the latter is therefore forced, on pain of suicide, to maintain that man has free will. but with this assertion theological ethics by no means disarms all the objections which threaten its life. renouvier's book on free will is probably the most thorough and exhaustive work on this subject which has been treated by thousands of thinkers and not a few babblers since the time of the ancient greeks, and he describes it as follows: "will is free and spontaneous if reason cannot foretell its untrammelled action at any time other than that at which it actually takes place." renouvier makes no limitation and no reservation. he does not say, "if human reason cannot foretell its action," and this omission of the particularizing adjective is not carelessness or a mistake on his part, it is duly considered; for the prudent dialectician knows very well that he would ruin his theory of free will if he only maintained that human reason alone should be able to foretell its action. there are many happenings which human reason cannot foretell, and which nevertheless obey immutable laws and take place according to absolutely fixed rules without the exercise of any inner freedom or authority on the part of the individual. if human reason cannot foretell these happenings, it is not because no external force of the universe determines them and they are entirely spontaneous, but simply because the laws controlling them are unknown. therefore the impossibility of foretelling them is no proof of their freedom, it is only a proof of the ignorance of the human mind. there was a time when no human intellect could foretell the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse. was that because the heavenly bodies act freely and are eclipsed only at their own spontaneous desire, when and how they please? no, because man had not discovered and comprehended their movements. to this very day we are unable to foretell the weather on a particular day next year, or the result of the next harvest, or an earthquake. does this prove the freedom, the absolute independence of these occurrences? no; it only proves the inadequacy of our knowledge. renouvier therefore would achieve nothing for his theory of free will, if only human understanding were to be unable to foretell the actions of the will. that is why he does not say "human reason," but simply "reason." the essence of free will is that its actions altogether shall be incapable of being foreseen; it is not in its nature to act in accordance with some predetermination which must necessarily reckon with outer circumstances and given forces; and the impossibility of foretelling its actions exists not only for human reason but for every reason--for reason in general. for every reason and therefore for the divine reason as well. and now theological ethics must find a way out of this dilemma: either god does not foresee the decisions of free human will, then this is a denial of his omniscience, that is, of one of his essential attributes; or god foresees the decisions of free human will, then this is a denial of the freedom of the will, the essence of which, according to renouvier, lies in the fact that it cannot be foreseen. for this impossibility of being foreseen is indeed the quality by which free will stands or falls. let us realize the significance of this concept. nothing can be foreseen which will not with certainty occur. but whatever at some future time will become a reality, must even now be virtually a reality for an omniscient reason not bound by the human categories of time and space, since for this reason neither proximity nor distance exists, but everything is on one plane, and there is no future or past, but everything is present. so if the divine reason foresees now how the free will of man will act in the future, that is equivalent to saying that this free will is forced to act in the particular way which god foresees and not otherwise. therefore the will is not free but, on the contrary, strictly bound. it is obliged to make the event foreseen by god a fact, as god can only foresee what must certainly come to pass, and a foreseen event that does not happen would mean a mistake, a false assumption, of which one cannot believe god capable without denying him. this apparent free will is coercion at sight. as its action is foreseen by god, the will is subject to the law of fate, but a period of delay is granted. every movement of the supposedly free will becomes a part of the order of the universe which has been unalterably laid down from eternity, and which the human will cannot upset without burying god in the ruins. man may imagine that his will is free. but that is self-deception, and he can only indulge in it because what god sees clearly is hidden from him, namely, the goal towards which, though he does not realize it, he is inevitably led along strictly defined paths by the iron hand of fate. it would be unjust towards theology to say that it has never seen the incompatibility of free will with divine omniscience. this has not escaped its notice, but it has attempted by the use of familiar formulæ to get out of the difficulty. in his book _de libero arbitrio_ saint augustine stoutly maintains that the human will is free, but he tries to rescue the attributes of the deity by reserving to it the right or the power to intervene by its mercy in the actions of the will, if in its freedom it comes to a decision which endangers the salvation of the soul. saint thomas aquinas takes good care not to differ in opinion from the bishop of hippo. the reformers, calvin, luther and bishop jansen, too, were better logicians than the patristic writers, and unhesitatingly denied the freedom of the will, but they did not notice that they made god responsible for all the misdeeds of man, lacking freedom and acting with god's foreknowledge and at his behest. the council of trent scorned all these contradictions and unintelligible points, and declared with infallible authority that man's will is free and that at the same time god is omniscient. the catholic church at the time was in some countries still in a position to meet reason, if it raised objections, with an unanswerable argument: the stake. that is the peculiarity of theological as distinguished from scientific thought, the purest form of which is mathematics. the former never follows a train of thought to its strictly logical conclusion, but only follows a certain distance, to a point where it loses itself in an impenetrable black fog, or in a cloud of glory which dazzles the beholder. mathematical thought, on the contrary, develops the train of thought to the bitter end, to its ultimate conclusions. these are necessarily absurd if the premises are erroneous, and their absurdity is so clear that it convincingly proves the mistake in the point of departure. such a scrupulous confutation of self is to be expected as little from mystic visions as from arrogant dogmatism. the former obey the laws of dreams, in which the association of ideas, unfettered by logic, holds sway and strings together the most incompatible ideas to form an apparently connected series; the latter demands the privilege of being independent of the judgment of reason, and of being tried by faith, a judge who always decides in its favour. those who believe in free will adduce a proof of it which they derive by the method of introspection. man, they say, will never be convinced that he is not free, that his actions are not determined by his own will alone, for he has the incontrovertible consciousness of the contrary. he is quite clear on the point that he does a thing because it is his will to do so, that he had the choice of doing it or not, that he does what he wants, that he comes to his decision owing to considerations, inclinations, moods or intentions which are perfectly known to him, if to him only. at the sorbonne in paris they still remember the professor--when the anecdote was told me victor cousin was named as the hero, but i cannot guarantee that it was he and no other--who used to say in his lecture on free will: "man's will is free. there is no need to prove this by giving reasons. we feel it immediately as a truth. i will show you. i will raise my right arm. i raise it"--here he raised his right arm with a commanding gesture, kept it for a short time in this position, and added triumphantly: "you see that my will is free." his hearers broke into enthusiastic applause at this triumphant demonstration. to-day they would receive it with loud laughter. we have learnt to seek the roots of most, perhaps of all, human actions in the subconsciousness. there they are worked out under influences which cannot be perceived by introspection and in which inborn and acquired inclinations, experiences, organic conditions at the time, instincts, attractions and repulsions play a decisive part. they rise ready made into consciousness, and the latter, not having seen them being formed, persuades itself that it has produced them spontaneously, and imagines reasons why it willed to do actions that were determined outside its sphere. the professor who authoritatively states, "i wish to raise my right arm and therefore i do it," certainly says this in all good faith, but equally certainly he is ignorant. he is not aware of the play of forces which end in his gesture. he raises his right arm, which he believes he chooses with complete freedom, because he is in the habit of using his right arm by preference; if he had been left-handed he would have announced his wish to raise his left arm, and would have been equally convinced that he had decided, with complete freedom, for his left arm. if he suffered from chronic muscular rheumatism in one of his arms, so that it would trouble him or hurt him to move it, he would unconsciously choose the other, sound arm, and maintain just as positively that he had done so with complete freedom. i have mentioned as instances two particularly crude and therefore very obvious reasons which may determine the action of this simple-minded professor without his being aware of it. but each one of our more complicated, and even of our simplest, movements is the outcome of numberless subtle causes which are partly due to the organized experiences and habits of our individual life, partly a necessary consequence of our inherited qualities, our bodily and intellectual constitution, and their origin goes back to the far distant past of our species, to the beginnings of life, we may even say to eternity. our consciousness can tell nothing of these causes. they elude our observation and investigation and remain ever unknown to us. renouvier is quite right when he says no understanding--and i say without his ambiguity no human understanding of the present time--can foretell the actions of another, nor indeed his own, but not because they come to pass independently of inevitable causes, but simply because these causes cannot be descried by our ignorance. it is vain labour to try and derive the solution of the question of free will, or even a contribution towards it, from introspection. it is a method unsuitable for this purpose. the greek sage well knew what a great and difficult task he set man when he admonished him: "[greek: gnôthi seauton]." that is easy to say but difficult if not impossible to do. spinoza very happily characterized the self-deception in which the individual is plunged with regard to the part played in determining his actions by his conscious will aided by reason; he says that if a stone, flung by some hand, had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own free will; and in another place he points out without any illustrative metaphor, that a drunk man and a child, who certainly do not act on their own initiative, also believe in the freedom of their will. it has been possible to prove experimentally how ignorant of the real motives of his actions the individual may be. it is suggested to a person who has been hypnotized that on awakening he is to carry out a certain action, something particularly absurd, unjustified and aimless being intentionally chosen. the subject of the experiment on awaking faithfully carries out the suggestion, and as he has no memory of what happened while he was in the hypnotic state, he is convinced that he is yielding to a sudden idea, a whim, but that in any case his action is determined by his own will. but since he must realize the absurdity of what he is doing, he seeks for some sufficient motive to explain it, and always finds one to his own satisfaction. all the efforts of anguished sophists to prove their thesis of the freedom of the will from data supplied by introspection have failed miserably. but they were forced to undertake them, for theology cannot give up the contention that man acts with free will. it is an important part of the religious conception of the universe and of the relation in which, according to this, man stands to god. to put it shortly, religion sees in man's life on earth a preparation for eternity. it gives him the opportunity of coming nearer to god by his own efforts and thus making himself worthy of the salvation which secures him a place in the sight of god to the end of time. thus the life of the flesh is made a method of selection by which the sheep are sundered from the goats. god provides man with free will for this special purpose, so that he may make use of it to choose good of his own accord and to avoid evil. this undoubtedly wearisome task is made much easier for him, because god in his goodness has given him laws, doctrines of morality and examples which point out the way of salvation. if man makes proper use of his gifts, if in pursuance of divine admonition, he treads of his own free will the path of virtue, he acquires merit which gives him a legitimate claim to the reward of finding favour in god's eyes and to be admitted to the company of the just and pure. but if man purposely turns to evil, of which he is warned by revelation and which he has been given the power to avoid, then he is a sinner and deserves the punishment of damnation, which, however, he may yet escape if god in his mercy forgives him his sin. therefore man holds in his hand the fate of his immortal soul. it depends on him whether this fate be salvation or damnation. he is responsible for directing it to the former or the latter. of course, god has the power to force him to virtue and to stop him from vice. but it is not his plan to condemn man to be the slave of virtue. he wants man to choose virtue of his own accord, he wants noble souls about him who by freedom have attained morality. this religious view of the universe, which deals in assertions and disdains on principle to prove even one of them to reason by facts that can be tested, contrasts with the scientific view of the universe which asserts nothing but what can be objectively ascertained to be true, which distinguishes sharply between the account of what has been observed and can be tested by everyone and hypotheses for which it demands no belief, but only the recognition of their possibility or probability, and which it discards as soon as an ascertained fact definitely disproves them. no compromise is possible between these two views of the universe. nothing can bridge the chasm between them. it would be superficial to say that the theme of the scientific view is realities and that of the religious one imagination. imagination is also a reality, only of a different order to that which is called so in common parlance. it is a subjective reality; it exists only in the mind that conceives it. reality itself is for the thinking mind only a state of consciousness, but it is an image of conditions which have an objective existence, though in another form, outside the consciousness. the supporters of religion maintain that there is an objective reality corresponding to their concepts, but this cannot be ascertained by any of the senses which the living organism has developed in order to establish a relation between the world, of which it is a part, and itself. it is perfectly useless for supporters of the one view of the universe to try and convince those of the other. each of them moves on a different plane and is unapproachable to the other. all that can be done is to define both the one and the other as clearly as possible and prove their incompatibility. for the scientific view of the universe the problem of free will does not exist and cannot exist. all facts that science has observed force it to the assumption of causation, which does not only mean that every phenomenon is produced by a cause, is the effect of a cause and could never have occurred but for this cause, but also means that the effect represents the exact equivalent of the energy which was its cause. thus the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the total energy in the universe is an essential part of the concept of causation, the fundamental hypothesis without which the phenomenon of the universe and the things which occur in it are simply unintelligible to reason; and everything in and outside ourselves, everything that we perceive, becomes chaos, chance, lawless whim or miracle in the theological sense of the word. it is inconceivable that an effect should be anything other than the reappearance in a different form of the exact quantity of energy that caused it; for if the energy of the effect exceeded that of its cause, then part of the effect would have been produced without cause; and if the energy of the effect fell short of that of the cause, then part of the energy of the cause would have been expended without producing an effect. that, however, would be the negation of causation, it would be an admission that part of the effect (i.e. an effect) could be produced without sufficient cause, i.e. out of nothing, and that a part of the cause (i.e. energy) could disappear (into nothing) without producing an equivalent effect, which is obviously absurd. the human will manifests itself by an action or the prevention of an action according to the impulse felt by our organism. both these are an exercise of force, the amount of which can be measured. indeed, inhibition, too, is a dynamical effort which represents the exact equivalent of the force with which the impulse which it has checked acted on the motory centres. the will, therefore, expends energy which does work that can be measured. but the will must derive this energy from some source. it therefore also only converts energy derived from the energy of the universe, the total amount of which can neither be augmented nor diminished; the will consequently is a part of the dynamic energy of the universe, and must necessarily be subject to its mechanical law; that is, to the law of causation. it is therefore not free, but dependent, as is every phenomenon in the universe. whoever maintains its freedom maintains that it is independent, that it is not subject to the law of causation, that it has no cause of which the elements, if they could be fully known to us, would be measurable, that it expends energy which it derives from nowhere, that it produces energy out of nothing. whoever maintains this contradicts all experience from which the knowledge of nature and her laws has been built up; it is obviously hopeless to expect a reasonable discussion with such a person. now the supporters of free will may reply that they do not deny that the will derives its energy from the organism and therefore from the universal source of cosmic energy, and that it makes use of it according to the laws of mechanics; but they assert that the direction in which energy is expended by the will is freely determined by it; further, that the direction does not affect the amount of energy used, and consequently the will can act absolutely in accordance with the mechanical laws of the universe and yet can, independently of outside causes, determine the manner in which the energy shall be expended; that is to say, the will can be free. but this objection is pure sophistry, for the determination of the direction, in so far as it is not mere imagination and therefore ineffective and sterile, but really controls the action, is an expenditure of energy. the controlling power uses up energy and obeys a cause, so we have arrived at the same dilemma again--either the controlling will is subject to the law of causation, then it is not free; or it is free and is determined by no outside cause, then we must ascribe to it motion without driving power and energy derived from nothing--which is absurd. no. there is no such thing as free will. the concept of freedom itself is an illusion of thought which cannot survey sufficiently extensive connexions. nothing in the universe is free; all things mutually determine each other. all are cause and effect, and they fit into one another like cog wheels. everything is linked up and dovetailed. the philosopher's phrase, "everything is in flux," is the description of the outward appearance of things. against it we must set the reality which is: "everything is eternally at rest." for a circumscribed system of motion without beginning or end may mean motion for every individual point which describes the course, but is, as a whole, virtually at rest. everything that exists, or ever will exist, has its necessary and sufficient cause in that which has always been; the sequence of phenomena has been unalterably determined since all eternity for all eternity; what we call chance is an occurrence for which our ignorance cannot perceive the necessary causes and conditions; past and future would be in the same plane, therefore would be present for an omniscience, which knew and understood the machine of the universe down to its smallest wheel and pin. one of the logical consequences of this is that, without any miracle or the assumption of any supernatural influences, it would be possible to foretell the most distant events in all their smallest details. an intelligence sufficiently wide and penetrating would, following the strict law of causation, be able to produce all lines of the present with absolute certainty immeasurably far into the future. as everything that ever will be necessarily must be, it virtually exists at present and has always existed; therefore it is only a question of clarity of vision, which however, is denied to man, to see it at any time and to any extent. the illusion of flux is explicable. life, which like all world processes is a cyclical motion, is passed in an endless alternation between the shining forth and extinction of consciousness, the bearers of which are an everlasting series of organisms following one another. every organism lasts a limited time, during which it is carried along an inconceivably small fraction of the tremendous cycle. it sees all the points of this short stretch but once, and does not learn that they are eternally the same. it gathers the false impression that they fly past it, whereas they are at rest and it passes them, until it ceases to be a suitable bearer of consciousness and disappears, making room for a successor. this rigid immutability of the whole universe is certainly intolerably gruesome to the imagination, but then, every time we look beyond the narrow confines of life and human circumstances, to peep into the infinity and eternity which surrounds us, do not terrifying vistas open up before us? not only the religious minded, but many free thinkers, too, have free will at heart, though the latter are otherwise guiltless of any mysticism. they claim it in the name of man's dignity, which would be deeply humiliated if we had to confess ourselves the slaves of outside influences, automata moved by universal causation without our having any say in the matter. we are not entitled to such trumpery pride. let us seek our dignity in our striving for knowledge, in the subjection of our own instincts to the control of our reason, but not in an imaginary independence of the laws of nature, whose commands we should oppose in vain. with free will responsibility also disappears. that is obvious. but that means a collapse only for theological morality. scientific ethics can manage very well without responsibility. nay, more; there is no room in it for this concept. in the system of theological morality responsibility has a transcendental significance. to sum up once more shortly what has been dealt with in detail above: according to this system morality is a divine command, obedience to, or disregard of which results in salvation or damnation; in order that reward and punishment may be just, one as well as the other must be merited; that implies the assumption that virtue is practised or vice chosen intentionally and with forethought; but this mode of action must be freely willed if man is to be responsible for it before his divine judge. scientific ethics knows nothing of this supernatural dream. in its view morality is an immanent phenomenon which occurs only within humanity--or to define it more accurately, within humanity organized as a society. it arose from a definite necessity; from the undeniable need of men to unite, so as to be able, in company with one another, shoulder to shoulder, to succeed more easily, or indeed to succeed at all, in the struggle for existence which is too hard for the solitary individual. it has a clearly recognizable aim: to teach man to curb his selfish instincts and to practise consideration for his neighbour, by which means alone peaceable life in common and productive co-operation are possible. the instinct of self-preservation supplies society with the laws of morality which it imperiously imposes on all its members, and unconditional obedience to which it demands. society does not dream of saying to the individual: "you are free; you must yourself decide whether you will follow the path of virtue or that of vice." on the contrary, it says to him: "whether you wish it or not, you must do that which my doctrine of morality indicates as good and eschew that which it declares to be evil. you have no choice. i tolerate you in my midst only if you submit to the laws of morality. if you transgress them i shall draw your teeth and claws or destroy you altogether." by discipline lasting many thousands of years society has developed in the individual, though not in all, an organ that watches that his conduct is moral, and this is the conscience. but this is only supplementary to, and representative of, society, which in the main exercises police supervision itself, and sees that in general the moral law is obeyed. it judges all the actions of the individual that come to its knowledge. conscience only is the competent authority where occurrences are concerned which take place simply in the consciousness of the individual, and which he alone is aware of. conscience is only too often a lenient judge who acquits the individual too easily and nearly always admits extenuating circumstances. society does not let him off so lightly; his punishment is certain if he cannot prevent his sin from becoming known. responsibility therefore also exists in morality as understood by sociologists. as far as his intentions are concerned the individual must come to terms with his conscience, which, as a rule, he does not find difficult. for his deeds he must account to society, and it does not ask what took place in his consciousness, but only how his spiritual impulses were manifested. for his deeds, then, he is summoned before society's court of justice and must answer for them without having recourse to the excuse that he acted as he was forced to do by his disposition and the pressure of circumstances, and that he had no choice and could not act otherwise. though morality has always been necessary for the life of the community, and though the latter has, under the pressure of the law of self-preservation, always had to make its members strictly subservient to morality, it has ever had a dim idea that the responsibility of the individual for his actions is only of practical, not of fundamental or ideal significance. it has never pushed investigation as to how far the individual acted freely or not to any great lengths, never attempted to trace it to the foundations of his consciousness, to the inception of the impulses of his will. where the lack of freedom was obvious, for instance, where every layman could see there was insanity, the moral law has been disregarded ever since ancient times, and society has contented itself with protecting itself from the intolerable actions of the lunatic by rendering him harmless. since positive law, made concrete in the laws with penal sanctions, was evolved from the universal moral law, it has admitted the plea of irresponsibility and refrained from exercising its coercive powers where such irresponsibility has been established. in addition to madness, demonstrable coercion and self-defence relieve the individual from responsibility for the crime and render him immune from punishment. in the course of evolution society has conceded still further limitations of individual responsibility. it willingly admits new knowledge gained by scientific psychology and concedes limited responsibility, not only in case of madness, but in such cases, too, where experts can convincingly prove to the judges, the guardians of its law, that the individual was in an abnormal condition and affected by morbid influences at the time of the crime. farther society cannot go, if it does not want to put an end to moral law and do away altogether with positive law. concern for its continued existence forbids this. it must leave it to the philosophers to continue the investigation. they must show that the will is never free, always fettered, not only in the extreme cases of madness or when under the influence of suggestion. they must make it clear that there is only a difference of degree and not of kind between the determining influences under which the individual is constrained to act, and that the causation which binds him proceeds by imperceptible degrees from the delirium of the maniac and the obsession of the abnormal man to the passion, lust and desire of the man with strongly developed instincts, and to the slight stimulus of habits, the colourless judgment and shallow considerations of the ordinary man with a deformed character and no definite features. society can draw no practical conclusion from the theoretical recognition of the lasting limitation and lack of freedom of the will, because moral law by its very nature implies coercion, and therefore excludes freedom. whether the individual submits to the moral law of his own accord, or because he is forced thereto by the community's powers of coercion, is of no account to society. it deals only with the visible results. but it is not merely a matter of flat utilitarianism, it is not even unjust, if society, without inquiring whether the will is free or not, makes the individual responsible for his actions and only makes an exception from this universal rule in extreme cases. even though his will is subject to the law of causation, and the individual always acts as he must, he nevertheless has a means of keeping within the moral law despite inner impulses and outer pressure, and that is by his judgment and its instrument, inhibition. like every organic function which is not purely vegetative and therefore beyond the influence of the will, judgment and inhibition can be strengthened and perfected by methodical exercise, while total neglect of them will weaken and finally atrophy them. the community may demand that each of its members shall devote attention to the development of the natural functions which permit him to discriminate and to suppress any inclination to evil which may appear. it facilitates this duty towards itself and himself for the individual--for it is a question of the increase of his organic efficiency and of his personal worth--by the institutions it founds for the education of youth, by schools which not only impart knowledge, but also form the character, by instruction after the school age, by the honours with which it distinguishes especially excellent persons, thereby holding them up to example. the community prescribes that everyone should acquire a certain minimum of knowledge, and for this purpose forces each individual by law to go to school for a certain number of years. it may and ought to force him also to render himself more capable of obeying the moral law by methodical exercise of his will. every citizen is responsible to the state for being able to read and write. in this sense the individual is also responsible for sufficiently strengthening his faculty of inhibition to be able to control his selfish, anti-social and immoral desires. the particular purpose for which he is to employ his faculty of inhibition depends on the current moral law of the age, which is determined not by the individual, but by the community. the individual does quite enough and is free of blame if he strives with all his might to approximate his actions to the ideal which the community demands at a given time for the life of its members in common and for their mutual relations. to alter and perfect this ideal is the business of a few select men with wider judgment, stronger will and warmer sympathies than the average. in these exceptional cases it is not the community which imposes its ideal on the individual, but, on the contrary, the individual who works out a new ideal for the community, and, so to speak, thanks to his personal qualities, establishes a new record in the gymnastic of the will which beats all earlier ones. finally, it is true, the individual is dependent on his natural disposition. to say that he can be, and is to be, raised above himself is a very impressive, but really nonsensical, phrase. he can get out of himself only what is in him by nature, and however hard he may try to reach out beyond the boundaries drawn by his organic disposition, he finds it impossible to overstep them. but, as a rule, they are far wider than the individual has any idea of until he attempts to reach them, and he will find many surprises if he labours untiringly to develop to their fullest extent all the possibilities latent in him. even a born weakling can, by dint of methodical practice, harden his flaccid muscles sufficiently to become a gymnast of average skill, though he is hardly likely to become a first-class athlete. in just the same way a weak-willed or simple person can by earnest endeavours rise to a consistent morality; if, nevertheless, there appear in him, continually or occasionally, organic impulses which carry him away, it is not his fault but his misfortune. in that case he is subjectively not responsible for his immorality. but the community can, all the same, not liberate him from responsibility, because the law of self-preservation forces it to insist on observance of the moral law, and it has no means of accurately measuring how strong the pressure of instincts and the power of inhibition is in any individual, and to what extent he has fulfilled the duty of exercising and strengthening the latter. the phrase "to understand everything is to forgive everything" shows insight, but is only true in the sense that one must not blame an individual for his natural imperfection. it comprehends recognition of the will's lack of freedom, and the inadmissibility, from the philosophical point of view, of the concept of responsibility, but it does not affect the right and the duty of the community to demand moral conduct regardless of this lack of freedom. it is not permitted to forgive because it understands. moreover, there would be no sense in forgiveness by the community, for the concept of forgiveness implies feeling and kindly forgetfulness of an injury inflicted of malice prepense; but insult and offence play no part in the punishment by society of transgressions of the moral law, and indulgence due to sensibility would endanger its existence. the certainty possessed by the individual that his evil deeds, if they become known, will have evil consequences for him is one of the determining factors which is indispensable in helping him to make a decision. it is an inadmissible affectation to condemn the fear of punishment as a motive for moral action, because it ought to be the result of the conviction that it is absolutely right. it is a powerful aid to self-discipline, as also are the thought and the foretaste of the satisfaction upon which self-respect may count if general respect and praise are to be the reward of exemplary conduct. the great weakness of the kantian doctrine of morality lies in the fact that it retains free will, even though it gives it another name. it is called autonomy of will and is contrasted with heteronomy. this doctrine demands, and considers it possible, that the will should be its own lawgiver and should not allow others to lay down laws for it; but it fails to examine how the will comes to make laws for itself, of what hypothesis these laws are the necessary conclusions, by what means the will secures respect for its law, and whether this seemingly self-imposed law is not really the inner realization of a ready-made law of extraneous origin. the dogma of the autonomy of the will is a consequence of the preliminary error of excluding utility from morality and of declaring its imperative to be categorical, that is, not dependent on the aim, but independent and regardless of any aim. the whole tomfoolery of the categorical imperative and of the autonomy of the will is transcendental mysticism, and is all the more surprising as it is the result of an investigation which claims to be the work of pure reason. it is the shadow of the ghostly bogies of religious conceptions in the daylight of "pure reason." from the point of view of the community we may speak of merit and sin, but not from the subjective point of view. for the community the moral conduct of the individual is useful, immoral conduct is disadvantageous, therefore it praises the one and condemns and punishes the other. that is opportunism, but not moral philosophy. considered subjectively, moral conduct is just as little meritorious as beauty, great stature, muscular strength, keen intelligence, health, a good memory, prompt reactions of consciousness and all other advantages that the individual has received without his personal intervention as a gift of nature. and immoral conduct is just as little blameworthy as ugliness, stupidity, sickness and other misfortunes which the individual is burdened with by heredity or which a hard fate has imposed on him. happy is the favoured man! pitiable the unfortunate one! both are the work of forces which are absolutely beyond the control of their wills. in the same way the good man acts morally because he possesses insight and restraining will-power, and the bad man acts immorally because these perfections have been denied him, and neither the one nor the other can do anything in the matter. that does not relieve man of the duty of labouring assiduously at his moral development, but it does relieve him of responsibility for the result of his efforts. on one point the sociological, the biological and the theological moralists agree: they all bow down humbly before grace. chapter vii morality and progress i have fully investigated in another book ("_der sinn der geschichte_") the problem of progress in all its details. i therefore refer the reader to that for all particulars, and will here give only a summary of the main points. progress implies motion from one point to another. this simple concept is supplemented by others, some clear and some dim, which group themselves round it: the conception that the point towards which motion is directed signifies something better and more desirable than the one from which the motion takes place, and the assumption that the motion is due to an impulse, either inherent in the moving object or complex of objects and an essential part of it, or else impressed upon it by outside forces; further, that the impulse connotes a conscious image of the goal arrived at, recognition of its higher worth and the desire for greater perfection. all these ideas, which are concomitants of the concept of progress, are childish anthropomorphism when applied to the universe. to define progress as motion from a worse point to a better one implies the existence of a scale whereby value may be measured. now values are clearly determined and graded as far as human beings or any similar creatures are concerned. worse or better means to man less or more pleasant, useful, pleasing; progress, therefore, is a development to a condition which man considers more suitable and useful for him and feels to be more harmonious and pleasanter. the universe, from this standpoint, would make progress to prepare itself for the appearance of man, to become more intelligible, habitable and comfortable for man, to please and delight him. whether it obeys its own natural disposition or a higher intelligence, a god, in carrying out this work, in either case it would realize progress to serve mankind. but if this ceases to exist, there is no point in characterizing a development as progress in the sense of amelioration, beautification and perfection. one would then have no right to describe, for instance, the solar system with its planets as indicating progress from the original condition of nebula, because the latter in itself, apart from man and the conditions of his existence, is not better or worse, not more beautiful or uglier, not more perfect or more defective than the former; the original nebula and the solar system are equally the result of the play of the same cosmic forces, and the dynamic formula of the one is the same as that of the other. but reason rejects as nonsensical any view which declares man to be the aim of the universe, which puts all the work of the universe at his service, and conceives it as a huge machine functioning for his advantage. for reasons of formal logic, too, the idea of progress in the universe is unthinkable. the understanding cannot conceive of the universe as other than eternal. now in eternity all progress, that is, all motion from a point of departure, must have reached its goal eternities ago, however slow the motion, however distant the goal. eternity and progress are two concepts which logically exclude one another. in the universe there can be no progress in the sense of ascent, of motion from a worse to a better thing; the only thing in the universe, in nature, which is comprehensible to the understanding and which experience, derived from sense perceptions, can establish, is evolution, an eternal, equable motion always on the same level; and human standards of value are not applicable to its regular, successive stages. one state is merged without a break in another, the simple becomes more manifold until a maximum of complexity is reached; thereupon what is intricate gradually falls to pieces, and the complicated is dissolved and returns to the simple; then, when this point is attained, the same course begins again, and so on for all eternity. thus evolution in the universe is an endless succession of cyclic movements from the simple to the intricate and back to the simple; with a constant alternation from one point of each single circle to the other; with the most extreme, crushing uniformity in the totality of all cycles; with absolutely equal dignity of all the phases of the endless course as they develop one from the other; with a synchronism, inconceivable to man, of all forms of evolution in numberless circles revolving side by side within the infinite whole of the universe. but the concept of progress, which cannot be derived from the processes in the universe and has no sense when applied to them, becomes a reasonable one as soon as its validity is limited to the evolution of humanity. here we no longer deal with conceptions of eternity and infinity. it is a question of temporal and spacial phenomena. the existence of man had a beginning. no doubt it will have an end. it appeared on earth latest at the commencement of the quaternary geological period, but more probably towards the end of the tertiary period. it must necessarily disappear when the earth, owing to cold and evaporation, becomes incapable of supporting life, a state of affairs which, according to our present knowledge of natural laws, must inevitably come to pass. a few million years are allotted to it in which to fulfil its destiny, certainly a short span of time compared with the eternity of the universe, but compared with the duration of individual and national life, with personal destinies and historical occurrences, an immeasurably vast prospect. within the limits of its genesis, its being and its disappearance, it is in a constant state of evolution. it is impossible to deny this. comparisons between the skulls found among remains of the paleolithic age and those of our times, between the state of the undeveloped tribes of central africa and australia and that of the peoples of europe and america, between the beginnings of human speech and the present-day languages, between the thought, knowledge and abilities of former generations and ours--all these prove this incontrovertibly. the purpose of this evolution is unmistakable. it is directed towards an ever closer, ever subtler adaptation to the unalterable conditions which are imposed on men by nature, and which they must make the best of if they are not to perish. and it is synonymous with progress; that is to say, not only with change, simple motion from one point to another, but with amelioration and improvement. here we may apply standards of value. the aim and object of evolution, which we know and desire, supply us with them. here we may judge and appraise anthropomorphically. not only may we do so, but we must, for it is a question of matters which concern mankind alone. all evolution of mankind, corporal and intellectual, the enlargement of the brain case so as to accommodate a larger brain; the development of the muscles of the larynx, palate and hand, and the accurate co-ordination of their movements, which things make clearer and more emphatic speech possible and render the hands defter; the acquisition, interpretation and storing up of experiences leading to discoveries and inventions, all are directed to the same end: to provide men with more reliable weapons in the struggle for existence; to defend them from the dangers surrounding them, the destructive forces of nature; to render their life more secure, longer and richer; to save them from fatigue and suffering; to give them pleasurable emotions and possibilities of happiness. and as we have a clear idea of the object of our evolution, as we desire this object and continually seek to find new means whereby to reach it, we are absolutely justified in calling every movement that brings us nearer to the aim we have in view, and aspire to reach, a progressive step, and in calling every stage of evolution which realizes a biggish part of the object desired an amelioration, an improvement, an ascent. the total amount of progress which has secured to mankind its development we sum up in the concept of civilization. the latter, however, is still far removed from ideal perfection. what we know is infinitesimally small compared with the tremendous bulk of the unknown, perhaps the unknowable, which greets our view on all sides. our technical achievements often leave us in the lurch and indicate no way out of many difficulties. in the human being who knows and can do something, too much still remains of the stupid, helpless, untamed, primitive beast. nevertheless, what has been achieved is of value, and it is childish to depreciate it. paradoxical minds, like j. j. rousseau and his parrot-like imitators, may deny the use of all civilization and declare that the so-called state of nature, the ignorance and helplessness of undeveloped man amid all too mighty nature, is preferable. that is an intellectual joke which is not very amusing. we have not vanquished death, but we have prolonged life, as the mortality statistics prove. we cannot cure all diseases; crowded dwellings in great cities, the nature and intensity of our occupations--civilization, in short--bring diseases from which we should probably not suffer if we were savages; but the cave-dwellers, too, were subject to illnesses, and our antisepsis and hygiene effectually prevent many and grave bodily ills. division of labour makes the individual dependent on the whole economic organism; it makes it easier for the favoured few to exploit the many and to be parasites at their expense, but nevertheless the individual can more easily satisfy his needs than if, being completely free and independent, he alone had to provide all the objects he requires. the speed and facility with which the exchange of goods is effected, thanks to ever new and ever more excellent means of communication, often give rise to artificial wants; cheap travel occasions useless restlessness, but the emancipation of the individual from the place of his birth, the conversion of the whole globe into one single economic domain, of which every part with its own particular superabundance of men and products supplies the lack of the same in other parts, has at least this invaluable advantage, that it makes man more independent of local hazards and makes the earth more habitable for him. many things provided by civilization are obtainable only by the rich, and the spectacle of the luxury of these favoured mortals makes the lot of the poor harder to bear, but the possibility of working one's way up into the ranks of the fortunate is a mighty spur to strong characters, and gives rise to efforts which are profitable to many. all the great technical achievements of civilization can certainly not bring happiness either to the individual or to the community, because happiness is a spiritual state which does not depend on bodily satisfactions and, though it may be troubled by material conditions, can never be created by them; but the moments of happiness which the individual experiences derive an extraordinary intensity from the instruments of civilization which surround and serve us. certainly civilization has its bad points, and it requires no great cleverness to discover them, to point them out and to exaggerate them. certainly many of its most boasted, supposed benefits are not really a blessing, but either merely imaginary or else unimportant--little, superfluous things which may be pleasant, but lacking which we can live without great deprivation, and for which we undoubtedly pay far too dearly. but, on the whole, it is a mighty achievement of man's struggling intellect, an invaluable improvement of the lot of man, and if anyone denies this he forfeits any claim to serious refutation. rousseau's state of nature may be a very pleasant change for a summer holiday, but every man of sound common sense would decline it as a permanent abode. we may therefore freely concede the fact of progress in civilization in so far as the latter implies greater safety, facility, order and equability of life, deeper and more widely diffused knowledge and more perfect adaptation of man to the natural conditions in which he finds himself. for it is no reservation to note in the course of evolution both individual deviations from the path which leads to the goal of civilization, the amelioration of the constitution of mankind, and occasional relapses into bygone barbarisms. to make use of gumplowicz's expression, it is not an acrochronic and acrotopic illusion (that is, a form of self-deception which consists in thinking the time when one lives and the place where one lives the best of all times and the most wonderful of all places) if we place the present far above all past ages and declare our civilization to be incomparably richer and more perfect than anything that has preceded it. the _laudator acti_, the cross-grained nestor who praises the past at the expense of the present, the enthusiast for "the good old times," is a figure that has always been familiar. but it proves nothing. this tender love of the past is not the outcome of objective comparison and consideration, but an impulse of subjective psychology. it is simply the emotion and longing which fill an old man's heart when he looks back on his youth. he remembers the pleasurable emotions which once accompanied all his impressions and which are now unknown to his worn-out organism, and he thinks the world was better because he found more joy in it. the aged man is convinced that in his youth the sky was bluer, the rose more odorous, the women more beautiful than now, but an impartial observer would pityingly shake his head at this. but can the progress, which cannot reasonably be denied in civilization, also be traced in morality? philosophers who are by no means negligible have roundly replied in the negative. buckle declares uncompromisingly that the only progress possible to man is intellectual, and by this he means that mankind grows in knowledge, foresight and clarity of thought, but not at the same time in morality, which, according to him, differs from the intellect and understanding and is not included in them. buckle's unfavourable judgment has been turned into a formula which has often been repeated. scientifically, technically, we progress; morally we stand still or slip back; the two orders of development move neither in the same direction nor with the same speed. that is a view that is widely held. fr. bouillier comes to the same conclusion as buckle, though from different considerations. he asserts that "a savage who obeys his conscience, however ignorant this may be, can be as virtuous as a socrates or an aristides; one can even go so far as to defend the view that social progress instead of strengthening individual morality weakens it, for society, in proportion as it is better ordered, saves the individual the trouble of a great many virtuous actions." however, there are other moralists who take the opposite view. shaftesbury cannot imagine a moral system in which there is no place for the idea of constant progress, of continuous improvement. the great frenchmen of the eighteenth century are convinced of the moral rise of humanity. "the mass of mankind," says turgot, "advances constantly towards an ever-growing perfection," and elsewhere: "men taught by experience grow in ever greater measure and in a better sense humane." condorcet defends no less emphatically the view that the faculty of growing more perfect is inherent in man. this is a case of pessimism and optimism which have their roots less in reasonable thought than in temperament. a worn-out, weary individual, or generation, looks back and spends the time in futile yearning and melancholy visions of the past; but a sturdy generation, full of life, and conscious of it, looks forward, and planning, inventing, and determined to realize its creative ideas, it conjures up the image of the future. pessimism regrets and groans; optimism hopes and promises. the former, like ovid, thinks the golden age is in the past, the latter, like the fathers of the great revolution, looks for it in the future. in neither case do they reach conclusions as a result of observation and logical thought, rather they invent reasons afterwards for their conclusions, as they do interpretations of their observations. but he who regards life neither with bitterness nor with pride, and tries to understand it objectively, will come to the opinion that morality too has its fair share in the progress of civilization. theological thought interprets moral perfection differently from scientific thought. according to the former it is independent of intellectual development and purely a matter of faith. god is the ideal of morality, belief in him the necessary condition for a moral life. through its fall mankind withdrew from god and was left a prey to immorality; original sin perpetually burdened it; by redemption and grace it has been purified from this inborn stain, led back to god and once more rendered capable of morality. for mankind only one kind of progress in morality was possible, and this took place, not gradually and step by step, but with one sudden swift advance, by which it immediately attained the highest degree of moral perfection possible, and that was when the true faith was revealed to it. before the revelation mankind did not know real morality, only its dim shadow, only a vague yearning for it; by the revelation at one blow it was in full possession of morality, and now it is the business of every individual, whether he will draw near to the divine example by pious efforts or ruthlessly withdraw from it. since the glad tidings of faith were announced to humanity there can be no question of moral progress for mankind as a whole; it has become a personal matter which everyone has to deal with himself. criticism of this dogmatism is superfluous. it is quite enough to place it before the reader. it is quite comprehensible, too, that those whose views permit them to talk with bouillier of a savage who obeys his conscience should deny moral progress. they assume that a savage has a conscience, that conscience is an element of human nature, that it is a quality or a capacity like sensation or memory, that it is born with man like his limbs and organs. in that case it might well be asserted that subjective morality has made no progress in historic and perhaps even in prehistoric times, and that actually a "savage who obeys his conscience can be just as virtuous as a socrates or an aristides." it would hardly be possible to give a concrete proof of the contrary; if for no other reason because for a long time there have been no savages in the strict sense of the word anywhere on earth. by savages we mean human beings in their primitive, zoological condition who have developed solely according to the biological forms of the species and under the influence of surrounding nature and have taken over nothing of an intellectual character from the group to which they belong. all savages of whom we know form societies which for the most part are not even loosely, but firmly, knit together, with laws that may seem nonsensical and barbaric to us, but are none the less binding with clearly defined duties which they impose on every member, with sanctions whose cruelty supersedes that of any punishment permitted by civilization. a man who is a member of a society, no matter how primitive it may be, may certainly have a conscience, but the point is that he is not a savage, but the contrary of a savage, namely: a social being who has received an education from his society, who is bound to conform to its habits, customs and views, and who in all his actions must consider its opinion. but these conditions, as i have shown, produce a conscience, the representative of society in the consciousness of the individual. conscience is no innate feature of man uninfluenced by society, it is not a product of nature, it is the result of education; he who possesses a conscience is no savage, but a person formed by discipline and subservient to it; conscience is the fruit of civilization, of a certain civilization; in itself it represents progress compared with the primitive state of man. consequently it is an objectionable contradiction to talk of conscience and at the same time deny moral progress. it is peculiarly arbitrary, too, to think that a savage, if he had a conscience, could obey it to the same extent, that is, be just as virtuous, as a socrates or an aristides. this would contradict all the observations and experience from which i have derived the doctrine that conscience works by means of inhibition, and that morality and virtue from the biological point of view are inhibition. for inhibition is developed by practice and use. except in cases of morbid disturbance it develops simultaneously with the understanding which manipulates it and demands efficiency from it. there can be no two opinions about the fact that the understanding and the faculty of inhibition in living beings have developed progressively. there is no need to adduce any proof that the frog is intellectually superior to the zoospore, and man to the frog, and that as we ascend the scale of organisms we find their reactions to stimuli are increasingly subject to individual modification, and that there is a gradual transition from the original, purely mechanical tropism to differentiated reflex action, which, however, is still beyond the control of the will, and finally to resistances which suppress every externally visible reply on the part of the organism to the impression it has received. in the course of this development the faculty of inhibition grows stronger and more efficient and obeys the behests of the understanding more and more swiftly, surely and reliably; it can reach a pitch of invincibility against which all the revolts of instinct, all the storms of passion, are powerless. in the savage, or rather in man at a low stage of civilization, the power of inhibition is far from having reached such perfect development. it is not very robust, works defectively and often fails. little civilized man, if he has a conscience, cannot even with the best intentions always obey it punctually. his instinct is stronger than his insight. he is not master of his impulses; rather it is they that master him. all who have described tribes of low civilization have observed that their reactions resemble reflex movements and that they lack self-control. moral conduct, that is, control of their selfishness and consideration for their fellow men, is difficult for them if it demands effort, sacrifice and painful renunciation. however, we need not trouble to go to the negroes of the congo or the inhabitants of the solomon islands to observe the inefficiency of the power of inhibition. we need only look around us. we shall find enough instances among ourselves. the uneducated, the badly educated and abnormal people on whom teaching and example make no impression cannot follow the precepts of morality, although they know them. to express it as the roman poet does, they know the better and approve it, but they have a longing for the worse. so it is wrong to say that a savage can be just as virtuous as a socrates or an aristides. he could not, even if he would. he would lack the organic means: a sufficiently trained intelligence to point out his moral duty, a sufficiently developed faculty of inhibition to follow the admonition of his intelligence. bouillier's objection to moral progress will not hold water. the romantics who have invented the fairy tale of the noble savage and who declare in seume's words: "see, we savages are better men after all," are out of touch with reality. like civilization, and simultaneously with civilization, morality progresses towards improvement, towards perfection. the kantian moralist, like the theologian, is forbidden by the logic of his system to admit the possibility of moral progress. if the moral law is categorical, that is, unlimited by any special purpose, if it exists within us, eternal and immutable as the stars above us, we should be hard put to it to say how this unalterable block, placed in our souls we know not how or by whom, could receive an impetus to progressive development, or in what way this development could be carried out. that which is categorical is absolute, and the concept of progress in the absolute, as in the infinite and the eternal, has no sense. but whoever regards morality from the biological and sociological point of view is forced to assert its progress, just as the dogmatic mystic, who believes in the categorical imperative, is forced to deny it. let us recapitulate the fundamental concepts. regarded biologically morality is inhibition, the development of which is of the greatest importance to the individual, as it enables him not to waste the living force of his cell plasm and of his organs in sterile reflex movements, but to store it up and hold it ready for useful purposes. the stronger his power of inhibition the better he is armed for the struggle for existence, and the better he is armed the more efficient he is. denial of the progressive development of inhibition implies a denial that modern man can maintain himself with more ease and security against nature and hostile or injurious natural phenomena, and that he is more successful in competition with other men than his predecessors on earth. but this latter denial is obviously nonsense. the only individuals who do not take part in progressive development are the degenerates. they are organically inferior, their faculty of inhibition is defective or altogether lacking, they are slaves of impulses which their will and intelligence have no means of controlling, they are the outcome of morbidly arrested or retrograde development, they are the victims and refuse of a civilization too intensive, too exhausting and wearing for some men, and they are destined to fall out of the ranks of a race moving majestically forward and to lie helplessly by the roadside. from the sociological point of view morality is the bond which unites the individuals in a community, the foundation upon which alone society can be built up and maintained. for it implies a victory over self, consideration for one's neighbour, recognition of his rights, concession of his claims, even when valued possessions must unwillingly be given up and painful renunciation of attainable satisfaction is required. this is neighbourly kindness and the charity of the bible, hutcheson's and hume's benevolence, adam smith's sympathy and herbert spencer's altruism; it is the necessary condition on which alone individuals can live peaceably together and helpfully assist each other to make life easier. if most or all individuals lack it, we have hobbes's war of all against all; then man is as a wolf to other men, and each one is condemned to the state of a beast roaming in loneliness. if a few, a minority, lack it, then the majority will not tolerate them in its midst, but will expel them from the community as a dangerous nuisance and deprive them of the privilege of mutual aid and of the advantage of joint responsibility. the species of man, like every other species of organism and like every individual, wants to live. it can only achieve this by adapting itself to existing natural conditions. the more suitable and perfect the adaptation the more easily and securely it lives. under the present conditions of the universe and the earth a solitary human individual could not manage to exist, let alone develop into an intelligent being. the form his adaptation to circumstances has taken is that of union in an organized community. for the existence of society and the adjustment of the individual in it is the indispensable condition for the life of the species as well as of the individual. society can only continue to exist if individuals learn to consider one another and practise benevolence towards each other. society therefore created morality and inculcated it in all its members, because it was its first need, the essential condition which rendered its existence possible, just as the species created society, because it could only continue to live as an organized society. thus morality with the strictest logical necessity has its place in the totality of efforts which human beings had to make, and still have to make, in order to preserve life, to make it sufficiently profound and to enrich it with satisfactions, that is, with pleasurable emotions of every kind, so that they may continue to have the will and the eager desire to maintain their existence by effort and struggle; in short, in order to make life seem worth living, even at the cost of constant toil and moil. without society it is impossible for the individual to exist; without morality it is impossible for society to exist; the instinct of self-preservation furnishes society with habits and rules governing the mutual relations of its members and with institutions for economizing force; all these together we call civilization. the development and improvement of civilization is obvious; it is proved by the fact that it draws nearer and nearer to its goal, namely, the establishment of satisfactory relations between individuals and groups, and the attainment of a maximum of satisfaction with a minimum of individual effort. but it would be incomprehensible if morality, the essential condition for the existence of society which creates civilization, should have no part in the indisputable, because easily demonstrable, progress of the latter. morality occupies such a large place in civilization that the mistaken view has arisen among many moral philosophers that it is the aim of civilization and has no aim other than itself. closer investigation shows this to be an error, a reversal of the true relation. morality is no aim, certainly no aim to itself, it is a means to an end, the most important, most indispensable means to the one end, to bring about civilization, to maintain and refine it, and adapt it more and more to its task. but the task of civilization, as i have shown, is to preserve, facilitate and enrich the life of the individual and the species. morality therefore is the most important form in which the instinct of self-preservation in the species is manifested, and to deny progress to it implies the assumption that the species does not possess the impulse to preserve and beautify its existence, that its instinct of self-preservation flags, that it does not recognize its aim and is ignorant of the path leading to its goal. this assumption, however, is contradicted by all, and supported by none, of the phenomena observable in the life of the species--the absolute increase of the population of the earth, the prolongation of individual life and of the age of efficiency, the combating of every kind of harmful thing. the steadfast self-control of civilized man compared with the unreliability of the savage, who appears capricious and unaccountable because he freely obeys every impulse, proves the progressive development of the faculty of inhibition in the individual organism. the order and definite organization of modern society, the rule of law, men's equality before the law, the guarantee of freedom and respect for the person, all these compared with the state of nations in earlier times (actually anarchy under a mantle of tyranny and the unlimited power of a few mighty ones over the helpless masses) prove the progressive development of civilization in the social organism. but logically the progressive development of morality itself must correspond to the progressive development of its instrument, inhibition, and of its product, civilization. the conclusion to which we are forced by theoretical considerations is fully endorsed by observation of actual life. it is sufficient to indicate broad facts to one who denies moral progress. slavery, which aristotle thought a law of nature, which christianity tolerated, which modern states, such as england, france, the united states and brazil, defended and protected by law, was everywhere abolished some years ago. the objection is raised that modern hired labour is merely slavery of the proletariat under another name, that the exploitation of workmen by employers is a hypocritical continuation of serfdom. but that is sophistry. the hired labourer is not bound to his contract. he can break it. "yes, at the price of starvation." that used to be the case, but nowadays organized working men are no longer at the mercy of powerful capital, and therein lies progress. they are in a position to make conditions and not seldom to force their acceptance. they have the right to strike, to move from place to place, to form unions. the community has recognized the duty of mitigating, at least to some extent, the evils to which faulty economic organization exposes the workman. it has instituted accident and health insurance, old age pensions, and, in some places, assistance for those who are out of work through no fault of their own. all this is still very defective, but these are hopeful beginnings, all the same, and, above all, it shows the awakening of a social conscience that earlier ages did not know. justice is administered more and more humanely, that is, morally. it is a century since legal torture was abolished. society is ashamed to get at the truth easily by torturing a suspect who after all may be innocent. the condemned man is no longer branded or mutilated; he suffers no corporal ill-treatment of which the results can never be obliterated. capital punishment is still a blot on the honour of civilization. but for more than a century now, since the time of beccaria, it has been violently opposed and has already been abolished in some states; the others will no doubt have to follow suit within a short time. consider that in england at the beginning of the nineteenth century a thief was hanged if he had stolen a thing of no more value than the rope that was to hang him, and even children of fourteen years were condemned to this fate. to-day the judge pronounces sentence of death, even where it is still legal, with grave misgivings and searchings of conscience, and the execution, formerly a public spectacle, is carried out more or less secretly, because the conviction is gradually ripening in society that by the cold-blooded killing of a man it is perpetrating a crime which it must keep as secret as possible. the sentence is now almost everywhere deferred, and thus the conviction becomes a very emphatic warning which points out the path of repentance, of conversion and improvement to the guilty man, and leaves him the possibility of becoming a decent human being again. special courts for children mitigate the stern penal code and modify it according to the needs of unripe, youthful characters. imprisonment for debt is a half-forgotten thing of the past and regarded more or less as a joke. what these changes have in common is that they one and all indicate a deepening of the community's feeling of duty and responsibility towards the individual, greater respect for persons on the part of the law, an increase of the will to resist the first impulse of anger, revenge and mercilessness. these tendencies, however, are the very essence of morality. i forbear to adduce as a proof of progress that the inquisition no longer rules and nowhere burns its victims. for actually there is no greater toleration of those who hold other opinions than there was formerly. religious toleration is explained by the fact that the people's consciousness no longer attaches such enormous importance to religion as in past centuries. but political, æsthetic and philosophical antagonisms arouse as much bloodthirsty rage to-day as did formerly heresy in religion, and opponents would unhesitatingly apply torture and the stake to one another if the great mass of the people would develop sufficiently enthusiastic zeal for their views to allow their raging fanaticism to have recourse to violence, as it once permitted domineering religious orthodoxy to do. other aspects of civilization, not so essential, are hardly less encouraging than the developments on which i have hitherto dwelt. drunkenness, formerly an almost universal vice, is on the decrease. among the educated classes it is only met with exceptionally, and is recognized as a morbid aberration; among the lower classes it continually grows less. the statistics of the savings banks show an ever-growing determination to save. the masses who used to rejoice in dirt now manifest an increasingly vigorous desire for a cleanliness that demands soap and baths. this indicates control of impulse, of the inclination for alcoholic drinks and the tendency to squander, and an increase of self-respect which recognizes dirt to be humiliating. these are activities of the moral feelings, their material activities. if, in spite of these material proofs of the progress of morality in all social functions and in many individual habits, serious-minded men still maintain that it stands still or even that it shows retrogression compared with former times, this view, which is undoubtedly a mistaken one, is due to wrong interpretation of facts. bouillier's remark that "social progress instead of increasing individual morality weakens it, because society, in proportion as it is better organized, saves the individual the trouble of a number of virtuous actions" has a perfectly correct point of departure. many tasks of neighbourly kindness and humane joint responsibility which used to be left to the inclination, the free choice and the noble zeal of individuals, and could be carried out or neglected by them, are now methodically fulfilled by the community. saint martin no longer needs to divide his cloak to give half to a poor shivering man. the public charity commission gives him winter clothes if he cannot afford to buy any. no knights are needed to protect innocence, weakness and humility from oppressors. the oppressed appeal successfully to the police, the court of justice, or, by writing to the papers, to public opinion. there is no need for knights templar or knights of st. john to care for strangers and tend the sick. inns and public hospitals are at their disposal. to-day there would be neither occasion nor reason for the miracle of st. elizabeth of hungary, who against the orders of her hard husband took to the starving bread which was turned into roses. the poor are regularly fed in municipal and communal kitchens. individual deeds of mercy are less necessary now than formerly, when, if they occurred, they were the outcome of exceptionally noble and devout sympathy and heroic self-sacrifice. one is therefore inclined to believe that men are less capable of such deeds than they were in the past. but that is doing them a grave injustice. dr. barnardo, who opened a home for the little waifs and strays of the east end of london, is not inferior to st. vincent de paul who adopted and brought up forsaken children. john brown who suffered a martyr's death by hanging because he attempted with arms to liberate the negro slaves of the southern states, henry dumont who devoted the efforts of a lifetime to founding the red cross to help those wounded in war, emile zola who sacrificed his fortune, his reputation as an author, his personal safety, and suffered persecution, calumny, exile, a shameful condemnation in court, and violent threats to his life in order to get justice for captain dreyfus who had been wrongfully accused--all these can well compare with the saints in the golden legend. virtue exists potentially in as many cases as formerly, probably in more; and it is actively practised whenever and wherever it is appealed to. another result of the long evolution of civilization and morality is the development of an ethical instinct in all except abnormal, degenerate individuals, which causes men to act morally in nearly all situations without conscious reflection, choice or effort. the individual who is ethically well grounded, in whom moral conduct has become an organized reflex action, does what is right without any conscious effort, and therefore does not in so doing evoke any idea of merit either in himself or in witnesses. but to do right habitually, carelessly and almost without thought, as one breathes and eats, easily makes one unjust in one's judgments. the battle between reason and blind instinct, between the will and refractory impulse, the victory of the lofty principle, of spirituality over what is irrational and materialistic, which give us the illusion that free humanity is superior to the fatality of cosmic forces, have something so elevated and beautiful about them that we are disappointed if they are absent, and practical morality without this dramatic setting does not appear to be real morality. nevertheless we must not give way to this æsthetic point of view. we must always remember that morality has a biological and sociological aim and must soberly admit that it is all the better if this aim is realized without in every single case depending on uncertain individual decisions. it would be an ideal state of affairs if in a society there were such clear knowledge of all its vital necessities, and this had been so inculcated in all its members, that their harmonious life together and their co-operation for the common weal would never more be troubled by the revolt of ruthless individual selfishness against the love of one's neighbour and willingness to sacrifice oneself for the community. the ideal of morality would be attained, but the concept of merit would be transferred from the individual to the community. superficial observation might object to finding in individuals no victorious struggle against resistance, hence no virtue, and might bemoan the stagnation, nay, the retrogression, of morality. but whoever views matters as a whole would have to admit that it would imply the greatest progress in virtue if the latter from being an individual merit had become an attribute of the community. i am far from maintaining that we have reached this ideal state; but evolution tends unmistakably in this direction; and this is one of the reasons why morality may appear to make no progress. the very rise of the community to a higher stage of morality may be a fresh cause of error concerning the progress of morality. the work of the strongest and most clear-headed thinkers for many thousand years, who have bequeathed as a legacy to the community their lifelong labours for the amelioration of the lot of mankind, has developed in us an ideal of active and passive morality which is always present, even to the mind of the weak or bad man who cannot or will not live up to it. by this ideal, which is that of the community and which we bear within us, we involuntarily judge real life as we observe it, without applying the necessary corrections. we necessarily note a discrepancy between theory and practice, which appears to us to be not mere inadequacy but a contradiction of principles, not a quantitative, but a qualitative difference, and thus he who is not forewarned easily becomes doubtful, pessimistic, and bitterly contemptuous of mankind. this is the theme with which light literature unweariedly deals. novels and the drama constantly show us types: "pillars of society" and other worthy men, who pretend to be honourable, who are full of good principles, preach unctuously and condemn others with pious indignation, but who themselves in all situations behave with the most horrible selfishness and are sinks of iniquity. the creators of these rogues professing virtue, of these secret sinners, think they are mightily superior; they think they know mankind, that they are deceived by no one and can see deep down into men's souls; they call their method realism, and they look down with the greatest contempt upon poets who depict good, unselfish, noble, in short, moral characters, and call them optimists, flirts, distillers of rosewater, who are either too silly or too dishonest to see the truth or to confess it. if realism happens to be the fashion, the public believes these men who depict what is ugly and disgusting, admires them, is impressed by them, and scorns the idealists who have a better opinion of mankind. however, realism is onesided and exaggerated, and therefore just as far from the truth as enthusiastic idealism. it picks out certain characteristics of human nature, generalizes from them and neglects the others, thereby libelling mankind. the same people who in their flat, insipid daily life unhesitatingly indulge their poor little vanities, their naïve selfishness, their childish jealousy, their secret sensuality and their moral cowardice because it is of no consequence, because it alters nothing in the general constitution of society, because the community takes good care that moral principles shall be maintained, these same people can, on great occasions, which, however, seldom occur, reveal virtues which they themselves never suspected and which we gaze at in blank astonishment with reverent awe. the hypocritical philistines of realistic literature, rotten at the core, when the _titanic_ sank, during the plague in manchuria, at the earthquake of messina, in the mine disaster at courrières, and on arctic and antarctic expeditions, proved to be heroes who came very near to the theatrical ideal of morality, if they did not quite reach it. if one takes the valet's point of view and observes man in his dressing-gown and slippers when he does not feel called upon to pull himself together, one may very well form a poor opinion of him. but if one considers the actions of the community and dwells on the loftiest deeds of individuals, one will no longer believe that the morality of the present time is inferior to that of any other age. there is one phenomenon, though, which seems to prove that those who deny moral progress are in the right, and that is war. this is indeed the triumph of the beast in mankind, a bestial trampling under foot of civilization, its principles, methods and aims, and it might be adduced as a crushing proof of the stagnation or retrogression of morality that to this very day its horrors can devastate the earth, as they did hundreds and thousands of years ago, only to an incomparably greater extent, more cruelly and more thoroughly. but this, too, would be a false conclusion. it is certain that the men who take it upon themselves freely, purposely and intentionally to make war are monsters; their action is a crime that cannot be expiated. unhesitatingly they have recourse to massacre, robbery, fire and all other horrors in order to satisfy their devilish self-seeking which desires the fulfilment of their ambition, that is, of their self-love and vanity, which covets riches, increase of power, a ruling position and its privileges. these they pursue either for themselves or for a family or caste, and they pretend that they wish to defend their country from its enemies, to acquire new boundaries for it affording better protection than the old, to promote the development of the nation by getting fresh territory, to spread its civilization and secure a glorious future for it. nations, however, which allow their rulers to plunge them into a war of aggression may be foolish and clumsy, but they need not be immoral. they are made drunk with phrases which appeal to their noblest feelings, which their government and its intellectual bailiffs pour out to them in overflowing measure; they believe the shameless lies which are told them boastfully; and this is undoubtedly a lamentable, mental weakness which drew from dante the bitter cry: "often one hears the people in their intoxication cry: 'long live our death! down with our life!'" but having simply accepted these preliminary ideas the people act with such morality as one cannot forbear to admire. in a grand flight they rise superior to all thought of self, raise their feeling of joint responsibility to the pitch of heroism and martyrdom, and gladly sacrifice to their duty to their neighbour and to the community their possessions, their comfort, their health and their lives. that is very great virtue whose subjective merit is no whit diminished by the fact that it is manifested in a cause that is objectively unjust. and this virtue on the part of nations which have been misled was never so widespread or so real as now. the attitude of mercenaries who served the highest bidder, the lack of ideals among the soldiers who followed foreign conquerors at whose command they tyrannized over nations who did not concern them at all, the cynicism of the leaders who unhesitatingly went over to the enemy and fought against their own country and people, these are things that are not to be found nowadays and are almost unthinkable. no napoleon of to-day could lead the men of würtemberg and bavaria to spain and russia, nor could an elector of hesse sell recruits to england for the conquest of north america; no louis xiv could induce a bernard of saxe-weimar to fight his battles against german adversaries, no constable of bourbon ally himself with spain against his native france. leonidas, once admired and praised as an exception, is to-day the rule. "the guards who die but do not yield" are to be found on every battlefield nowadays. in modern warfare a higher, more perfect morality of the masses obtains than was the case in the past. that war itself is the most immoral thing does not detract from the moral worth of those who are led and misled. the masses lack insight and judgment, their understanding is not sufficiently developed to realize the bestiality of the rulers who put them to such evil use; but the way they suppress their own feelings, the way their will controls their impulses, their social discipline, in short, their morality, is admirable. moreover, the conscience of mankind revolts more and more against the wickedness of war, and the best men of the time are striving to bring the mutual relations of nations, like those of individuals, within the jurisdiction of law and morality. morality will doubtless at no distant date do away with war, as it has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, blood feuds, head hunting and cannibalism. no phenomenon of individual worthlessness observed within a narrow sphere can detract from the fact that the community constantly improves. a pessimistic view of the development of morality has no justification. progress of civilization implies progress of morality, its most important instrument in the work of adapting the race to the immutable conditions of its existence. chapter viii the sanctions of morality the concept of morality includes an idea of compulsion, of coercion. a voice says to man: "you must!" or "you may not!" it commands him to do, or to refrain from doing, something. if he obeys, all is well; but if he takes no notice of it, pays no heed to it, the question arises: "what now? will the voice rest content with crying in the wilderness? will it not mind speaking to deaf ears? will the refractory individual not suffer for disregarding it, or has it means to enforce obedience, and what are these means?" the answer to this question depends on what view one holds as to the nature of this monitory, warning, commanding voice. whoever believes in kant's categorical imperative must admit that this word of command is denuded of all power of coercion and must absolutely rely on the good will of the individual in whose soul it makes itself heard. according to kant the moral law aims at no extraneous result, no utility. it is its own aim and object. but its own aim is fulfilled as soon as the categorical imperative has spoken, whether the individual acts in accordance with it or not. it has therefore in principle no sanction. true, kant contradicts himself, for after having sternly excluded from his doctrine all utility as the end of morality, all trace of feeling from moral action, he smuggles blissful happiness in by a back door; the result of submission to the moral law and its dutiful fulfilment, he declares, will be bliss. bliss, however you interpret it, is a pleasurable emotion. whether you act morally with the declared intention of attaining the pleasurable emotion of bliss, or whether this pleasurable emotion comes of its own accord as an undesired reward when you have acted morally merely from a feeling of duty, without a thought for such a result, without a wish to attain it, it makes no difference to the fact that moral action actually meets with a reward. kant does not openly promise this, but with a wink he whispers in your ear that there is a prospect of it. nor does it alter the further fact that kant, having contemptuously expelled eudæmonism from his system, reinstates it with full honours. once it has been conceded that moral conduct makes man blissful, in other words gives him a reward, the categorical imperative also has a sanction, albeit a very insufficient one. he who fulfils the moral law attains bliss; that is a spur whether you admit it or not. but he who does not fulfil it loses this advantage, otherwise, however, nothing happens to him. the sanction, therefore, is onesided. a reward is offered for the fulfilment of the moral law, but there is no punishment for its non-fulfilment. for it is no penalty if bliss is withheld from him who has no conception of it and no desire for it. no matter, then, if the moral law be eternal and immutable as the stars above us, if it be categorical, if it be fulfilled, not owing to a conception of its effect, not from liking for this effect, but from an inner necessity, it ceases to be a living force for mankind or to have any practical significance; for the single thread which unites it with human feelings--the whispered, vague promise of bliss--is too thin. feeling which has no knowledge of this misty bliss, and therefore no yearning for it, is uninfluenced by the categorical moral law. reason is not necessarily convinced that it is right and valid. the moral law abides like the stars with which it is arbitrarily compared, itself a star in airless space, pursuing its course regardless of humanity, having no relation to it or connexion with it; regard for or disregard of the moral law makes no perceptible difference, and it ceases to have any but a kind of astronomical interest for mankind, a purely theoretical interest for purposes of scientific observation and calculation, and is in no way applicable to the feelings, thoughts and actions of men. theological morality adopts a widely different point of view. its logic compels it to provide the most effective sanctions. god is the lawgiver of morality. he prescribes with dictatorial omniscience what is good, what is bad, what should be practised and what avoided. obedience earns a glorious reward, revolt entails the most terrible punishment. reward and punishment are eternal, or may in certain circumstances be so, and this, by the way, is cruelty which ill accords with the universal goodness ascribed to god. for human understanding will never be persuaded, will never be able to grasp, that a sinner, however grave and numerous his sins committed during the brief period of the fleeting life of man, can ever deserve an eternity of the most fearful punishment. the lack of proportion between the deed and the penalty is so monstrous that it is felt to be the gravest injustice, against which both reason and feeling revolt. imagination can conceive hell fire that lasts a certain time and has an aim, like life with its praiseworthy and wicked deeds, but it boggles at the idea of a hell from which there is no escape and the agonies of which are endless. the old testament conceives the sanctions of the moral law enunciated by god in a thoroughly realistic manner. fulfil the commandment "that thy days may be long in the land." if you disobey, the curse of the lord will be on you and you will be pursued by his anger unto the fourth generation. christianity considered it dubious to make this life the scene of reward and punishment. it is imprudent to let divine justice rule here below, so to say, in public, before an audience and representatives of the press who attentively follow the proceedings, watch all its details, and can judge whether the verdict is put into execution. prudence demands that the trial should take place in the next world, where it is protected from annoying curiosity. mocking onlookers cannot then observe that it is only in the dramas of noble-minded poets that in the last act vice is inevitably punished and virtue rewarded, while in real life only too often merit starves, suffers humiliation and poverty and altogether leads a miserable existence, while sin flourishes in an objectionable manner and to the very end revels in all the good things of this earth. however, the religious moralists painted such a vivid and arresting picture of what awaits the sinners in the next world, that if men had not been obdurate in their disbelief they must have shudderingly realized it, as if it actually happened in this world. words from the pulpit admonishing men to obey god's law under penalty of most terrible punishment were greatly emphasized by the paintings and sculpture over the altars and the church doors, where all the tortures of hell were depicted by great artists who put all their imagination and all their genius into the work. as innumerable people have testified, these representations were taken so literally, not only by the simple-minded masses but also by the more highly educated, that they were haunted by them, waking and sleeping, and imagined that in their own flesh they felt the torture of flames, of boiling pitch, of the prick of the pitchfork as the devil turned them on the grid, of the teeth with which the spirits of hell tore their flesh from their bones. the fear of hell poisoned many a life up till quite recently, especially in scotland, and kept people in a constant state of agitation and anguish which occasionally rose to mad despair. it is remarkable that only punishment was so impressively held up to man's view, but not reward. pictures of paradise are much less rich and varied than those of hell, and its joys are peculiarly modest. the inventive powers of painters, sculptors, and poets did not rise above a beautifully illuminated hall where the blessed are ranged around god's throne and with folded hands sing hymns of praise to him, while angels play an accompaniment on trumpets and fiddles. a prayer meeting, a choir and a concert of music, that is all that christian eschatology holds out as an eternal reward to virtue. it redounds to its credit that it assumes a sufficiently modest taste among the good to make them long for these joys and find infinite happiness in them. islam does not count on such moderation. the joys of paradise that it promises are so crudely sensual that they may well arouse lust in coarse natures, and can counterbalance the fear of hell fire. the ideas of the reward of merit in the hereafter held by the northern nations, germans and scandinavians, are just as low and coarse. for the mohamedans paradise is a harem; for the worshippers of odin it is a pot-house where there are free drinks and a jolly brawl to end up with. heroes who fall in battle--they knew no virtues but a warlike spirit and contempt of death--enter valhalla, where they partake of the everlasting orgies of the gods, drink unlimited quantities of mead and beer, and fight for them to their heart's content without taking any harm. the north american indians hope, after leading a model life, to be gathered to the great spirit, and in the happy hunting grounds of heaven evermore to kill abundant game. only buddhism comforts the virtuous man with finer and more spiritual hopes. from out his world of weariness and pessimism it opens up the prospect of nirvana to him, that is, of the end of all feeling, which after all can only be painful, and of all thought, which after all is only melancholy and despair, and of the volatilization of the personality, the only real release; while it condemns the sinner to the worst punishment, continued existence in ever new incarnations. these are indeed extraordinarily vigorous sanctions, which, though they fail to have any effect on the unbeliever, make a very deep impression on the believer, and are well fitted to determine his actions. but they imply a debasement of the motives for leading a moral life, which are no longer the outcome of insight and a convinced desire for good, but the result of fear and avidity, a speculation for profit, a prudent flight from danger. the practice of morality becomes a safe investment for the father of a family who hopes to find his savings augmented by interest in the hereafter, and the avoidance of vice becomes a schoolboy's fear of punishment. nevertheless, the view is widely held by superficial, practical men that these imaginary and deceptive sanctions of morality cannot be dispensed with, that only the fear of hell can keep the masses from giving themselves up to every form of vice and crime, that only the promise of paradise is capable of inducing them to act unselfishly and make sacrifices, and that all bonds of discipline would be loosened if they ceased to believe in a last judgment and an hereafter with its rewards and punishments. this whole system of sanctions in a future life is a transcendental projection (according with primitive, childlike thought) of immanent practices and forms in the positive administration of justice which are transferred to a class of actions that successfully evade it. traditional and customary law, as well as written law, puts its whole emphasis on sanctions; it partakes itself of the nature of a sanction. without sanctions it has no meaning. it is not kindly counsel, nor fatherly admonition, nor wise advice, it is a stern command, it is coercion, and this arouses only scorn if it is not armed with the means to make itself a reality to which the unwilling must also submit, because they cannot help themselves. there is no law, there can be no law, which is not supplemented by arrangements that make it binding for everyone. in the british house of commons it has been customary for many hundred years to designate members as the representatives of their particular constituency. only if a member commits a grave offence against the rules of the house does he run the risk of the speaker's calling him by name, but this case has not arisen within the memory of man. a disrespectful irish member of parliament, urged by perverse curiosity, asked the speaker one day: "what would happen if you called me by my name?" the speaker thought for a short time and then answered with impressive gravity: "i have no idea, but it must be something terrible." such a mysterious threat of an unknown catastrophe may suffice for a picked assembly whose members would no doubt maintain order and observe all the rules of parliamentary decency, even if they were not held in check by the fear of some dark danger. it would not be sufficient by a long way to guarantee the rule of law in a society which includes individuals of the most varied disposition, mind development, education and strength of impulse. positive law, as i have shown, presents a very simplified excerpt of morality for the use of coarser natures. it is a summary of the minimum of self-denial, consideration for one's fellow men, and the feeling of joint responsibility, the observance of which the community must pitilessly demand from all its members if it is to continue to exist and not fall back within a very short time into the state of hobbes's war of all against all. the necessity of self-preservation makes it a duty for the community to provide for the case that one of its members refuses to accept the minimum of discipline and to recognize the claims of another personality. the community prevents this revolt, which would frustrate its aim and endanger its existence, by employing physical force to break all resistance to the law which it must, for the common weal, impose on all its members. that is an extraneous compulsion that certainly has something brutal and unworthy of man about it and may well arouse discomfort in more highly developed minds. it would undoubtedly be more dignified and better if there were no need for the handcuffs of the police, for prison cells and executioners, if man's own insight and the admonition of his conscience were enough to constrain everyone to respect the law, that is, to practise a minimum of morality. but the community cannot wait until this stage of moral development has been generally attained. it refuses to entrust its existence to the spiritual purity of all its members. on principle it disregards processes in the consciousness of the individual--i have cited in an earlier chapter the few exceptions to this rule: investigation as to premeditation, accountability, freedom from undue influence--and keeps to actions which alone it judges. it declares itself incompetent to pronounce sentence upon a "storm inside a skull," to quote victor hugo. its sphere is that of obvious facts. not until subjective impulses and decisions are manifested in outward form does it intervene with methods of the same order, with outward coercion. the sanctions of its law are material, are punishments and fines. it hits the wrongdoer over the head and on his hands and forcibly empties his pockets. to look into his soul and set matters to rights there is a task undertaken much later by law-givers. it was only after they had remembered that the source of law is morality and that its ultimate aim is not the bare attainment of a state of mutual respect for one another's rights, but the education of the community to a universal condition of self-discipline, consideration and neighbourly love, that the law-givers made a point not only of requiting the bad man's misdeeds, but also of trying to elevate him morally. at different times, at different stages of civilization, and according to the current views of the universe, society has interpreted in different ways the punishment it inflicts and which it carries out by forcible means, so as to ensure respect for its laws. its original character is that of revenge for an offence. the wrongdoer has offended the community, it attacks him furiously and breaks every bone in his body just as an angry individual would do in his first access of indignation. that is draco's penal code. that is the law of literal requital. the special characteristic of this sanction is its violence and lack of moderation. it does not trouble to find the right proportion between punishment and crime. it does not carefully and fairly weigh the force of its blows. the club falls with a frightful crash, but its dynamical effect is not calculated beforehand in kilogrammetres. "the stab of a knife is not measured," as an italian proverb says. thus conceived, punishment has something primitive about it, something intolerably barbarous. the community does the very things it was created, by morality and law, to prevent; it exercises the right of the stronger against the challenger; it promotes war, not that of all against all, but of all against one, and its punishment is an act of war. in a strongly religious society which lives in the idea of immediate community with the deity, every transgression of the law is felt to be a sin against the gods, and the punishment becomes an expiation offered to them so as to avert their dangerous anger from the commonwealth. in the administration of justice dim religious ideas are mingled, punishment is tinged with a veneer of civilization, the culprit is, so to speak, offered as a sacrifice to the gods. this supernatural view was prolonged by the inquisition, at least for a certain class of offences, until almost modern times. when society awakens to the consciousness that its bond of union is morality, and that its most important task is to educate its members in morality, it introduces the concept of betterment into its penal system. it wants not only to punish the wrongdoer sharply but also to transform him inwardly and purify him. he is to feel that the punishment is not only a requital but a mental benefit. in the austrian army, until corporal punishment was abolished, it was a rule that the soldier, after being flogged, should approach the officer on duty and say, as he saluted, "i thank you for the kind punishment." that is the attitude that society, when it gives a moralizing tendency to its penal laws, wishes the person who has been punished to attain. in this there is much pleasing self-deception not unmixed with a good deal of hypocrisy. penal law offers the wrongdoer but little scope for improvement. all misdemeanours and crimes flow from three sources: ignorance, passion and innate, anti-social self-seeking. ignorance is the main, almost the exclusive cause of wrongdoing among young criminals who have been badly brought up or neglected, who have never had anything but bad examples before them, and who cannot distinguish between good and evil. society may hope to improve these by right treatment; it must not punish, it must educate them. men who commit crimes from passion are those who possess a consciousness of morality and a conscience, who know quite well what is right and what wrong, but have not sufficient strength of character, that is, not an adequately developed power of inhibition, to resist an opportunity, a temptation, a turmoil of their instincts. to want to improve them is senseless, for they are not bad; they are weak, or at any rate not strong enough. what they need is a strengthening of their character, of their faculty of inhibition, and to achieve this is beyond the power of society. all it can do is to humiliate the guilty party by publicly exposing his lapse and by condemning him, and then grant a delay of the execution of the sentence. in so doing it says to him: "you have acted basely and ought to be ashamed of yourself, now go and do not do it again." if the warning is unavailing and he relapses, then the earlier sentence, as well as the new one, is executed. fear of this is added to his motives for acting honestly, and may possibly strengthen his resistance to the onslaught of his evil instincts. but his good conduct will always be at stake in the struggle between his power of inhibition and his instincts, and the stronger of the two will always carry the day. and finally, upon the man whose organic disposition makes him anti-social, upon lombroso's born criminal, society can have no educative effect whatever. it is a hopeless case. society can render him harmless, it cannot alter him. consideration for his neighbour will never find a place in his consciousness. he will never learn to resist his impulses and desires. his spiritual insensibility makes him indifferent to the sufferings of others. incapable of continuous and equable effort, he will always want to prey on society by begging, deceiving, stealing and robbing. he has no conscience and does not hear the voice of society in his mind. he knows nothing of good and evil, which are both empty phrases for him, words without any meaning, and he is convinced that he acts rightly every time he seeks to satisfy his appetites. in his case it is love's labour lost to try and give a moral meaning to the sanctions of the law. punishment is not directed against the soul of the born criminal, only against his body. it overwhelms him, fetters him and makes him either for the time being, or permanently, harmless; but his organic tendency continues to sway him, and whenever he recovers his liberty he is the same as before he was punished. the mystics give to punishment the character of fatherly and chastening discipline by which the sinner expiates his crime and is purged of the sin; thus it purifies him and leads him back to the state of innocence; a kind of anticipatory hell fire which enables him to enter paradise. in "gorgias" plato says explicitly: "he who is punished is liberated from the evil of his soul." and the apostle paul teaches us: "punishment is ordained for the betterment of man." criminal anthropology recognizes that it is useless to expect this moralizing and redeeming effect from punishment. lombroso altogether rejects punishment as a means of discipline and expiation, and before him bentham and j. s. mill, and simultaneously with him and after him fouillée, guyau and maudsley adopted the same view. according to them the sanction of criminal law, which extends and completes it and ensures its efficacy, can have no other aim than the law itself, and this aim is to defend society against its active enemies, if possible by converting them, if necessary by forcible subjugation. in a book which is full of interest, but whose value is considerably diminished by a strong admixture of mysticism, "esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction," m. guyau goes much farther than the criminal anthropologists and sociological opponents of punishment, and expresses the somewhat paradoxical view that "the real sanction seems to imply complete freedom from punishment for the crime committed, as punishment for any action that has been accomplished is useless." it is quite correct that no punishment under the sun can undo what has been done. but it is not feasible for that reason to dispense with all punishment for misdeeds and to call this systematic freedom from punishment a sanction. guyau overlooks the fact that the punishment is directed not to the crime but the perpetrator. it certainly alters nothing in a past transgression of the law, and that is not its object, but it may possibly have the effect of preventing fresh misdeeds on the part of the same wrongdoer or of others, and that would justify it. if society must renounce the idea of improving the misdemeanant, especially the man whose organic tendencies make him a criminal and who is the most dangerous and commits the most numerous and worst crimes, it nevertheless assumes that it makes an impression on morally doubtful characters by punishing misdemeanours and crimes, that it warns them and prevents them from erring. that is the theory of intimidation, which also has many opponents. it will hardly be denied that psychologically it is well founded. the conception of the evil consequences for himself that his action may entail strengthens the impulsive man's power of inhibition when he is about to do wrong, and perhaps enables him to overcome his immoral instinct. only it is difficult to measure the force which the thought of punishment adds to the effort of inhibition. this force does not come into question at all with the man who sins occasionally from passion. the flood of his impulses sweeps away all barriers which reason may oppose, and their power of resistance is not materially increased by the fear of consequences, because the mental horizon is completely darkened at the time of the storm and no prevision is possible. the criminal from organic causes exercises no inhibition. he knows that society condemns his actions, but he is convinced of his personal right to carry them out, and fears no punishment, because he hopes to escape it, and tries his utmost by means of planning, prudence and self-control to outwit society. the theory of intimidation is not applicable to these two classes of criminals, and they constitute a large proportion of the army of wrongdoers against which society has to defend itself by force. but there remains the great number of mediocre natures whose sympathy with their fellow men, the emotional foundation of the subjective impulse to morality, is only slightly developed, who have a superficial veneer of morality, who act honourably out of prudence, but who would feel no repugnance towards perpetrating profitable misdeeds, if they were certain that they would incur no risk. these insipid characters whose emotional temperature oscillates round about freezing point and who are incapable of great excitement, of passion, would see no reason to resist any temptation, to disregard any favourable opportunity, if the penal code, the judge and the policeman did not warn them to be careful. for this kind of man the penal sanction is really a useful and perhaps an indispensable means of prevention, and it has been thought out and developed by the community with a view to such people. not content with theoretical considerations, people have also appealed to practical experience to test the theory of intimidation. in some countries capital punishment was either legally abolished or tacitly suppressed, the judges either refraining from pronouncing the sentence on the prisoner or the head of the state, when appealed to, commuting it by an act of pardon to loss of liberty. statistics seemed to show that serious crimes meriting the death penalty increased, and capital punishment was reintroduced or the practice of systematic pardons was abandoned, with the alleged result that the worst crimes grew less numerous. i express myself doubtfully, because i do not think that the statistics were sufficiently conclusive. they embraced too small a number of cases and too short a period of time. it cannot be conclusively proved that the abolition of the death penalty resulted in an increase of capital crimes; but it is certain that crimes were never more frequent or more horrible than in the times when criminal justice was most cruel and made use of the most terrible sanctions. up to the dawn of modern times legal torture was administered, at every street corner there were gallows, the poor wretch under sentence of death was pinched with red-hot pincers, the executioner tore the flesh from his bones, poured boiling pitch over him, cut out his tongue, hacked off his hands, broke him on the wheel or burnt him alive; executions were a sort of public entertainment or popular holiday, and efforts were made to attract as many spectators as possible; every inhabitant of one of the larger towns was familiar from childhood with the horrid spectacle of mutilated human bodies writhing in torture, and there rang in his ears the echo of the screams of pain and of the shrill death rattle of the victims. but these impressions were so far from intimidating the gaping crowd that many hurried from the place of execution to commit the most execrable crimes, the punishment of which they had just witnessed; consequently punishments have gradually been made less cruel, and the public is excluded from executions, which clearly indicates a decisive rejection of the theory of intimidation. the truth is that the severity of the punishment has no effect upon the frequency or the savagery of crimes. the criminality of a community depends on the value and emphasis of the moral education which it bestows upon the rising generation. it can prevent its members, at any rate the average, normal type, from developing into criminals. but the fear of punishment has no deterrent effect upon those whose criminal impulses have not been subjugated by social discipline. the severity of the punishment does not contribute anything to the defence of society. it only proves that the lawgiver and the criminal judges are on the lowest level of civilization which corresponds to a widespread and barbarous criminality, and that their modes of thought and feeling are horribly like those of the criminals whom they sentence to torture, the gallows, and the wheel. positive law aims at defending society, and tries to attain its end by punishing transgressions. it provides no reward for conscientious obedience. the law has no honours to bestow on blamelessness and virtue. society felt the want of this and made attempts to encourage honourable conduct by conferring distinctions, just as it tries to intimidate vice by punishing crime. these attempts were not particularly happy. the bestowal of titles and orders is no recognition of virtue, but a means adopted by governments to ensure devotion to power. an arrangement was made in some places to honour model citizens in public and crown them with laurels, but it soon came to grief owing to indifference and mockery. a private individual wanted to fill this gap in social institutions. the count of montyon, a son of the eighteenth century, whose philosophy he had imbibed, instituted the prizes for virtue which are distributed annually by the french academy. they are bestowed on modest integrity in humble circumstances which has manifested a sense of duty, neighbourly love and self-sacrifice. this friend of man has had few imitators, and that is understandable. sound common sense realizes that rewards like the montyon prizes for virtue do not with the infallibility of a natural law fall to the lot of merit, but are nearly always adjudicated to the prizewinner by chance, by recommendation, and by all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with virtue; and it seems unjust that among equal claims some should be satisfied while others, the great majority, are not. it would be vain to contend that one virtue which goes empty-handed is not unfairly treated when another gets a benefit on which it has not counted, and that in a moral character, such as alone would be eligible for a prize for virtue, there is no room for envy. that would be the moral of the gospel concerning the labourers who came at the eleventh hour, which has met with opposition from others besides the contemporaries of jesus. on the whole, the community has never felt called upon to solve the moral problem of the reward of virtue. it has always contented itself with the punishment of vice and has given its law threatening, but not encouraging, sanctions. this attitude shows that it has always had a clear conception of its moral task. in its positive law it never included anything but that minimum of morality that was absolutely necessary to its existence, and without which it would dissolve into its original elements, its order would be replaced by chaos, by the war of all against all. it must insist on the observance of this minimum; it must use forcible means to achieve this. but it does not feel justified in demanding more than this minimum, because more is not claimed by its instinct of self-preservation. a surplus of virtue over and above the amount necessary for the life of society is desirable; but it does not lie within the scope of the natural functions of the community, determined by its organic necessities, to achieve this by compulsion and the provision of legal rewards as an encouragement. it is the business of the individual to work at his own moral improvement, and the community cannot interfere directly in the matter. it is enough that it encourage this work indirectly by bestowing care on the culture and education of the individual, by making it the duty of its public schools to inculcate good principles, and by creating a public opinion which surrounds all the activities of higher morality with admiration, respect and gratitude. the moral education of the individual is not an object with which laws are concerned; it is the result of the constant, vital influence of the community, and can have no sanction other than the increase of well-being of every single person within the social union, which is a natural consequence of raising the moral level of the community. the penal sanctions of positive law have a gross materialism about them corresponding to the definite concreteness of the actions with which positive law deals. the broad field of morality, however, which is outside the narrow sphere of the laws, has no room for sanctions of a material nature. the penalties prescribed by law are directed to actions which, if they became general, would in a very short space of time result in the dissolution of society. the community essays by forcible measures to prevent this kind of action, and these measures more or less fulfil their aim, whether you interpret their use on the theory of discipline, of expiation and purification by repentance, of improvement and moral re-birth, or of intimidation. all these theories were invented later on, after the community had been convinced by experience that punishment, if it does not entirely prevent crime, at least limits it sufficiently to make the continued existence of society possible, and more or less to guarantee to its members the safety of their life, their property and their personal dignity. against transgressions of the moral law, the results of which are not immediately obvious, such as ruthless selfishness, blunted sympathy and lack of active neighbourly kindness, the community does not proceed with forcible measures; firstly, because it cannot establish their existence convincingly and hence cannot try them in a court of justice, and secondly, because it does not recognize them as constituting an immediate danger to its existence. now, as the sanctions set up by society are not applicable to these transgressions, an individual whose mind does not penetrate very far into matters is disquieted, for accustomed as he is to the spectacle of the steady justice of the state, he seeks the counterpart in the forms of this justice in the world of morality, and does not discover it at the first glance. he asks anxiously where are the police, the public prosecutor, the examining magistrate, the criminal court, the prison for sins against morality, and invents them, since he cannot find them. he transfers to the hereafter the sanctions of morality, which are not visible on earth. he cannot make up his mind to renounce them, because the fact that sins against the moral law go unpunished would seem to him to indicate intolerable anarchy, comparable with the state of a community where everyone could murder, rob and mutilate to his heart's content without incurring the risk of the least personal unpleasantness. in the sphere of the moral law punishment certainly does not follow hot foot upon crime, but it nevertheless does not fail to appear, and becomes visible when the eye is capable of embracing long periods of time and of tracing intricate connexions. the sanctions of the moral law differ from those of criminal law, but they are not wanting. they are of a subjective and of an objective character. the subjective punishment for a sin against the laws of morality is remorse. it is inflicted by the inner judge who rules in the consciousness of the individual, by conscience, and penetrates to the very deepest depths of a person's mind which no outward punishment imposed by the community ever reaches. it is not only religious and political martyrs who endure torture and death with proud serenity, conscious that they are morally immeasurably superior to their executioners; even common criminals remain perfectly unmoved by their punishment and regret only that they are weaker than their captors. prisons are full of convicts who look upon their condition as that of prisoners of war. they have been worsted in their battle with law. that seems to them a misfortune but not a disgrace. they are neither humble nor contrite, but revengeful. they are determined and ready to take up the duel with society as soon as an opportunity offers and they may hope to do so with some prospect of success. but remorse is an unresisting submission to the verdict of conscience and the consciousness of one's own unworthiness. it is the recognition of the justice of the sentence which brands one, and the constant, anguished realization that one's personality has been deservedly humiliated, dishonoured and deprived of its rights. as a spiritual process, remorse causes the sinner continually to relive the misdeed he committed, while at the same time he is fully conscious of its atrocity. the ego becomes dual, one part active, the other watching and judging. the one again and again perpetrates its misdeed, the other looks on horrified and suffers agonies. it is one long torture and disgrace of self. remorse condemns the sinner perpetually to repeat in his mind the deed which fills him with horror of himself. this state of mind is the nearest approach to eternal damnation in hell. there is only one means of temporary escape: to extinguish memory by narcotics. that is why remorse not seldom leads to drunkenness. shakespeare, with a poet's infallible insight into the soul, has grasped and depicted the nature of remorse, the uninterrupted, torturing presence of the misdeed in man's consciousness. lady macbeth sees her hands ever stained with the blood of the innocent royal victim whom she herself did not even murder, and she complains that "all the perfumes of arabia will not sweeten this little hand." leontes, in the "winter's tale," on hearing of hermione's alleged death, of which he believes himself guilty, mourns: "once a day i'll visit the chapel where they lie; and tears shed there shall be my recreation: so long as nature will bear up with this exercise, so long i daily vow to use it." remorse is the most effective of the subjective sanctions of morality; it is almost too effective, for owing to its duration and severity the punishment easily grows disproportionate to the crime. but it has one great disadvantage, it affects only better natures who have an active conscience and spiritual delicacy, while it spares the wicked who have no conscience, who perpetrate their misdeeds contentedly, without a qualm, and regret them only when they are discovered and lead to unpleasantness. nevertheless, the actions of these hardened sinners do not go quite unpunished. moral law always takes vengeance for transgressions, but not directly on the evildoer. in addition to the subjective, it also has an objective sanction; when it is violated retribution falls on the community. the masses have a dim idea that every evil deed meets with requital and express it in the proverb that "though the mills of god grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." they have noticed that the curse of an evil deed never fails to come, and is consummated with crushing force, only that it does not happen at once. it seems objectionably unjust that the culprit should not feel the effect of his crime, whilst others do who were not born when it was perpetrated. but the concept of retributory justice is as little applicable to the far-reaching relations in the life of humanity as to the actions of the laws of nature, for instance gravity or electricity. morality is, as i have shown, an adaptation of the species to the natural conditions in which it is forced to live. morality, therefore, has an aim, which is to make social life in common possible for the individual, this life alone enabling him to maintain his existence amid the conditions obtaining on this earth. the discipline which morality imposes on the individual leaves him a certain amount of free play. if he escapes from this discipline to a certain small extent which does not threaten the existence of society, this revolt has no ill effect upon the life of the species, the latter has no grounds for punishing him, and the only, yet sufficient, sanction of the loose morality of an undisciplined individual lies in the fact that he is more or less inferior to the most perfect type of the species, and visibly bears the stamp of his worthlessness in his character, his bearing and his mode of thought. but if in his disregard of morality the individual goes so far as to frustrate its aim and endanger the existence of society, then the latter must either find ways and means of rendering the culprit harmless or else it overlooks his misdeed and thereby becomes an accessory and justly suffers the evils consequent upon a deterioration of morals which is universally tolerated. the means by which a society must defend the morality necessary to its existence can only be spiritual, for it is not a question of breaches of the positive law which result in the intervention of justice and of material penalties, but of a disregard of the commands of morality, which are not drawn up in paragraphs. public opinion suffices to rouse the individual who despises the moral law to an uncomfortable sense of his unworthiness; if he finds himself treated with contempt and sees disapproval and dislike in everyone's face, either he will be spurred to an effort to overcome his immoral instincts or his self-respect will suffer from the universal contempt with which he meets; and this suffering is his punishment, therefore it is the sanction of a breach of the moral law. if public opinion does not keep careful and severe watch, such as may be termed the function of a higher moral police, then inevitably the moral tone of the whole society will sink to a lower level, and this will result in making life harder and more difficult, and in certain circumstances may lead to dissolution. this is not a theoretical assumption, but an observed fact, a lesson taught by history. it tells us of epochs in which the licentiousness of individuals, favoured by a society too dull, weak and indifferent to stand up against bad examples, succeeded in corrupting all classes. such a period is exemplified by the fall of rome. common natures indulged and wallowed in every vice, the better ones felt such disgust for a life without nobility and virtue that they discarded it, and the community lost all excuse of joint responsibility and became so loosely knit together that it was incapable of common effort or sacrifice, and collapsed miserably at the first onslaught of a foreign aggressor tempted by its depravity. the disintegration of a society, the sanction of its sins against morality, is a slow process. it does not often take place catastrophically, with theatrical effect, so that even a dull observer can grasp the connexion between cause and effect. but whoever investigates closely will realize that all evils from which society suffers, which make life more bitter and harder for its members, are ultimately due to defective morality. what are class struggles with their consequent hostilities between groups of the same nation, their coercion and damage, but manifestations of self-seeking, lack of consideration and injustice, that is, of immorality? would they be possible if members of all classes, capitalists and workers, agriculturists and townsmen, rulers and subjects were inspired by neighbourly kindness, understanding and appreciation of the needs, pretensions and feelings of their opponents, and by a spirit of self-sacrifice? would the decay of character, the arbitrariness and arrogance of the mighty, the cowardly slavishness of the masses, with the resultant rottenness of public affairs, be conceivable if individuals were conscious of their dignity and their duty to themselves and the community, and if they had the strength and the determination to overcome their fear of men? could wars of aggression bring ruin upon mankind if leading personalities did not give way to the desire for outward honours, to the hunger for power, to avarice, to the itch of vanity, that is to the lowest forms of selfishness, and if the masses out of stupidity or fear of a mental effort, and out of dread for their personal responsibility did not allow themselves to be misused for base purposes? thus we find insufficient morality in individuals, or the complete lack of it, to be at the root of all evils with which the community is afflicted, and we are justified in conceiving war, party quarrels, collisions between groups representing different interests, revolutions, in fact, all tragedies of life in societies with the suffering and destruction they entail, as the penal sanction of sins against morality. morality, which was created to facilitate life for the individual or to make it at all possible for him, is no longer able to fulfil its aim, and the society finds itself by its own fault back in the condition of misery and fear, owing to which its instinct of self-preservation originally forced it to make the effort of setting up the moral law. even the most merciless zealot cannot wish for a more efficacious and painful punishment of immorality. but morality does not possess the sanction of punishment alone, it has also the more amiable one of reward. we have seen that by strengthening the faculty of inhibition it raises the individual to a higher level of organic development, that by the inculcation of consideration and neighbourly kindness it affords the community the possibility of working together peacefully and profitably. but it does more than that. it gives life an incomparably higher value than when it is dull and uniform, by enriching and beautifying it with heroism and with ideals. ideals and heroism are direct creations of morality and inconceivable without it. the ideal is a conception of perfection; the thought of attaining it is accompanied by the most pleasurable emotions, and the individual regards it as his life's task to strive for it. the struggle for the ideal implies effort at all times, renunciation of the ease of a thoughtless and care-free existence, an endless series of difficult victories over appetites clamouring for immediate satisfaction, that is, constant work in the service of morality. he who has an ideal is never troubled by the problem of the meaning of life. his life has an aim and significance. he knows whither he goes, why he lives, for what he works. he knows nothing of the doubts of the aimless wanderer, of the discouraging consciousness of one's own uselessness, and his assurance, his conviction that his efforts are useful and worthy come very near to happiness. heroism is the noblest victory of a thinking and volitional personality over selfishness; it is altruism which rises to self-sacrifice, the proud subjugation by reason of the most primitive and powerful of all instincts, that of self-preservation. it is the highest achievement of which morality is capable. it is never developed for the profit of an individual, but always for that of a community, for a thought, for an ideal. his heroic conduct raises the hero out of the rut of his existence, liberates him from the trammels of his individuality and enlarges this to represent a community, its longings, its resolutions, its determination. at the moment of his heroic action the hero lives innumerable lives, the lives of all for whom he risks his own, and if death reaches him, it can destroy only his single person, but cannot put an end to the dynamic activity of the community which is included in the hero, while he is magnificently elevated far above himself. the faculty of forming an ideal of existence and activity, and of rising to the heights of heroism, is the royal reward of morality which the perfect subjection of animal instincts to the rule of human reason has achieved. its punishment for those retrograde individuals who never learn to control their instinctive reflex actions is that they are denied the sight of the glory of the ideal, that heroism is unknown and incomprehensible to them, that they lead their lives fettered and imprisoned, unconscious of any task, without prospect or exaltation, as if they dwelt in a cellar or in a dark dungeon. these are the sanctions of morality. it has no others, nor does it need them. in one passage of the book cited above guyau makes the doubting remark: "who can tell us whether morality is not ... at one and the same time a beautiful and useful art? perhaps it bewitches us and deceives us." let us assume that it is an illusion. that would not detract from its value for mankind. is not all our knowledge of the world, is not our whole view of nature an illusion? we are made conscious of the universe by its qualities, and these qualities are conferred on it by our senses. but all knowledge that we derive from our senses is an illusion. for the senses do not convey reality to us, but the modifications which the influence of reality produces in our sense organs. the universe has neither sound nor colour nor scent. but we perceive it as sounding, coloured and scented. these qualities we attribute to reality are illusions of our senses, but these illusions make up all the beauty of the world which without them would be dumb, blind and without charm for us. life for us is an unspeakably oppressive riddle. has it an aim, and, if so, what? we do not know. all thought only leads to the conclusion: life is its own aim and end, we live for life's sake. and this conclusion is no solution of the problem. then morality appears, and not only makes life easier and possible, but even shows us an aim, if not for universal, at least for individual life. that aim is the humanization of the animal, the spiritualization of man, the exaltation and enrichment of the individual by means of sympathy, neighbourly kindness, a sense of joint responsibility, and the subjection of instinct to reason which, as far as we know, is the noblest product of nature. it is possible that morality, which hides the eerie unintelligibility of life from us, is an illusion. blessed be the illusion which makes life worth living. printed in england by cassell & company, limited, london, e.c. . f . [illustration] a review of the systems of ethics founded on the theory of evolution by c. m. williams new york macmillan & co. and london _all rights reserved_ copyright, , by macmillan & co. typography by j. s. cushing & co., boston, u.s.a. presswork by berwick & smith, boston, u.s.a. * * * * * to my first teacher of morals my mother this book is gratefully and affectionately dedicated preface of the ethics founded on the theory of evolution, i have considered only the independent theories which have been elaborated to systems. i have omitted consideration of many works which bear on evolutional ethics as practical or exhortative treatises, or compilations of facts, but which involve no distinctly worked-out theory of morals. on the other hand, i have ventured to include professor von gizycki's "moralphilosophie" among the theoretical systems founded upon the theory of evolution, since, although the popular form of the work renders the prominence of the latter theory impracticable, the warp of evolution is clearly perceptible throughout it. in analyzing höffding's work, i have made use not of the danish but the german edition of his "ethics," which was translated with his coöperation. it is generally customary for an author to acknowledge, in the preface of his book, his especial indebtedness to those who have most influenced the growth of his thought in the line of research treated in the book. but i find this duty a difficult one to perform. many of the authors whose work has aided me are cited in the text. but it is impossible, with regard to many points, to say to whom one is indebted, or most indebted, since much that one reads is so assimilated into one's organized thought, and changed in the process of assimilation, that its source and original form are no longer remembered. besides this, much is always owed to personal influence and argument, and also to indefinite and minute forces whose workings it is impossible to trace. the growth of thought is, like any other growth, by imperceptible degrees and infinitesimal increments, and we breathe in ideas from our mental atmosphere as we breathe in perfumes or infections from our physical atmosphere. it is, of course, unnecessary to mention mr. spencer's name in this connection, since it goes without saying, that every one who writes on ethics in their relation to the theory of evolution must owe much to him, even where he differs from him. but there is perhaps one name which it is fitting that i should mention here, since the influence of its bearer on my work, although one for which i have reason to feel peculiarly indebted, is not of a nature to determine its mention in connection with any particular theory. i refer to my first teacher of philosophy, professor m. stuart phelps, now deceased, whose life and labor all those who had the privilege of sharing his instruction and benefiting by his kindness must ever hold in grateful remembrance. contents part i pages introductory remarks - darwin - wallace - haeckel - spencer - fiske - rolph - barratt - stephen - carneri - hÖffding - gizycki - alexander - (ree) - part ii introduction refutation of _a priori_ objections to evolutional ethics, and a statement of reasons for supposing that an application of the theory of evolution to ethics must be of use - chapter i the concepts of evolution extension of the meaning of darwinian concepts since darwin--lewes on the struggle for existence as internal--the mystery of "variation" according to darwin not a metaphysical mystery, but one of the incompleteness of scientific knowledge--rolph's criticism of the darwinian conception of the struggle for existence criticised--general classification of the theories of evolution--fechner's theory of the tendency to stability--petzoldt on fechner--petzoldt's concepts of tendency and competition--zöllner and du prel--examination of the concept of absolute stability, and of a full stability of the universe, in the light of the question as to the finite or infinite character of the material universe--periodicity in organisms--criticism of the concepts of cause and effect--criticism of spencer's definition of life--the concepts of heredity and adaptation--the point of dispute with regard to variation--darwin, haeckel, and eimer with regard to the inheritance of individual acquirements--criticisms of weismann--habit in the life of the individual--advantage of the method pursued by avenarius in the "kritik der reinen erfahrung"--lamarck on the relation of use and function--darwin on habit and instinct--function and tendency to function--relation of organism and environment--theory of a special vital force--the relation of exercise to strength of tendency--the concepts of cause and effect as applied to organism and environment--relation of primary tendency to later-evolved function--form and function--the mixture of types in sexual propagation--summary of conclusions - chapter ii intelligence and "end" the question as to the extent to which reason is diffused in the universe--darwin and haeckel on reason and instinct--du prel on reason as a fundamental property of all matter--carneri on the automatism of animals--the dependence of theories on this question on the starting-point assumed in the argument--difficulties of assigning a limit-line to reason--schneider's criteria--insectivorous plants--knight, darwin, etc., on the movements of plants--race-habits--so-called reflex-action in man--from non-analogy no inference possible--arbitrary nature of the assumptions involved in the two starting-points of query--reason = cause or effect?--further criticism of the concepts of cause and effect--the bias of the specialist--attempted definition of the province of reason--definition of "end"--unreliability of inference as to the nature of ends in other individuals; in other species--possible inferences from the analogy of the nervous system--certain possible limiting assumptions as to the province of knowledge in animal species--the law of the variation of pain and pleasure in function--the ultimate dilemma--examinations of teleological conceptions with respect to the tendency to stability--criticism of wallace on the origin of life, or of consciousness--summary of conclusions - chapter iii the will difficulties of definition--the will and consciousness--"involuntary" action--will in passivity--the concept of choice--"ends" and the will--the future and will--the external and will--criticism of barratt's axioms and propositions--discussion of the relation of thought and feeling to will--the argument of the physiologist--the argument of the evolutionist--the argument from social statistics--the argument from psychiatry, criminology, etc.--the argument from the psychological principles on which evolutional ethics is founded--definition of natural law and necessity--the positive factors of evolution--the positive and active character of the organism as the result of evolution--the equivalence of conditions and results--the positive character of the organism as a part of nature--the sense of freedom as the sense of activity--the theory of the will as determined by motives--as determined by feeling--as determined by the desirability of the end or object--the argument of concomitance and that of sequence as used by both materialist and spiritualist--the endeavor to prove ( ) the causal character of physiological process; ( ) the causal character of consciousness--inconsistencies of these attempts - chapter iv the mutual relations of thought, feeling, and will in evolution hume on reason and passion--the constant connection of thought with feeling, and with feeling as pleasure or pain--the question as to whether thought or feeling is primary--application of answer to previous considerations on the diffusion of consciousness in nature--the relation of the concepts of the pleasurable and painful to the concept of "end"--will as a constant accompaniment of consciousness--absurdities to which the division of consciousness into distinct faculties leads--law of the growth of functional tendency and of pleasure in function--the new as a disturber of equilibrium--the pleasure involved in the overcoming of obstacles--the equilibrium of function as health--connection of the pleasure of food-taking with health--criticism of rolph's principle of the insatiability of life--further criticism of rolph on the darwinian theory of growth--the coördinate progress of physiological adaptation with the advancement of knowledge, and with the variation of feeling and will--the pleasure of the strongest motive as relative, not absolute--the character of the end in view--the pleasure of anticipation and the pleasure of the event--criticism of sidgwick on hedonism--criticism of rolph's theory of want as universal motive--suicide--rest--the diminution of pain with lapse of time as adaptation--pleasure in pain as pleasure in function--the relation of health to happiness--the theory of the absolute freedom of feeling--the concepts of cause and effect as applied to the evolution of thought, feeling, and will--application of conclusions to the teleological argument - chapter v egoism and altruism in evolution prototypes in other animal species of what we term egoism and altruism in man; care for the young on the part of the parent-animal; mutual aid between the sexes; animal societies--experiments of lubbock showing the irregularity and caprice of action altruistic in form, among the ants--benno scheitz on maternal care among lower species--answers to the argument of automatism--dependence of a theory of moral evolution on the definition of egoism and altruism--the significance of the terms progressive--the possibility of differences in the form of the evolution of altruism, in different species--the possibility of the combination of different forms in the evolution of a single species--discussion of the question of the first beginning of action prompted by altruistic motive--the argument of the illogical nature of a supposed development of altruism from egoism--the question as to whether health, the preservation of species, or pleasure, is the actual final end of action--the question of heredity in relation to that of the moral evolution--stephen's views--arguments from ribot, dugdale's "jukes," etc. - chapter vi conscience the gradual character of the evolution of altruism--paul friedmann on the genesis of benevolence--the observable growth of altruism from egoism in the individual--human society as necessitated by increase of the species--criticism of darwin's form of statement on this point--the mixed character of the motives which lead to advancement--the necessity of evolution, primal organisms once having come into existence--general features of the moral evolution in the human race--personal and social virtues--racial evolution as subordinate to the evolution of the species--criticism of stephen--the theory of the connection of intelligence and morality--testimony of maudsley, lombroso, dugdale--the advantages of conformity to social standards--definition of "advantage"--arguments from the general direction of social advancement--the direction of evolution in the race as a whole and in the individual not always the same--conclusion: the connection of intelligence with morality not invariable--definition of morality--identification of morality with justice--special rules of morality--morality as inward--the virtue of truthfulness--necessity of individual sacrifice--dependence of justice on certain general features of particular circumstances---definition of conscience--the mixed character of remorse--the theory of conscience as a special sense--criticism of utilitarianism--criticism of some forms of reaction against utilitarianism--the terms "higher" and "lower" as applied to pleasures and "ends"--the idea of a "return to nature"--the objection to evolutional ethics on the ground of degradation--struggle as an element of virtue--the evolution of social rewards and punishments--criticism of the objection to state-punishment on the ground of determinism--morality and the question of the transcendental--conscience in other species--the contempt for "mere habit"--the concepts of cause and effect as applied to the moral evolution - chapter vii the moral progress of the human species as shown by history the assimilative character of human progress--the character of our savage ancestors--greek civilization--the greek treatment of children--of old men--human sacrifices among the greeks--slaughter of prisoners--slavery--the greek attitude towards the fundamental virtues of trustworthiness--athenian democracy--roman civilization--treatment of children--human sacrifices--gladiatorial shows--slavery--moral character of the middle ages--human sacrifice in england before the roman conquest--slave laws--state punishment in england: burning, hanging, and boiling, quartering and disembowelling--women under the criminal law--blood-money--the classification of crimes--caste-favor in english criminal law--mutilation--flaying--ordeals--punishment by starvation--the press--the rack--"skevington's daughter"--benefit of clergy--the position of the english churl--the worship of rank--hanging for petty theft--the pillory--brutality of public feeling--condition of the prisons--jail-breaking, bribery, etc.--more concerning women under the law--favor to rank--the logical consistency of human character in its various directions of action--general comparison of the past with the present--the evidence of literature--modern philanthropy--decrease of national prejudices--growth of the democratic spirit--lack of imagination a reason for the failure to realize the evils of the past--the golden age of man - chapter viii the results of ethical inquiry on an evolutional basis criticism of alexander's theory of the right as always absolute right and as the expression, on all planes of development, of an equal equilibrium--the moral evolution as one involving the whole of humanity and the whole earth--gradual relaxation of the struggle for existence--the final limitation of the increase in density of population--the increase of vitality--the habituation to progress--the gradual coördination of individual with social welfare through ( ) spread and increase of sympathy with the individual on the part of society as a whole; ( ) growth of individual predilections in the direction of harmony with social requirements--decrease of punishment through ( ) increase in general sympathy; ( ) increase of amenability of the individual to influence--increase of pleasure in pleasure--the possible egoistic element in sympathy with pain--criticism of rolph on want as necessary to induce action--the moral evolution and emotion--criticism of spencer on altruism--criticism of wundt on evolutional ethics--the theory that evolution adds nothing to ethics--criticism of stephen on the impossibility of predicting the course of evolution--the moral evolution as willed--the motives furnished by evolutional ethics--the theological doctrine of a "change of heart"--the doctrine of the atonement--divine forgiveness--theology and social evils--the prominence of the idea of self-salvation in christian doctrine--human sacrifice among the jews--biblical authority for the killing of witches and heretics--the infliction of death for ceremonial offences among the jews--the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children--slave-holding, adultery, murder, etc., by god's chosen, bloodshed and cruelty of all sorts by god's express command--animal sacrifice among the jews--the original idea of jehovah and of heaven--the autocracy of the jewish priesthood confirmed by christ--forced exegesis--the asceticism of christianity--slavery and the new testament--predestination, hell, and the justification of the elect--the defence of christianity as being a comforting belief - chapter ix the ideal and the way of its attainment criticism of stephen's assertion that the ideal cannot be determined--the necessity of the choice between evils, under present social conditions--the argument for individual gratification of "natural desire"--dangers of utilitarianism--moral right of the minority and the ethical demand for compensation to the minority--the contest between individualist and socialist--criticism of spencer on personal vice--individualistic errors--socialistic pessimism--the idea of a "return to nature"--the socialistic glorification of the laborer--the agitation against machinery--the agitation against luxury--the abolition of luxury and the population question--the proposed change of social "environment"--socialism at the present date--arbitrary character of many socialistic ideas--criticisms of bellamy--the idea of a revolution--conclusions--the education of the child--the right of the child to state protection--the advantages of parental control--the education of women--the question of prostitution--monogamy or polygamy?--temporary contracts--divorce--the argument that the freedom of women must involve the forfeiture of chivalric feeling in men--the respect for age--desirable changes in criminal law--criticism of bellamy on crime--the question of capital punishment--arguments for--arguments against--conclusions--the conflict between justice and mercy--the supreme arbiter--the courage of moral sincerity--heroic characters--the final destruction of the human species--the loss of belief in personal immortality--the human and earthly ideal - a review of evolutional ethics part i introductory remarks in the preface to the latest edition of his "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," haeckel, writing of recent developments of thought on the subject of evolution, and the change of attitude observable in our later literature, says: "the vast mass of literature, yearly increasing in astonishing measure, on the theory of evolution in its various branches, best illustrates the remarkable change which public opinion has undergone. twenty years ago, the greater part of this literature was in opposition to darwin; to-day such opposition is not to be feared from well-informed students of science. on the other hand, almost the whole literature of biology now gives testimony in darwin's favor, for almost all zoölogical, and botanical, anatomic, and ontogenetic works are founded upon the principles of the development of species, and derive from darwin their best and most fruitful ideas." no science is a better exponent of this radical and important change than that which has to do with the principles of morals; for by no science was the theory of evolution assailed, in the beginning, with more vehemence and indefatigability. not only did the zealous adherents of christian dogma fear to find, in the destruction of all distinct barriers between the different forms of animal life, a ground for the denial of god's especial favor to man, and the worshippers of emotional morals become indignant at the unveiling of the divine mystic (as if only ignorance were reverence, and only the unknown worthy of homage), but even the less conservative schools of philosophy often showed themselves unfavorable or hesitant towards the new ideas, dreading their implications. all this is changed. if england's most popular living philosopher was among the first to declare himself for darwin, and to revise his whole system in accordance with the theory of evolution, so that this theory early began to find adherents among students of philosophy in all lands where english is spoken, it was not long before the newer schools of france and germany began to follow in their wake. now every year, and almost every month, brings with it a fresh supply of books, pamphlets, and magazine articles on "the evolution of morality," "l'evolution de la morale," "die evolution der sittlichkeit," "sittlichkeit und darwinismus," etc. so many are the waters which now pour themselves into this common stream that the current threatens soon to become too deep and swift for any but the most expert swimmers. in a short review of evolutional ethics, it will be impossible to consider all the literature that has added to our knowledge on this subject; we must confine ourselves to the few books that are most prominent. the first laborer in this line, not only indirectly through general theory, but also directly through particular theory, is, as usual, charles darwin; and though darwin was himself no psychologist, and moreover advances his ideas on the origin and development of morals only in the tentative manner that necessarily attaches to a first attempt when made by so conscientious a thinker, he doubtless suggested to all other writers in this field a very large part of that which was best in their work. a review of evolutional ethics must, therefore, in order to start with the proper origin of the science, begin with charles darwin in the essay on "instinct" appended to g. j. romanes' "mental evolution in animals,"[ ] darwin says: "the social instinct is indispensable to some animals, useful to still more, and apparently only pleasant to some few animals." the social tendency being thus classed as an instinct, it belongs to our work to examine what are darwin's theories as to the origin and nature of instinct. in the chapter on "instinct," in "the origin of species," darwin premises: "i have nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than i have with that of life itself."[ ] again: "frederick cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. this comparison gives, i think, an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not necessarily of its origin.... if we suppose any habitual action to become inherited--and it can be shown that this does sometimes happen--then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished.... but it would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations. it can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been acquired by habit."[ ] of one of the habits of these last-named insects darwin, however, writes: "i have not rarely felt that small and trifling instincts were a greater difficulty on our theory than those which have so justly excited the wonder of mankind; for an instinct, if really of no considerable importance in the struggle for life, could not be modified or formed through natural selection. perhaps as striking an instance as can be given is that of the workers of the hive-bee arranged in files and ventilating, by a peculiar movement of their wings, the well-closed hive: this ventilation has been artificially imitated, and as it is carried on even during winter, there can be no doubt that it is to bring in free air and displace the carbonic acid gas; therefore _it is in truth indispensable, and we may imagine the stages_--a few bees first going to the orifice to fan themselves--_by which the instinct might have been arrived at_."[ ] again: "glancing at instincts, marvellous as some are, they offer no greater difficulty than do corporeal structures on the theory of the natural selection of successive slight, but profitable modifications. we can thus understand why nature moves by graduated steps in endowing different animals of the same class with their several instincts."[ ] and again: "as i believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of the hive-bee, can be explained by natural selection having taken advantage of numerous successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts, natural selection having, by slow degrees, more and more perfectly led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from each other in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection; the bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other, than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates; the motive power of the process of natural selection having been the construction of cells of due strength and of the proper size and shape for the larvæ, this being effected with the greatest possible economy of labor and wax; that individual swarm which thus made the best cells with least labor, and least waste of honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and having transmitted their newly acquired economical instincts to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence."[ ] and further, of instinct in general: "it will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structures for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then i can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that was profitable. it is thus, as i believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have originated. as modifications of corporeal structure arise from, and are increased by, use or habit, and are diminished or lost by disuse, so i do not doubt it has been with instincts"; though darwin adds: "but i believe that the effects of habit are in many cases of subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called spontaneous variations of instincts; that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations of bodily structure." however, "no complex instinct can possibly be produced through natural selection, except by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous slight, yet profitable, variations."[ ] and of habit as connected with heredity, darwin writes: "changed habits produce an inherited effect, as in the period of the flowering of plants when transported from one climate to another. with animals the increased use or disuse of parts has had a more marked influence.... no breeder doubts how strong is the tendency to inheritance; that like produces like is his fundamental belief; doubts have been thrown on this principle only by theoretical writers.... if strange and rare deviations of structure are really inherited, less strange and commoner deviations may be freely admitted to be inheritable. perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject would be to look at the inheritance of every character whatever as the rule, and non-inheritance as the anomaly.... if it could be shown that our domestic varieties manifested a strong tendency to reversion--that is, to lose their acquired characters whilst kept under the same conditions, and whilst kept in a considerable body, so that free intercrossing might check, by blending together, any slight deviations in their structure, in such case i grant that we could deduce nothing from domestic varieties in regard to species. but there is not a shadow of evidence in favor of this view; to assert that we could not breed our cart and race horses, long and short horned cattle, and poultry of various breeds, and esculent vegetables, for an unlimited number of generations, would be opposed to all experience."[ ] darwin recognizes, in instinct, the possibility for the play of a certain amount of imitation, as also of intelligence and experience,[ ] though denying to these the range attributed to them by wallace. and summing up his theory in the essay given by romanes, he writes: "it may not be logical, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory, to look at the young cuckoo ejecting his foster brothers, ants making slaves, the larvæ of the ichneumidæ feeding within the live bodies of their prey, cats playing with mice, otters and cormorants with living fish, not as instincts specially given by the creator, but as very small parts of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic bodies--multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." it will thus be seen that darwin, while confessing a disability to account for the origin of _instinct_,--beginning with some form of instinct as already existent, just as he begins with life as already existent,--does advance some perfectly definite views as to the probable origins of _instincts_,--namely, preservation, in the struggle for existence, of numerous slight but profitable variations. the assertion of the inadequacy of habit to account for the origin of more complex instincts, as in the case of the hive-bees, when compared with the subsequent explanation, in the same connection, of the rise of these very instincts partly by habit acquired from experience and imitation, partly by accidental modifications of simpler instincts, both taken advantage of by natural selection,--would seem to limit the term "habit," as here used, to modes of action acquired during the life of the individual; this interpretation of the word being confirmed by the additional phrase "in one generation." but here, as everywhere in darwin's work, an unknown quantity appears--namely, the cause of variation; _i.e._ of the differences, or tendency to differ, of offspring, from the parental type. in "the descent of man," published twelve years later than "the origin of species," and "the variation of plants and animals under domestication," which appeared yet three years later, darwin's views on instinct and habit are still further elaborated, and a definition of the relation of these to reason, pleasure, pain, and the moral sense, attempted. in vol. i. of the former work, darwin devotes two chapters to these subjects. instinct he calls, pages - , "inherited habit"; and on page he says: "but as love, sympathy, and self-command became strengthened by habit, and as the power of reasoning becomes clearer, so that man can value justly the judgments of his fellows, he will feel himself impelled, apart from any transitory pleasure or pain, to certain lines of conduct." here, i take it, the word "habit" cannot be interpreted as referring to one generation of men, but to the race as a whole, a general continuity being thus ascribed to the inheritance of mental characteristics, and the important concept of progress as adaptation acquired. in contrasting reason with instinct, darwin thinks that instinct and intelligence do not, as cuvier maintained, stand in inverse ratio to each other, but that a high degree of intelligence is compatible with complex instincts--as in the case of the beaver; "yet it is not improbable that there is a certain amount of interference between the development of free intelligence and of instinct,--which latter implies some inherited modification of the brain. little is known about the functions of the brain, but we can perceive that, as the intellectual powers become highly developed, the various parts of the brain must be connected by very intricate channels of the freest intercommunication; and as a consequence, each separate part would perhaps tend to be less well fitted to answer to particular sensations or associations in a definite and inherited--that is, instinctive--manner. there seems even to exist some relation between a low degree of intelligence and a strong tendency to the formation of fixed, though not inherited habits; for, as a sagacious physician remarked to me, persons who are slightly imbecile tend to act in everything by routine or habit; and they are rendered much happier if this is encouraged."[ ] darwin thinks instinctive action and action from habit may not be connected with either pleasure or pain, though he would seem to contradict this view in the latter part of the passage just quoted, and again where he says: "although a habit may be blindly and implicitly followed, independently of any pleasure or pain felt at the moment, yet if it be forcibly and abruptly checked, a vague sense of dissatisfaction is generally experienced."[ ] in writing of the social instinct, darwin begins with it as already existent, and seems, moreover, to maintain concerning it a theory of purpose elsewhere denied in his works and, indeed, antagonistic to the whole principle of the struggle for existence. he says: "it has often been assumed that animals were in the first place rendered social, and that they feel, as a consequence, uncomfortable when separated from each other, and comfortable whilst together; but it is a more probable view that these sensations were first developed, _in order that_ those animals which would profit by living in society, _should be induced to live together_, in the same manner as the sense of hunger and the pleasure of eating were, no doubt, first acquired, in order to induce animals to eat."[ ] if it were not for the expressions "should be induced" and "to induce," the words "in order that," taken in connection with what follows, might be interpreted as referring to mere sequence of time, as, on page , where darwin refers to the "social faculties" simply as antecedent to society, they evidently do. for he says: "in order that primeval man, or the ape-like progenitors of man, should become social, they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings which induce other animals to live in a body." the sentences referred to which follow the first quotation are as follows: "the feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents; and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection. with those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers. with respect to the origin of the parental and filial affections, which apparently lie at the base of the social instincts, we know not the steps by which they have been gained; but we may infer that it has been to a large extent through natural selection." the passage may possibly be consistently explained by the idea of the survival of the fittest, but it is at least very unclear in its wording. at the beginning of chapter iv. of the same book, darwin also gives a synopsis of the development of the moral sense from the social instincts, through the pleasure of association and service, remorse being a result of the power of representation, regard for the approbation and disapprobation of fellows arising from sympathy with them until resulting habit plays a very important part in guiding the conduct of the individual. another passage, however, again introduces an antagonism between habit, instinct, and reason, and natural selection: "it is impossible to decide in many cases whether certain social instincts have been acquired through natural selection, or are the indirect result of other instincts and faculties, such as sympathy, reason, experience, and a tendency to imitation; or again, whether they are simply the result of long-continued habit." darwin distinguishes between "the all-important emotion of sympathy," and that of love. "a mother may passionately love her sleeping and passive infant, but she can hardly at such times be said to feel sympathy for it"; but he includes both love and sympathy under the head of "sympathetic emotions"; and on page he says: "with mankind, selfishness, experience, and imitation probably add, as mr. bain has shown, to the power of sympathy; for we are led by the hope of receiving good in return to perform acts of sympathetic kindness to others; and sympathy is much strengthened by habit." again, on page , "instinctive love and sympathy" would seem to be contrasted with love and sympathy as habit, the increase of such feelings in the race through habit, elsewhere more or less distinctly asserted, being here ignored: "although man, as he now exists, has few special instincts, having lost any which his early progenitors may have possessed, this is no reason why he should not have retained, from an extremely remote period, some degree of instinctive love and sympathy for his fellows. we are, indeed, all conscious that we do possess such sympathetic feelings; but our consciousness does not tell us whether they are instinctive, having originated long ago in the same manner as with the lower animals, or whether they have been acquired by each of us during our early years." but again, on page , sympathy is referred to as an element of the social instincts:[ ] "it should, however, be borne in mind that the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts"; though, on pages , , the social instinct is again contrasted with sympathy, since according to darwin the desire for the approbation of others and the consequent yielding to their wishes is the result of sympathy: "thus the social instincts, which must have been acquired by man in a very rude state, and probably even by his early ape-like progenitors, still give the impulse to some of his best actions; but his actions are in a higher degree determined by the expressed wishes and judgments of his fellow-men." again the social and the maternal instincts and sympathy are identified and classed as under the dominion of the moral sense, pages - : "it is evident, in the first place, that with mankind the instinctive impulses have different degrees of strength; a savage, will risk his own life to save that of a member of the same community, but will be wholly indifferent about a stranger; a young and timid mother urged by the maternal instinct will, without a moment's hesitation, run the greatest danger for her own infant, but not for a mere fellow-creature. nevertheless, many a civilized man, or even boy, who never before risked his life for another, but full of courage and sympathy, has disregarded the instinct of self-preservation, and plunged at once into a torrent to save a drowning man, though a stranger.... such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time; though, if prevented by any cause, distress or even misery might be felt.... i am aware that some persons maintain that actions performed impulsively, as in the above cases, do not come under the dominion of the moral sense, and cannot be called moral.... on the contrary, we all feel that an act cannot be considered as perfect or as performed in the most noble manner, unless it be done impulsively, without deliberation or effort, in the same manner as by a man in whom the requisite qualities are innate." darwin defines the office of the moral sense as "telling us what to do,"[ ] that of conscience,--which includes remorse, repentance, regret or shame, fear of the gods and of the disapprobation of men,--as reproving us if we disobey it;[ ] conscience seems elsewhere to be defined as concerned with resolve to better future action; and in still another passage, the moral sense and conscience are identified. but again, in another paragraph, darwin seems to ascribe remorse or regret, not to the baulking of an instinct, but to a _judgment_ of having been baulked: "a man cannot prevent past impressions often repassing through his mind; he will thus be driven to make a comparison between the impressions of past hunger, vengeance satisfied, or danger shunned at other men's cost, with the almost ever-present instinct of sympathy, and with his early knowledge of what others consider as praiseworthy or blamable. this knowledge cannot be banished from his mind, and from instinctive sympathy is esteemed of great moment. he will then feel as if he had been baulked in following a present instinct or habit, and this with all animals causes dissatisfaction, or even misery."[ ] but, in spite of all indefiniteness in the use of terms and uncertainty as to the interrelations of "the social instincts," sympathy, reason, pleasure, and the moral sense, it is, after all, comparatively easy to gather, after a little deeper study, the general and more important features of darwin's theory as to the origin of morality. we may state these as follows: the social instinct led men or their ape-like progenitors to society,[ ] this instinct growing out of the parental or filial affections through habit and natural selection. virtue is, at first, only tribal.[ ] the social qualities of sympathy, fidelity, and courage implied in mutual aid and defence, were no doubt acquired by man through the same means. "when two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other.... selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. a tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other tribe still more highly endowed. thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world." though in a warlike state, where courage is especially necessary to tribal existence, the bravest men would perish in larger numbers than other men, and the survival of the unfittest would seem thus to be secured, the influence of their bravery on others might excite the latter to imitation and do far more good than the begetting of offspring who would inherit their bravery. so, also, pity, though inciting modern society to the preservation of the weak, yet is useful in that it cultivates sympathy; and so, too, wealth, affording leisure for intellectual pursuits and a wider choice in marriage, tends, in the end, to the preservation of the fittest morally, by direct or indirect means.[ ] altruistic action, followed from selfish motives, may become habit; habits of benevolence certainly strengthen the feeling of sympathy; and "habits followed during many generations probably tend to be inherited." furthermore, melancholy tends often to suicide, as violence, and quarrelsomeness to a bloody end, intemperance to the destruction of individual life, and profligacy to disease and sterility; so that some elimination of the worst dispositions takes place. these are some of the probable steps of advancement, though the process is too complex to be clearly followed out. the approbation of others--the strengthening of sympathies by habit--example and imitation--reason--experience and even self-interest--instruction during youth, and religious feelings--are the causes which lead to the advancement of morality.[ ] in the paragraph just quoted, darwin says: "with civilized nations, as far as an advanced standard of morality and an increased number of fairly good men are concerned, natural selection apparently effects but little, though the fundamental social instincts were originally thus gained"; but he later writes: "judging from all that we know of man and the lower animals, there has always been sufficient variability in their intellectual and moral faculties for a steady advance through natural selection"; and he further says: "no doubt such advance demands many favorable concurrent circumstances; but it may well be doubted whether the most favorable would have sufficed, had not the rate of increase been rapid, and the consequent struggle for existence extremely severe."[ ] the end or aim of morality is the general good, rather than the general happiness, though "no doubt the welfare and the happiness of the individual usually coincide; and a contented, happy tribe will flourish better than one that is discontented and unhappy.... as all wish for happiness, the 'greatest happiness principle' will have become a most important secondary guide and object; the social instinct, however, together with sympathy (which leads to our regarding the approbation and disapprobation of others), having served as the primary impulse and guide."[ ] and with regard to the future, darwin says: "looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. in this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant."[ ] footnotes: [ ] p. . this essay originally formed part of the chapter on "instinct" in "the origin of species," but was omitted for the sake of condensation. [ ] vol. i. p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] appendix to "mental evolution in animals," pp. , . the italics are my own. [ ] "the origin of species," ii. p. . [ ] ibid. i. pp. , . [ ] "the origin of species," i. pp. , . [ ] ibid. i. pp. - . [ ] appendix to "mental evolution in animals," pp. , ; see also "the descent of man," i. p. _et seq._; and "nature" for feb. , , introduction to a letter to the editor from william higginson. [ ] p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] p. . [ ] see also p. . and, p. , sympathy is designated as "a fundamental element of the social instincts." [ ] p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] p. . [ ] "descent of man," i. p. , etc. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. pp. - . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. pp. , . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . alfred russel wallace "whatever we may define instinct to be, it is evidently some form of mental manifestation," says wallace in his "contributions to natural selection" ( ). we know little of the senses of animals; some animals may even possess senses which we have not, and by which stores of knowledge of the outside world may be opened that are closed to us. we do not know certainly, for instance, what is the office of the little stalked balls that are the sole remnants of hind wings in flies, or what is the office of the third joints of the antennæ in the same insects, though both these evidently correspond to some sense. how can we pretend to fathom the profound mystery of the mental nature of animals, and decide what or how much they can perceive or remember, reason or reflect? defining instinct, then, as "the performance by an animal of complex acts, absolutely without instruction," wallace refuses to accept the theory of such action, in any case where all other modes of explanation have not been exhausted; for "a point which can be proved should not be assumed, and a totally unknown power should not be brought in to explain facts, when known powers may be sufficient." he maintains that there is a possibility, for instance, of the instruction of young birds by old in the art of nest-building. it is quite likely that birds remember the form, size, position, and materials of the nest in which they were hatched, as it is also probable that young birds often pair with old ones who have experience in nest-building. man's architecture is also chiefly imitative. "birds brought up from the egg in cages do not make the characteristic nest of their species, even though the proper materials are supplied them, and often make no nest at all, but rudely heap together a quantity of materials." "no one has ever yet obtained the eggs of some bird which builds an elaborate nest, hatched those eggs by steam or under quite a distinct parent, placed them afterwards in an extensive aviary or covered garden, where the situation and the materials of a nest similar to that of the parent-birds may be found, and then seen what kind of nest these birds would build. if under these rigorous conditions they choose the same materials, the same situation, and construct the nest in the same way and as perfectly as their parents did, instinct would be proved in their case; now it is only assumed.... so no one has ever carefully taken the pupæ of a hive of bees out of the comb, removed them from the presence of other bees, and loosed them in a large conservatory with plenty of flowers and food, and observed what kind of cells they would construct. but till this is done no one can say that, with every new swarm there are no bees older than those of the same year, who may be the teachers in forming the new comb."[ ] "young birds never have the song peculiar to their species if they have not heard it, whereas they acquire very easily the song of almost any other bird with which they are associated." moreover, there are failures and imperfections in the nesting of birds that are not compatible with the theory of instinct, which is supposed to be infallible, but are quite so with the theory of intelligence and imitation. furthermore, in their manner of building, birds adapt themselves to circumstances and frequently alter and improve. the theory of instincts in man is likewise in the wrong. the sucking of the child, which is said to be instinctive, is merely one of those _simple_ acts dependent on organization, like breathing or muscular motion. "so walking is evidently dependent on the arrangement of the bones and joints, and the pleasurable exertion of the muscles, which lead to the vertical posture becoming gradually the most agreeable one; and there can be little doubt that an infant would learn of itself to walk, even if suckled by a wild beast." the theory of instinct "implies innate ideas[ ] of a very definite kind, and if established, would overthrow mr. mill's sensationalism and all the modern philosophy of experience." the reason why natural selection acts so powerfully upon animals, is to be found mainly in their individual isolation. "a slight injury, a temporary illness, will often end in death, because it leaves the individual powerless against its enemies.... there is, as a rule, no mutual assistance between adults, which enables them to tide over a period of sickness. neither is there any division of labor; each must fulfil _all_ the conditions of its existence, and therefore natural selection keeps all up to a pretty uniform standard." but in man as we now behold him, this is different. he is social and sympathetic; and in society, a division of labor takes place that leaves the physically defective still something to do by which he may sustain life, and saves him from the extreme penalty which falls upon animals so defective. by his skill in constructing for himself tools and clothing and in planting his own food, man has an immense advantage over the animals, in whom a change of structure must take place in adaptation to changed conditions. moreover, he not only escapes natural selection himself, but "is actually able to take away some of that power from nature, which, before his appearance, she universally exercised," establishing so his supremacy by means of that subtle force we term mind. "we can anticipate the time when the earth will produce only cultivated plants and domestic animals, when man's selection shall have supplanted natural selection." we must, in future geological study, trace back the gradually decreasing brain of former races to a time when the body as well begins materially to differ, if we would wish to reach the starting-point of the human family. before that time man had not mind enough to preserve his body from change. from this point, however, we shall probably see that, while all other forms of animal life changed again and again, man's physical character became fixed and almost immutable, advance taking place only in his mental and moral characteristics, with which are united modifications of the brain, as well as of the head and face, parts that are immediately connected with the brain and the medium of the most refined emotions. by man's superior sympathetic and moral feelings, he becomes fitted for the social state. there is one feature, however, in which natural selection will still act upon him--namely, the color of the skin, which, as mr. darwin has shown, is correlated with constitutional peculiarities, liability to certain diseases being often accompanied by marked external characteristics; so that, in certain countries, certain tints would be likely to be weeded out, and certain other tints, with which, again, color and texture of the hair seem to be associated, would be established by natural selection. natural selection has no power "to produce modifications which are in any degree injurious to their possessor, and mr. darwin uses the strong expression that a single case of this kind would be fatal to his theory. if, therefore, we find in man any characters which all the evidence we can obtain goes to show would have been actually injurious to him on their first appearance, they could not possibly have been produced by natural selection. neither could any specially developed organ have been so produced if it had been merely useless to its possessor, or if its use were not proportionate to its degree of development. such cases as these would prove that some other law, or some other power, than natural selection, had been at work. but if, further, we could see that these very modifications, though hurtful or useless at the time when they first appeared, became in the highest degree useful at a much later period, and are essential to the full moral and intellectual development of human nature, we should then infer the action of mind, foreseeing the future and preparing for it, just as surely as we do when we see the breeder set himself to work with the determination to produce a definite improvement in some cultivated plant or domestic animal"; we should infer a creation by law. skull-measurement shows that the brain of the savage was, and is, larger than it needs to be, and "capable, if cultivated and developed, of performing work of a degree and kind far beyond what he ever requires it to do." in evidence of this, wallace cites the measurements of esquimaux skulls and the testimony of paul broca to the fine form and capacity of the skulls of les eyzies, a race of cave-dwellers undoubtedly contemporary with the reindeer in southern france.[ ] he also argues that the loss, by man, of the hairy covering so long persistent in the mammalia, cannot have taken place on account of its lack of usefulness, since even the most savage tribes show a need of it, endeavoring to replace it by artificial coverings, especially on the back. this naked skin is, however, of importance to civilization, since it leads to the adoption of both clothing and houses, and develops, through the former, the sense of modesty. the loss of the prehensile character of the whole foot, and especially of the pedal thumb, is a preparation for civilization. so, too, the capacity of the human voice for music, of little use to savages, since their singing consists only in a sort of monotonous howling, must be regarded as a preparation for the civilized man's delight in music, and probably also for a higher state than that to which we have yet attained. nor can the sanctity which attaches to virtue, even among savages, be explained by utility or natural selection. the "mystic sense of wrong," which, although few laws enforce truth, yet attaches to untruth, even among whole tribes of utter savages, is an example of such sanctity. wallace adds, however, in the same breath: "no very severe reprobation follows untruth. in all ages, falsehood has been thought venial or even laudable under certain conditions." he asserts that "the utilitarian doctrine is not sufficient to account for the development of the moral sense," but seems, nevertheless, to adopt a utilitarian principle as the basis of the moral sense when he says: "where free play is allowed to the relations between man and man, this feeling [_i.e._ of sanctity] attaches itself to those acts of universal utility or self-sacrifice which are the products of our affections and sympathies which we term moral"; and he adds: "while it may be, and often is, perverted to give the same sanction to acts of narrow and conventional utility which are really immoral,--as when the hindoo will tell a lie, but will sooner starve than eat unclean food; and looks upon the marriage of adult females as gross immorality." the explanation of this inconsistency is, according to wallace, that the strength of the moral feeling, in any case, will depend on the individual or racial constitution, and on education and habit; and the acts to which its sanctions are applied will depend on the extent of modification of the simple feelings and affections by custom, law, and religion. if a moral sense is an essential part of our nature, it is easy to see that its sanction may often be given to acts which are useless or immoral, just as the natural appetite for drink is perverted by the drunkard into the means of his destruction. these phenomena of the preparation of the human being for civilization and morality can be explained only on the supposition of a superior intelligence which has guided man's development in a definite direction, just as man guides the development of many animal forms. by a superior intelligence is not necessarily meant the supreme intelligence. the modern cultivated mind seems incapable of realizing between it and the deity other grades of intelligence, which the law of continuity would, however, force us to infer: and rejecting first causes for any and every especial effect in the universe, except in the sense that the action of any intelligent being is a first cause, we can still conceive that the development of the essentially human portions of man's structure may have been, in this sense, "determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent beings acting through natural and universal laws."[ ] "it is probable that the true law of this development lies too deep for our discovery." wallace quotes, in support of his theory, some of professor tyndall's much-disputed statements,--to the effect that the chasm between the phenomena of mind and those of brain is impassable. "to say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception. you cannot have in the whole what does not exist in any of the parts;[ ] and those who argue thus should put forth a precise definition of matter with clearly enumerated properties, and show that the necessary result of a certain complex arrangement of the elements or atoms of that matter will be the production of self-consciousness. there is no escape from the dilemma,--either all matter is conscious, or consciousness is[ ] something distinct from matter, and in the latter case its presence in material forms is a proof of the existence of conscious beings outside of, and independent of, what we term matter. "the merest rudiment of sensation or self-consciousness is infinitely removed from absolutely non-sentient or unconscious matter. we can conceive of no physical addition to, or modification of, an unconscious mass which should create consciousness, no step in the series of changes organized matter may undergo, which should bring sensation where there was no sensation or power of sensation at the preceding step. it is because the things are utterly incomparable and incommensurable that we can only conceive of _sensation_ coming to matter from without, while _life_ may be conceived as merely a specific modification and coördination of the matter and the forces that compose the universe, and with which we are separately acquainted. we may admit with professor huxley, that _protoplasm_ is the 'matter of life' and the cause of organization; but we cannot admit or conceive that _protoplasm_ is the primary source of sensation and consciousness, or that it can ever of itself become _conscious_ in the same way as we may perhaps conceive that it may become _alive_." wallace then reaches, without further preliminary discussion, the conclusion that "matter is essentially force" (arguing that we may draw this conclusion from the preceding considerations); that "matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable. when we touch matter, we only really experience sensations of resistance, implying repulsive force; and no other sense can give us such apparently solid proofs of the reality of matter as touch does." wallace considers it a great step in advance thus "to get rid of the notion that matter is a thing in itself which can exist _per se_, and must have been eternal, since it is supposed to be indestructible and uncreated,--that force, or the forces of nature, are another thing given or added to matter, or else its necessary properties,--and that mind is yet another thing, either a product of this matter and its supposed inherent forces, or distinct from and co-existent with it"; and to be able to substitute for this theory "the far simpler and more consistent belief, that matter, as an entity distinct from force, does not exist; and that force is a product of mind." "if we are satisfied that force or forces are all that exist in the material universe, we are next led to inquire what is force." we are acquainted with two kinds of force--our own will-force, and the forces of nature. freedom of the will cannot be disproved, for it cannot be shown that there is not one-thousandth of a grain's difference between the force exerted by the body and the force derived from without. "if, therefore, we have traced one force, however minute, to an origin in our will, while we have no knowledge of any other primary cause of force, it does not seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will-force; and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually _is_ the _will_ of higher intelligences, or of one supreme intelligence." but though wallace declares "natural selection, as the law of the strongest, inadequate" to account for man's mental and moral development, since the finer feelings and capacities could have been of no use to human beings in the early stages of barbarism, and further maintains that it is also difficult to understand how "feelings developed by one set of actions could be transferred to acts of which the utility was partial, imaginary, or altogether absent," he nevertheless has other passages like the following: "in proportion as physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have increasing influence on the well-being of the race. capacity for acting in concert for protection and for the acquisition of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredations upon our fellows; the smaller development of the combative and destructive propensities, self-restraint in present appetites; and that intelligent foresight which prepares for the future, are all qualities that, from their earliest appearance, must have been for the benefit of each community, and would, therefore, have become the subjects of natural selection. for it is evident that such qualities would be for the well-being of man; would guard him against external enemies, against internal dissensions, and against the effects of inclement seasons and impending famine, more surely than could any merely physical modification. tribes in which such mental and moral qualities were predominant would therefore have an advantage over other tribes in which they were less developed, would live and maintain their numbers, while the others would decrease and finally succumb." "from the time, therefore, when the social and sympathetic feelings came into active operation, and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and structure. as an animal, he would remain almost stationary, the changes of the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise over other parts of the organic world. but from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those very influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard against adverse circumstances, and combine for mutual comfort and protection would be preserved and accumulated; the better and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental organization would occur which has raised the very lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so little from some of them in physical structure) and, in conjunction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed the wonderful intellect of the european races." "when the power that had hitherto modified the body had its action transferred to the mind, then races would advance and become improved, merely by the harsh discipline of a sterile soil and inclement seasons; under their influence a hardier, a more provident, and a more social race would be developed." and especially: "if my conclusions are just, it must inevitably follow that the higher--the more intellectual and moral--must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of natural selection, still acting on his mental organization, must ever lead to a more perfect adaptation of man's higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature and to the exigencies of the social state. while his external form will probably ever remain unchanged, except in the development of that perfect beauty which results from a healthy and well-organized body, refined and ennobled by the highest intellectual faculties and sympathetic emotions, his mental constitution may advance and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity. "our progress towards such a result is very slow, but it still seems to be a progress." in "darwinism" ( ), wallace advocates weismann's theory of heredity. with regard to instinct, he uses arguments similar to those of his earlier work. he says of the hunting instincts of dogs: "at first sight it appears as if the acquired habits of our trained dogs--pointers, retrievers, etc.--are certainly inherited; but this need not be the case, because there must be some structural or physical peculiarities, such as modifications in the attachments of muscles, increased delicacy of smell or sight, or peculiar likes and dislikes, which are inherited; and from these, peculiar habits follow as a natural consequence, or are easily acquired." so that he thus defines instinct, by implication, as he does also in his former book, as inherited habit which has no correlative in physical organization, and is unconnected with feelings of liking or disliking. he further says: "again, much of the perfection of instinct is due to the extreme severity of the selection, any failure involving destruction"; and adds that, even if we admit the inheritance of the effects of the direct action of the environment on the individual, the effects are so small in comparison with the amount of spontaneous variation of every part of the organism, that they must be quite overshadowed by the latter.[ ] in his theory of a higher intelligence guiding human development, wallace seems, in this book, to have abandoned all his former arguments except those from the mental and moral faculties, and it is perhaps due to a perception of the inconsistencies of his former utterances on the subject of the moral sense that he barely touches upon it in this book. on the other hand, he has elaborated his arguments from the mathematical and artistic faculties, and added an argument from wit and humor, none of which are found, he urges, among savages, except in their very rudiments, and none of which could have been developed by natural selection, since none could have been a cause of man's conquest in his struggles with wild beasts or with other tribes or nations. in answer to the objection that the law of continuity, which he has quoted as favoring the belief in the existence of grades of supernatural beings between man and the deity, tells against the introduction of new causes in man's development, wallace maintains that there are certainly two other points in evolution where such new causes come into play,--namely, at the beginning of life and at the beginning of consciousness. "increase of complexity in chemical compounds, with consequent instability, even if we admit that it may have produced protoplasm as a chemical compound, could certainly not have produced living protoplasm,--protoplasm which has the power of growth and reproduction, and of that continuous process of development which has resulted in the marvellous variety and complex organization of the whole vegetable kingdom, or, that is, vitality."[ ] "all idea of mere complication of structure producing" consciousness is "out of the question." "because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not follow that his mental nature, even though developed _pari passu_ with it, has been developed by the same causes only."[ ] yet, in assuming weismann's theory, wallace asserts: "whatever other causes have been at work, natural selection is supreme, to an extent which even darwin himself hesitated to claim for it." "while admitting, as darwin always admitted, the coöperation of the fundamental laws of growth and variation, of correlation and heredity, in determining the direction of lines of variation, or in the initiation of peculiar organs, we find that variation and natural selection are ever-present agencies which take possession, as it were, of every minute change originated by these fundamental causes, check or favor their further development, or modify them in countless ways according to the varying needs of the organism."[ ] in the opening portions of this book wallace introduces a teleological argument to the effect that the pain which we ordinarily conceive as connected with the struggle for existence among lower species is mostly a figment of our imagination. periods of suffering are comparatively short, since death speedily and without anticipation puts an end to those animals in any way incapacitated. livingstone describes how, when seized by a lion, a sort of stupor succeeded the first shock, so that he felt neither fear nor pain; it is probable that terror induces this same condition in animals seized by beasts of prey, and that their end is therefore painless after the first shock. cold is generally severest at night and tends to produce sleep and painless extinction. hunger is scarcely felt during periods of excitement, "and when food is scarce, the excitement of seeking it is at its greatest." nor is the gradual exhaustion and weakness of slow starvation necessarily painful. footnotes: [ ] for criticism of these arguments, see romanes, "mental evolution in animals," p. , etc.; also "animal intelligence." in his second edition of this book ( ), wallace notices a few of the instances cited by romanes in objection to his theory: such as the recognition of the hen's call by a chicken hatched in an incubator, the fear shown, on the other hand, at the note of a hawk, and the fear exhibited by most young animals at the voice or presence of their natural enemies. of these he says, however: "but in all these cases we have comparatively simple motions or acts induced by feelings of liking or disliking, and we can see that they may be due to definite nervous and muscular coördinations which are essential to the existence of the species. that a chicken should feel pleasure at the sound of a hen's voice, and pain or fear at that of a hawk, and should move towards the one and away from the other, is a fact of the same nature as the liking of an infant for milk and its dislike of beer, with the motion of the head towards the one and away from the other when offered to it." of two authentic cases of the building of a nest by young birds, without instruction, he says that, in one case (that of ring-doves), the nest is a very simple one, and that the birds also received some assistance; and in the other case the nest was not built with the neatness ordinarily characteristic of the species. (see "natural selection and tropical nature," pp. - .) the most of romanes' instances and arguments he does not notice or answer. [ ] in his second edition, wallace writes "not only innate ideas, but innate knowledge." [ ] in the second edition of this book, wallace maintains the same position with regard to skull-measurement as a criterion of mental capacity. nor does he notice distinctions in skull-form or the proportions of different parts of the brain to each other, except in the one case of the eyzies. [ ] see wallace on "miracles and modern spiritualism," "the psycho-physiological sciences and their assailants," and "the scientific aspect of the supernatural." [ ] wallace omits this particular clause in his second edition. [ ] the second edition reads "is, or pertains to." [ ] pp. , . [ ] this is contradictory of the passages on the subject of life above noticed as occurring in the "contributions to natural selection," and retained in the second edition of that book. [ ] p. . [ ] p. . ernst haeckel in his "anthropogenie" ( ), haeckel says: "the soul, or 'psyche' of man has evolved, as function of the cerebro-spinal nerve-chord simultaneously with the latter, and just as, even yet, brain and spinal column develop from the simple nerve-chord, so the human mind, or the soul-activity of the whole human race, has evolved, gradually and step by step, from the lower vertebrate soul. 'spirit' and 'soul' are only higher and combined or differentiated powers of the same function which we designate with the general expression 'force.'"[ ] in his essay on "cell-souls and soul-cells" ( ), haeckel attributes to all animals the possession of soul, and adds that "we cannot wholly deny a soul to the plants also." the possession of soul he defines as the "capacity of sensibility in the organism to excitations of various sorts, and of reaction upon these excitations with certain movements." "this uniform character of protoplasm gifted with soul permits us the hypothesis that the ultimate factors of the soul-life are the plastidules, the invisible, homogeneous, elemental particles, or molecules, of protoplasm, which, in limitless multiplicity, compose the unnumbered cells." the soul connected with the higher developments of brain and spinal column is likewise a higher development, and differs from the soul connected with the uncentralized organization of lower species. in the latest edition of his "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte" ( ), he further asserts that all matter is possessed of soul, and that "the antithesis which we have assumed between living and dead nature does not exist. when a stone, thrown into the air, falls to the earth according to fixed laws, or when a crystal is formed in a solution of salts, or when sulphur and quicksilver combine to form cinnabar, these phenomena are not more and not less mechanical phenomena of life than the growth and bloom of the plants, than the propagation and sense-activity of animals, than the perception and thought-processes of human beings."[ ] and both in this work and in his "anthropogenie" he quotes the words of goethe, that "matter can never exist and act without soul, the soul can never exist and act without matter." this last statement is, however, rather a metaphysical one, in distinction from haeckel's other statements on this subject, which are properly naturalistic. in his lecture on "cell-souls and soul-cells," haeckel says of instinct: "unbiassed observation, applying its tests without prejudice, shows conclusively that the so-called 'instinct' of the animals is nothing else than a sum of psychical functions originally acquired by adaptation, fixed by habit, and descending from generation to generation by inheritance. originally carried out with consciousness and reflection, many instinctive actions of the animals have become unconscious, as have, in like manner, the ordinary acts of intelligence in man. these too, may, with the same justice, be regarded as the expression of innate instinct, as often is the impulse to self-preservation, maternal love, and the social impulse. instinct is not an exclusive attribute of the animal-brain, nor is reason an especial endowment of man; there is, on the contrary, for the unbiassed observer, a long, long scale of gradual improvement and evolution in psychic life, which may be traced step by step, from the higher to lower human beings, from the perfect to the imperfect animals, until we reach those simple worms, whose nerve-ganglia are the beginning of all the numberless brain-forms of the scale." in his "anthropogenie," haeckel denies free will, maintaining that all phenomena are the result of mechanical causes--_causæ efficientes_, not _causæ finales_. in an essay on the "relation of the theory of evolution in its present form to science in general" ( ), he says of ethics: "by far the most important and the most difficult demand which practical philosophy makes upon the theory of evolution seems to be that of a new theory of morals. certainly in the future, as in the past, the careful development of moral character and of religious conviction must be the chief problem of education. but until now the greater number of people have clung to the conviction that this most important problem could be solved only in connection with certain ecclesiastical articles of faith. and since these dogmas, especially as connected with ancient myths of the creation, are in direct opposition to the facts of evolution, the latter have been believed to be, in the highest degree, inimical to religion and morality. "this fear we believe to be erroneous. it has its origin in the continual confusion of the true, reasonable, nature-religion and the dogmatic, mythological, church-religion. the comparative history of religions, an important branch of anthropology, teaches us the manifold nature of outward form in which different peoples and epochs have, in accordance with their individual character, enveloped religious thought. it shows us that the dogmatic teachings of the church-religion itself are subject to a slow, continuous evolution. new churches and sects arise, old ones disappear; at the best, a particular tenet of faith lasts but a few thousand years, an inconsiderably short space of time compared with the æons of the geological periods. finally, the history of civilization shows us to how small an extent true morality has been associated with any particular ecclesiastical form. the greatest rudeness and barbarity of custom often goes hand in hand with the absolute dominion of an all-powerful church; in confirmation of which assertion one need only remember the middle ages. on the other hand, we behold the highest standard of perfection attained by men who have severed connection with every creed. "independent of every confession of faith, there lives in the breast of every human being the germ of a pure nature-religion; this is indissolubly bound up with the noblest sides of human life. its highest commandment is love, the restraint of our natural egoism for the benefit of our fellow-men, and for the good of human society whose members we are. this natural law of morality is much older than all church-religion. it has developed out of the social instincts of the animals. we meet with its rudiments among all animals, especially among all mammals. following the laws of association and of division of labor, many individuals of such species unite to form the higher community of the swarm, herd, or tribe. the existence of the latter is necessarily dependent upon the mutual relations of the members of the community and the sacrifices which these make to the whole society at the cost of their own egoism. the consciousness of this necessity of self-sacrifice, the sense of duty, is nothing else than a social instinct. but this instinct is always a psychical habit, which was originally acquired, but which, becoming in the course of time hereditary, appears at last as innate. "in order to convince ourselves of the wonderful power of the sense of duty among animals, we need only to destroy an ant-hill. immediately we see, in the midst of the destruction, thousands of zealous citizens employed, not in the rescue of their own precious lives, but in the protection of the beloved community to which they belong. brave soldiers of the ant-state prepare to offer strong resistance to our intruding finger; instructors of youth rescue the so-called ant-eggs, the precious larvæ, on which the future of the state depends; busy workers immediately begin with undiminished courage to clear away the ruins and to prepare new dwellings. but the admirable state of civilization among these ants, among bees and other social animals, has been developed, just as has been our own, from the rudest beginnings. "even those finest and most beautiful forms of human emotion which we especially celebrate in poetry are to be found prefigured among the animals. have not the tender mother-love of the lioness, the touching affection between male and female parrots, the self-sacrificing fidelity of the dog, been long proverbial? the noblest emotions of sympathy and love, which direct action, are here, as with human beings, nothing else than ennobled instinct." beginning with this conception, the ethics of evolution has to seek for no new principle, but, on the contrary, to trace back the old rules of duty to their scientific basis. long before the rise of all church-religion, these natural commandments regulated the lawful relations of human beings, as of gregarious animals. this significant fact the church-religions should utilize, instead of disputing. for the future does not belong to that theology which declares war against the triumphant theory of evolution, but to that which makes it its own, acknowledges it, and turns it to advantage. "far, therefore, from fearing, from the influence of the theory of evolution, a subversion of all accepted moral law and a destructive emancipation of egoism, we, on the contrary, look forward to a system of ethics erected upon the indestructible foundation of unchanging natural law, since at the same time with the clear recognition of our true place in nature, the study of anthropogeny opens to us the comprehension of the necessary character of our old rules of duty. like theoretical science, practical philosophy and pedagogy will no longer derive their most important principles from so-called revelations, but from the scientific truths of evolution. this victory of monism over dualism opens to us a most hopeful prospect of an unending continuation of our moral, as of our intellectual evolution. in this sense, we welcome the theory of evolution in its present form newly stated by darwin, as a challenge--the most important challenge of pure and applied science." as touching on the idea of a nature-religion as conceived by haeckel, may be noticed, however, a passage which occurs at the end of chapter xii. of the "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," as well as the passage before referred to in which it is asserted that we know only _causæ efficientes_, never _causæ finales_. the passage is as follows: "the general significance of the degenerated or rudimentary organs in the most important questions of natural philosophy cannot be over-estimated. on these may be founded a theory of disteleology as opposed to the ancient, usual teleology." with especial theories of heredity advocated by haeckel we are not concerned, except in one respect. even in the first edition of his "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," haeckel makes a distinction between conservative and progressive inheritance, and in the edition of he still maintains this division against weismann and others, claiming the heredity of acquired habit, under certain circumstances, and showing conclusively that even wounds and blemishes received during the life of an individual may be, in some instances, inherited by descendants.[ ] the laws of progressive heredity he gives as four: ( ) the law of the inheritance of adaptation; ( ) the law of the surer inheritance of qualities fixed by continual operation of its causes on individual generations; ( ) the law of homochronous inheritance or inheritance at a corresponding age; ( ) the law of homotypous inheritance, which may be otherwise called the law of inheritance in corresponding parts of the body.[ ] having thus glanced at the special theories by which the great original authorities paved the way for a system of evolutional ethics, we may direct our attention to the more purely philosophical writers who have turned these theories to advantage and elaborated them. the first on the list is footnotes: [ ] p. _et seq._ [ ] erster vortrag. [ ] p. _et seq._ [ ] for illustrations and proofs of these laws, see the "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," pp. - . herbert spencer in treating of mr. spencer's work, it is necessary to begin with a book which made its appearance before the publication of "the origin of species," namely, "social statics" ( ), mr. spencer's first noteworthy publication. in this are contained some remarkable statements, which are of especial worth as showing in what measure the thought of the time was already tending in the direction of the revelations of its greatest prophet, and science, in england as in germany, was slowly coming to recognize the unity of nature in life and human progress. an analysis of the first and theoretical part of this work will be, therefore, of use, and with this we will begin. mr. spencer opens his book with some criticisms of utilitarianism or the "expediency philosophy." every rule, in order to be of value, must have a definite meaning. the rule of "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" supposes mankind to be unanimous in the definition of the greatest happiness; the standard of happiness is, however, infinitely variable, in nations and in individuals. for happiness signifies a gratified state of all the faculties; and no two individuals are alike in faculties. in endeavoring to fix a standard, we are met by such insolvable problems as: what is the ratio between mental and bodily enjoyments constituting the greatest happiness? which is most truly an element in the desired felicity, content or aspiration? the conclusion we inevitably reach is that a true conception of what human life should be is possible only to the ideal man,--in whom the component feelings exist in their normal proportions. the world as yet contains no such men, and we are left with an insolvable riddle on our hands. there is the same uncertainty as to the mode of obtaining the greatest happiness. the expediency philosophy believes that man's intellect is competent to observe accurately and to grasp at once the multiplied phenomena of life and derive therefrom the knowledge which shall enable him to say whether such or such measures will conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. if without knowledge of terrestrial phenomena and their laws, newton had attempted a theory of planetary and stellar equilibrium, he might have cogitated to all eternity without result. such an attempt, however, would have been far less absurd than the attempt to find out the principles of public polity by a direct examination of that wonderfully intricate combination, society. in order to understand society it is necessary to comprehend man. another mistake of the expediency philosophy is that it assumes the eternity of government, which marks a certain stage of civilization, but which will by no means necessarily last forever. time was when the history of a people was the history of its government. feudalism, serfdom, slavery,--all were forms of government. progress means less government; constitutional forms, political freedom, democracy, all mean this. government is a sign of imperfection, an evil necessary against knavery; it must exist only so long as this exists. the expediency philosophy is, however, founded on government; takes it into partnership: but a system of moral philosophy professes to be a code of correct rules for the best, as well as the worst, members of society, and applicable to humanity in its highest conceivable perfection. of the expediency philosophy it must, therefore, be said that it can claim no scientific character, since: its fundamental proposition is not an axiom but a problem to be solved; it is expressed in terms possessing no fixed acceptation; it would require omniscience to carry it into practice; and, moreover, it takes imperfection for its basis. the existence of society argues a certain fitness and desire of mankind for it; without this, it would not exist, as eating and drinking, and the nourishment and protection of offspring would not take place if there were no corresponding desires, but merely an abstract opinion in favor of the worth of the two. in the method of nature, there is always some prompter, called a desire, answering to each of the actions which it is requisite for us to perform. it is probable, therefore, that we shall find an instrumentality of this sort prompting us to morality. in objection to the theory of a moral sense, the want of uniformity in judgment as to what is right is often advanced. but none deny the importance of appetite, though all know that it is by no means an infallible guide in the choice of kind or quantity of food. the same may be said of parental affection. the foundation of the claim of any man that he has as great a right to happiness as any other can be found in the last analysis in feeling only; he feels that it is so. none but those committed to a preconceived theory can fail to recognize the workings of such a faculty as the moral sense. it is clear that the perceptions of propriety or impropriety of conduct do not originate with the intellect but with the emotional faculties. the intellect, uninfluenced by desire, would show both miser and spendthrift that their habits were unwise; whereas the intellect, influenced by desire, makes each think the other a fool, but does not enable him to see his own foolishness. this is a universal law: every feeling is accompanied by a sense of the rightness of those actions which give it gratification. from an impulse to behave in a way we call equitable arises a perception that it is proper, and a conviction that it is good. there is, however, a perpetual conflict amongst feelings, from which results an incongruity of beliefs. it has been said that codes derived from the moral sense have no stability since this sense ratifies one principle at one time and place, another at another. the same objection applies, however, to every other system of morals, and happily there is an answer to the objection. the error criticised is one of application, not of doctrine. the decisions of the geometric sense are conflicting; yet there are certain axioms upon which all agree; and in the same manner there are moral axioms to be found, upon which all must agree. disagreement is to be looked for among imperfect characters. but nature's laws know no exception: obey or suffer are the alternatives. a progress from entire unconsciousness of these laws to the conviction that law is universal and inevitable, constancy an essential attribute of divine rule, is the substance of the progress of man. the end of these unbending utterances is universal good; we have no alternative but to assume the law of constancy to be the best possible one. as with the physical, so with the ethical; all religions teach the inevitableness of punishment and reward, with which deeds are _necessarily_ and _indissolubly_ connected. it is of infinite importance to recognize and follow the laws of society. to the objection that one cannot always be guided by abstract principles, that there are exceptions where prudence must act, it may be replied that there are no exceptions to the laws of nature; that even if, in a particular instance, partial good may result, a far greater general evil is entailed by the opening of the way to future disobediences, and that we cannot, moreover, be sure that an exceptional disobedience will bring the anticipated benefits. moral as well as physical evil is the result of a want of congruity between the faculties and their sphere of action. with regard to the results of varying conditions upon man, we have three alternative theories from which to choose: either man remains entirely unaltered by his surroundings, or he grows more unfitted for them, or else he grows more fitted for them. the first two suppositions being absurd, we are obliged to admit the remaining one. and since all evil results from non-adaptation, and non-adaptation is being continually diminished, it follows that evil must be continually diminishing. the evil in society shows that man is not yet completely adapted to a state which requires that each individual shall have such desires only as may be fully satisfied without trenching upon the ability of other individuals to obtain a like satisfaction. the primitive condition of man required that he should sacrifice the welfare of other beings to his own; the old attribute still clings to him in some measure; the belief in human perfectibility amounts to the belief that man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. progress is not an accident but a necessity; and if, instead of proposing it as a rule of human conduct, bentham had simply assumed the "greatest happiness" to be the creative purpose, his position would have been tenable enough. it is one thing, however, to hold that greatest happiness is the creative purpose, and quite a different thing to hold that greatest happiness should be the immediate aim of mankind. truth has two sides, a divine and a human; or, it is for man to ascertain the conditions which lead to the greatest happiness, and to live in conformity with these. the men who are to realize this greatest sum of happiness must be such as can obtain complete happiness without diminishing the activity and happiness of others. the first great condition of the attainment of the end is, therefore, justice, and, as a supplement to this, negative and positive beneficence,--abstinence from diminishing the spheres of activity of others, and further, a positive increase of their pleasure. for man is sympathetic, and the sympathetic pleasures increase the sum total of happiness. the exercise[ ] of all the faculties in which happiness consists is not only man's right but also his duty. for the fact of pain, of punishment, proves that god intends and wills such exercise. but the exercise of all the faculties is freedom; all men have, therefore, a right to freedom of action. this principle, however, implies a limitation of man by men, whereby we arrive at the general proposition that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his feelings _compatible with the possession of a like liberty in every other man_. in the progress of mankind, or adaptation, the conduct which hurts necessary feelings in others must inevitably undergo restraint and consequent limitation; conduct which hurts only their incidental feelings, as those of caste or prejudice, will not inevitably be restrained, but if it springs from necessary feelings, will, on the contrary, be continued at the expense of these incidental feelings and to their final suppression. morality is _not_, therefore, to be interpreted as a refraining from the infliction of any pain whatever, for some sentiment must be wounded; and by much wounding it is gradually weakened. when men mutually behave in a way that offends some essential element in the nature of each, and all in turn have to bear the consequent suffering, there will arise a tendency to curb the desire that makes them so behave. questions of individual morality seem to present a difficulty to this theory of freedom. thus, for instance, on the principle above adopted, the liberty of drunkenness cannot be condemned as long as the drunkard respects a like liberty in others; and here we fall into the inconsistency of affirming that a man is at liberty to do something essentially destructive of happiness. however, if we admit, as we must, that liberty is the _primary_ law, no desire to get a secondary law fulfilled can warrant us in breaking this primary one; we must deal with secondary laws as best we can. the first principle above stated may also be secondarily derived. the regulation of conduct is not left to the accident of a philosophical inquiry; the agent of morality is the moral sense. in all ages, but more especially in recent ones, have there been affirmations of the equality of all men and their equal right to happiness. when we find that a belief like this is not only permanent but daily gaining ground, we have good reason to conclude that it corresponds to some essential element of our moral constitution; more especially since we find that its existence is in harmony with that chief prerequisite to greatest happiness lately dwelt upon; and that its growth is in harmony with the law of adaptation, by which the greatest happiness is being wrought out. to assert, however, that the sense of justice is but the gradually acquired conviction that benefits spring from some kinds of action, and evils from other kinds, the sympathies and antipathies contracted manifesting themselves as a love of justice and a hatred of injustice, is as absurd as to conclude that hunger springs from a conviction of the benefit of eating. the moral sense must be regarded as a special faculty, since, otherwise, there would be nothing during the dormancy of the other faculties, which must sometimes occur, to prevent an infringement on the freedom requisite for their future action. as adam smith has shown in his "theory of moral sentiments," the proper regulation of our conduct to others is secured by means of a faculty whose function it is to excite in each being the emotions displayed by the beings about him. the sentiment of justice is nothing but a sympathetic affection of the instinct of personal rights, a sort of reflex function of it. other things being equal, those persons possessing the strongest sense of personal rights have, also, the strongest sense of the rights of others. there is no _necessary_ connection between the two; but in the average of cases they bear a constant ratio. it may be objected that if the truth that every man has a freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringe not upon the equal freedom of others, be an axiom, it should be recognized by all, as is not the case. this difficulty seems in part due to the impossibility of making the perfect law recognize an imperfect state. it may further be answered that the bushman knows nothing of the science of mathematics, yet that arithmetic is a fact; the difference in men's moral perceptions is no difficulty in our way, but rather illustrates the truth of our theory, since man is not yet adapted to the social state. in further confirmation of the doctrine of the free exercise of function, it may be added that, since non-fulfilment of desire produces misery, if god is to be regarded as willing such non-fulfilment, he must be regarded as willing men's misery; which is absurd. if men are not naturally free, then a doctrine of the divine right of kings is easily reached, and whoever is king must be regarded as such by divine right, no matter how he reached the throne. spencer then proceeds to apply his first principle or axiom of freedom to prove the right to life and liberty, to the use of the earth, to property and free speech; and considers further the rights of women and of children, and the political rights of individuals; the constitution and duty of the state; commerce, education, and the poor-laws; government colonization, sanitary supervision, postal arrangements, etc. a remarkable feature of this part of "social statics" is that spencer, while applying his principle with quite an opposite result to all other property, advocates the nationalization of the land, on the ground that the freedom of the individual is right only in so far as it does not hinder a like freedom in others; and that the monopolization of the privileges of land-ownership by individuals does prevent the enjoyment of the same privilege by others. general considerations the course of civilization could not possibly have been other than it has been. progress shows us that perfect individuation joined to the greatest mutual dependence will be reached in the future of the race. there will be an ultimate identity of personal and social interests, and a disappearance of evil. spencer gives, however, a number of arguments to prove that the interest of society is, at present also, the interest of the individual. * * * * * the "theory of population" (published in ), which is founded on the theory of an antagonism between the intellectual and the reproductive powers, and on the ancient theory of a direct relation between skull-capacity or brain-size and intellectual power, contains this passage: "from the beginning, pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress. it produced the original diffusion of the race. it compelled men to abandon predatory habits and take to agriculture. it led to the clearing of the earth's surface. it forced men into the social state; made social organization inevitable; and has developed the social sentiments. it has stimulated to progressive improvements in production, and to increased skill and intelligence. it is daily pressing us into closer contact and more mutually dependent relationships. and after having caused, as it ultimately must, the due peopling of the globe, and the bringing of all its habitable parts into the highest state of culture,--after having brought all processes for the satisfaction of human wants to the greatest perfection,--after having, at the same time, developed the intellect into complete competency for its work, and the feelings into complete fitness for social life,--after having done all this, we see the pressure of population, as it gradually finishes its work, must gradually bring itself to an end." in a letter to mr. mill, published in bain's "mental and moral science" (p. , d edition), spencer repudiates the title of anti-utilitarian, which mr. mill, in view of the criticisms of utilitarianism contained in "social statics," had applied to him. he defines his position in respect to utilitarianism as follows: "i have never regarded myself as an anti-utilitarian. my dissent from the doctrine of utility as commonly understood, concerns, not the object to be reached by men, but the method of reaching it. while i admit that happiness is the ultimate end to be contemplated, i do not admit that it should be the proximate end. the expediency philosophy, having concluded that happiness is a thing to be achieved, assumes that morality has no other business than empirically to generalize the results of conduct, and to supply for the guidance of conduct nothing more than its empirical generalizations. "but 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 i 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. "to make my 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 quite 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 the organized and consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals, who bequeathed to him their slowly developed nervous organizations--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 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." in "recent discussions in science, philosophy, and morals"[ ] ( ), spencer, after quoting portions of the above letter as defining his position, continues with a consideration of the continual readjustment of the compromise between the ideal and the practicable, the former of which prescribes a system far too good for men as they are, the latter of which does not of itself tend to establish a system better than the existing one; and he reiterates his law of the perfect man as follows:-- "granted that we are chiefly interested in ascertaining what is _relatively_ right, it still follows that we must first consider what is absolutely right; since the one conception presupposes the other." spencer further expressly repudiates empirical utilitarianism, and denies the assertion of mr. hutton that he by implication recognizes no parentage for morals beyond that of the accumulation and organization of the facts of experience. on this head he says:-- "in the genesis of an idea, the successive experiences, be they of sounds, colors, touches, tastes, or be they of the special objects that combine many of these into groups, have so much in common that each, when it occurs, can be definitely thought of as like those which preceded it. but in the genesis of an emotion, the successive experiences so far differ that each of them, when it occurs, suggests past experiences which are not specifically similar, but have only a general similarity; and, at the same time, it suggests benefits or evils in past experience which likewise are various in their special natures, though they have a certain community of general nature. hence it results that the consciousness aroused is a multitudinous confused consciousness, in which, along with a certain kind of combination among impressions received from without, there is a vague cloud of ideal combinations akin to them, and a vague mass of ideal feelings of pleasure or pain that were associated with them. we have abundant proof that feelings grow up without reference to recognized causes and consequences, and without the possessor of them being able to say why they have grown up, though analysis, nevertheless, shows that they have been formed out of connected experiences. the experiences of utility i refer to are those which become registered, not as distinctly recognized connections between certain kinds of acts and certain kinds of remote results, but those which become registered in the shape of associations between groups of feelings that have often recurred together, though the relation between them has not been consciously generalized"--associations which though little perceived, nevertheless serve as incentives or deterrents. much deeper down than the history of the human race must we go to find the beginnings of these connections. the appearances and sounds which excite in the infant a vague dread indicate danger; and do so because they are the physiological accompaniments of destructive action. "what we call the natural language of anger is due to a partial contraction of those muscles which actual combat would call into play; and all marks of irritation, down to that passing shade over the brow which accompanies slight annoyance, are incipient stages of these same contractions. conversely with the natural language of pleasure, and of that state of mind which we call amicable feeling; this, too, has a physical interpretation." of the altruistic sentiments, spencer says: "the development of these has gone on only as fast as society has advanced to a state in which the activities are mainly peaceful. the root of all the altruistic sentiments is sympathy, and sympathy could become dominant only when the mode of life, instead of being one that habitually inflicted direct pain, became one which conferred direct and indirect benefits; the pains inflicted being mainly incidental and indirect." sympathy is "the concomitant of gregariousness; the two having all along increased by reciprocal aid." "if we suppose all thought of rewards or punishments, immediate or remote, to be left out of consideration, it is clear that any one who hesitates to inflict a pain because of the vivid representation of that pain which rises in his consciousness, is restrained not by any sense of obligation or by any formulated doctrine of utility, but by the painful associations established in him. and it is clear that if, after repeated experiences of the moral discomfort he has felt from witnessing the unhappiness indirectly caused by some of his acts, he is led to check himself when again tempted to those acts, the restraint is of like nature. conversely with the pleasure-giving acts, repetitions of kind deeds and experiences of the sympathetic gratifications that follow tend continually to make stronger the association between deeds and feelings of happiness." spencer continues: "eventually these experiences may be consciously generalized, and there may result a deliberate pursuit of the sympathetic gratifications. there may also come to be distinctly recognized the truths that the remoter results are respectively detrimental and beneficial--that due regard for others is conducive to ultimate personal welfare, and disregard of others to ultimate personal disaster; and then there may become current such summations of experience as 'honesty is the best policy.' but so far from regarding these intellectual recognitions of utility as preceding and causing the moral sentiment, i regard the moral sentiment as preceding such recognitions of utility and making them possible. the pleasures and pains directly resulting, in experience, from sympathetic and unsympathetic actions, had first to be slowly associated with such actions, and the resulting incentives and deterrents frequently obeyed, before there could arise the perceptions that sympathetic and unsympathetic actions are remotely beneficial or detrimental to the actor; and they had to be obeyed still longer and more generally before there could arise the perceptions that they are socially beneficial and detrimental. when, however, the remote effects, personal and social, have gained general recognition, are expressed in current maxims, and lead to injunctions having the religious sanction, the sentiments that prompt sympathetic actions and check unsympathetic ones, are immensely strengthened by their alliances. approbation and reprobation, divine and human, come to be associated in thought with the sympathetic and unsympathetic actions respectively. the commands of a creed, the legal penalties, and the code of social conduct, mutually enforce them; and every child, as it grows up, daily has impressed on it, by the words and faces and voices of those around, the authority of these highest principles." the altruistic sentiments develop, and altruistic action becomes habitual, "until at length these altruistic sentiments begin to call in question the authority of those ego-altruistic sentiments which once ruled unchallenged." and spencer sums up his objections to the interpretation of his theory of the development of the moral sentiment as follows: "what i have said will make it clear that two fundamental errors have been made in the interpretation put upon it. both utility and experience have been construed in senses much too narrow. "utility, convenient a word as it is from its comprehensiveness, has very inconvenient and misleading implications. it vividly suggests uses and means and proximate ends, but very faintly suggests the pleasures, positive or negative, which are the ultimate ends, and which, in the ethical meaning of the word, are alone considered; and, further, it implies conscious recognition of means and ends--implies the deliberate taking of some course to gain a perceived benefit. experience, too, in its ordinary acceptation, connotes definite perceptions of causes and consequences, as standing in observed relations, and is not taken to include the connections found in consciousness between states that occur together, when the relation between them, causal or other, is not perceived. it is in their widest senses, however, that i habitually use these words, as will be manifest to every one who reads the 'principles of psychology.'" in his essay on prison ethics ( ), spencer says: "the antagonistic schools of morals, like many other antagonistic schools, are both right and both wrong. the _a priori_ school has its truth; the _a posteriori_ school has its truth; and for the proper guidance of conduct there should be due recognition of both. on the one hand, it is asserted that there is an absolute standard of rectitude; and respecting certain classes of actions, it is rightly asserted. from the fundamental laws of life and the conditions of social existence are deducible certain imperative limitations to individual action--limitations which are essential to a perfect life, individual and social; or, in other words, essential to the greatest possible happiness. and these limitations, following inevitably as they do from undeniable first principles, deep as the nature of life itself, constitute what we may distinguish as absolute morality. "on the other hand, it is contended, and in a sense rightly contended, that with men as they are, and society as it is, the dictates of absolute morality are impracticable. legal control, which involves the infliction of pain, alike on those who are restrained and on those who pay the cost of restraining them, is proved by this fact to be not absolutely moral, seeing that absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such way that pain shall not be inflicted. wherefore, if it be admitted that legal control is at present indispensable, it must be admitted that these _a priori_ rules cannot be immediately carried out. and hence it follows that we must adapt our laws and actions to the existing character of mankind--that we must estimate the good or evil resulting from this or that arrangement, and so reach _a posteriori_ a code fitted for the time being. in short, we must fall back on expediency." spencer then goes on to argue that an advanced penal code is as impossible to an early stage of civilization as is an advanced form of government; a bloody penal code is both a natural product of the time and a needful restraint for the time, and is also the only one which could be carried out by the existing administration. the aim of morality is life, of absolute morality complete life; society is therefore justified in coercing the criminal who breaks through the conditions of life or constrains us to do so. coercion is legitimate to the extent of compelling restitution, and preventing a repetition of aggressions; no further. less bloody systems of punishment, wherever introduced, have borne excellent fruit. it may be deductively shown that the best of all systems must be that best calculated to reform the criminal; too severe punishment, instead of awakening a sense of guilt, prevents the same, begetting a sense of injustice towards the inflicting power, which causes resentment; so that, even if the criminal, on reëntering society, commits no further crime, he is restrained by the lowest of motives--fear. the industrial system applied in prisons must have the best results--counteracting habits of idleness, strengthening self-control, and educating the will. the principle of freedom, which runs through all spencer's works, is especially enounced again, in his essay, "the man versus the state" ( ), in which he combats "the great political superstition" of so-called "paternal government." he says: "reduced to its lowest terms, every proposal to interfere with citizens' activities further than by enforcing their mutual limitations, is a proposal to improve life by breaking through the fundamental conditions of life."[ ] in "the data of ethics" (published ), mr. spencer assumes a somewhat different standpoint from that of his earlier works bearing on morals. the course of reasoning contained in this book is as follows:-- the doctrine that correlatives imply one another has, for one of its common examples, the relation 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. still less, when part and whole are dynamically related, and least of all when the whole is organic, can the part be understood except by comprehension of the whole to which it belongs. this truth holds not only of material but also of immaterial aggregates. conduct is a whole and, in a sense, an organic whole, and ethics, of which it is a part, cannot be understood except through the understanding of the whole of conduct. a definition of conduct must exclude purposeless actions,--such, for instance, as those of an epileptic in a fit. hence the definition emerges either: acts adjusted to ends; or, 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 they are considered separately or in their totality. a large part of conduct is non-ethical, indifferent; this passes, by small degrees and in countless ways, into conduct which is either moral or immoral. the acts of all living creatures, as acts adjusted to ends, come within the definition of conduct; the conduct of the higher animals as compared with that of man, and of the lower animals as compared with the higher, differs mainly in that the adjustments of acts to ends is relatively simple and relatively incomplete. and as in other cases, so in this case, we must interpret the more developed by the less developed; human conduct as a part of the whole of the conduct of animate beings. and further: as, in order to understand the part of human conduct with which ethics is concerned, we must study it as a part of human conduct as a whole, and in order to understand human conduct, we must again study it as a part of the whole of conduct exhibited in animate beings, so, in order to comprehend this too, we must regard it as an outcome of former, less developed conduct, out of which it has arisen. our first step must be to study the evolution of conduct. morphology deals with physical structure, physiology with the processes carried on in the body. 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. we saw that conduct is distinguished from the totality of actions by the exclusion of purposeless actions; but during evolution this distinction arises by degrees. we trace up conduct to the vertebrates and through the vertebrates to man, and find that here the adjustments of acts to ends are both more numerous and better than among lower mammals; and we find the same thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of lower. these better adjustments favor, not only prolongation, but also increased amount of life. and among these adjustments of acts to ends, there are not only such as further individual life but also, evolving with these, such as favor the life of the species. race-maintaining conduct, like self-maintaining conduct, arises gradually out of that which cannot be called conduct. the multitudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the earth are engaged in a continuous struggle for existence, in which the adjustments of acts to ends, being imperfectly evolved, miss completeness because they cannot be made by one creature without other creatures being prevented from making them. this imperfectly evolved conduct introduces us, by antithesis, to conduct which is perfectly evolved,--such adjustments that each creature may make them without preventing other creatures making them also. the conditions of such conduct cannot exist in predatory savage life; nor can it exist where there remains antagonism between individuals forming a group, or between groups of individuals,--two traits of life necessarily associated, since the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression of individuals on one another also. hence the limit of evolution can be reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies; can be approached only as war decreases and dies out. the principle of beneficence is not derived by spencer from the principle of freedom, in "social statics"; and here, as in the latter book, spencer has difficulty with it. he says: "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 coöperation, 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." thus, then, says spencer, "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." by comparing the meanings of a word in different connections, and observing what they have in common, we learn its essential significance. material objects we are accustomed to designate as 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 will carry far and true; and so on. so of inanimate actions, and so, also, of living things and actions. 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 skilfully adjusted to the requirements. so too our use of the words good and bad with respect to conduct under its ethical aspects has regard to the efficiency or non-efficiency of the adjustments of acts to ends. this last truth is, through the entanglements of social relations, by which men's actions often simultaneously affect the welfares of self, of offspring, and of fellow-citizens, somewhat disguised. 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 conduct which fails to achieve it is regarded as relatively bad. 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. the ethical judgments we pass on such 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, do need moral enforcement. with regard to the 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. and most emphatic are the application of the words, in this sense, throughout the third division of conduct comprising the deeds by which men affect one another. always, then, acts are good or bad, according as they are well or ill-adapted to ends. that is, good is the name we apply to the relatively more evolved conduct; and bad is the name we apply to that which is relatively less evolved; for we have seen that "evolution, tending ever towards self-preservation, reaches its limits when individual life is the greatest, both in length and breadth; and we now see that, leaving other ends aside, we regard as good the conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad the conduct tending to self-destruction." with increasing power of maintaining individual life goes increasing power of perpetuating the species by fostering progeny; and the 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 this is the form of conduct most emphatically termed good. "moreover, just as we 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 fulfils all three classes of ends at the same time." has this evolution been a mistake? the pessimist claims so, the optimist claims not. but there is one postulate in which both pessimists and optimists agree--namely, that it is evident that life is good or bad, according as it does, or does not, have a surplus of agreeable feeling; if a future life is included in the theory of either, the assumption is still the same, that life is a blessing or a curse according as existence, now considered in both worlds, contains more of pleasure or of pain; and the implication is therefore that conduct which conduces to the preservation of self, the family, and society, is good or bad in the same measure. "thus there is no escape from the admission that conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful." so that if self-mutilation furthered life, and picking a man's pocket brightened his prospects, we should regard these acts as good. approach to such a constitution as effects complete adjustment of acts to ends of every kind is, however, an approach to perfection, and therefore means approach to that which secures greater happiness. "pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception" of moral aim. here follow criticisms of the religious school of morals, which bases its system on the will of god, and of the school of "pure intuitionists," who hold "that men have been divinely endowed with moral faculties." "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." 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. spencer also repeats and enlarges upon his formerly stated objections to utilitarianism as superficial: "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." 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. so with ethics; a preparation in the simpler sciences is presupposed. 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 animals. 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. belonging under one aspect of 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, as different aspects of evolving life. the physical view 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. it is so with conduct. the conduct of lowly organized creatures has its successive portions feebly connected. from these up to man may be observed an increase in cohesion. man, even in his lowest state, displays in his conduct far more coherent combinations of motions; and in civilized man this trait of developed conduct becomes more conspicuous still. but an even 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 fact. the sequences of conduct in the moral man are more easily to be specified, as implied by the word trustworthy applied to them; while those of the less principled man cannot be so specified; as is implied by the word untrustworthy. indefiniteness accompanies incoherence in conduct that is little evolved; and throughout the ascending stages of evolving conduct there is an increasingly definite coördination of the motions constituting it, until we reach the conscientious man, who is exact in all his transactions. with this increase of definiteness and coherence goes also an increase of heterogeneity; the moral man performs more varied duties, adjustments of acts to ends in more varied relations, than does the immoral man. evolution in conduct is, like all other evolution, towards equilibrium,--not the equilibrium reached by the individual in death, but a moving equilibrium. his evolution consists in a continual adjustment of inner to outer relations, until a state of society shall be reached in which the individual will find his nature congruous with the environment. the biological view "the truth that the ideally moral man is one in whom the moving equilibrium is perfect, or approaches nearest to perfection, becomes, when translated with physiological language, the truth that he is one in whom the functions of all kinds are duly fulfilled." either excess or defect in the performance of function results in a lowering of life, for the time being at least. hence, the performance of every function is, in a sense, a moral obligation. one test of action is thus given us. an action must be classed as right or wrong in respect of its immediate bearings, according as it does or does not tend either to the maintenance of complete life for the time being or the prolongation of life to its full extent. this is true even though the remoter bearings of the action may call for a different classification. the seeming paradoxy of this statement results from the tendency, so difficult to avoid, to judge a conclusion which presupposes an ideal humanity, by its applicability to humanity as now existing. in the ideal state, towards which evolution tends, any falling short of function implies deviation from perfectly moral conduct. "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 desistence from acts which impede it; and whenever sentience 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." so, in the case of the seizure of food, for example, "the pleasurable sensation," everywhere where it arises, 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 non-establishment of it in any particular case implies, in so far, unfitness to the conditions of existence." "sentient existence can evolve only on condition that pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts." it is true that, in mankind as at present constituted, guidance by present or proximate pleasures and pains fails throughout a wide range of cases. this arises throughout evolution by changes in the environment, from which result partial misadjustments of the feelings, necessitating readjustments. this general cause of derangement has been operating on human beings in the changes from a primitive to a civilized condition through the direct opposition and struggle of the militant and the industrial spirit, in a manner unusually decided, persistent, and involved. but there is a still further relation between pleasure and welfare to be considered. 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. non-recognition of these general truths vitiates moral speculation at large. "'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 towards death." however, it is with the indirect results that the moralist is especially concerned; since remote consequences of action are especially to be considered in ethical questions. but doubtless a better understanding of biological truths would be to the benefit of moral theory and society at large. spencer especially combats, in a note at the end of this chapter, barratt's theory, stated in "physical ethics," that movements of retraction and withdrawal and movements that secure the continuance of the impression of any acting force, are the external marks, respectively, of pain and pleasure. a great part of the vital processes, even in creatures of developed nervous systems, are carried on by unconscious reflex action, and there is, therefore, no propriety in assuming the existence of what we understand by consciousness in creatures not only devoid of nervous systems but devoid of structures in general. it is more proper to conceive such feelings as arising gradually, by the compounding of ultimate elements of consciousness. the psychological view "mind consists of feelings and the relations among feelings.[ ] by compositions of the relations, and ideas of relations, intelligence arises. by composition of 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."[ ] "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."[ ] "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 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 sentience has become increasingly ideal; and among feelings produced by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which are evolved latest, are the re-compounded 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."[ ] out of the three controls of conduct, the political, the religious, and the social, the first and the last of which are generated in the social state through the supremacy of individuals in the midst of a control that is also, in some degree, exerted by the whole community, the moral consciousness grows; the feeling of moral obligation in general arising in a manner analogous to that in which abstract ideas are generated, out of concrete instances. as in such groupings of instances the different components are mutually cancelled to form the abstract idea, so in groupings of the emotions, there takes place a mutual cancelling of diverse components; the common component is made relatively appreciable, and becomes an abstract feeling. that which the moral feelings--the feelings that prompt honesty, truthfulness, etc.--have in common, is complexity and re-representative character. 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. another element--that of coerciveness--originated from experience of those several forms of restraint that have established themselves in the course of civilization--the political, religious, and social. by punishment is generated the sense of compulsion which the consciousness of duty includes, and which the word obligation indicates. this sense, however, becomes indirectly connected with the feelings distinguished as moral; and slowly fades as these emerge from amidst the political, religious, and social motives, and become distinct and predominant. the sense of duty is, therefore, transitory, fading as a motive as pleasure in right-doing is evolved. the sociological view "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." yet in man we find an additional factor in the formula for life: for man is sociable to a degree not found anywhere else among animals. the conditions of the associated state have therefore called for an emphasizing of those restraints on conduct entailed by the presence of fellow-men. "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." "but here we are met by a fact which forbids us thus to put in the foreground the welfare 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, since as long as communities are endangered by rival communities, a sacrifice of private to public claims is necessary. when, however, antagonism between communities shall cease, there will cease to be any public claims at variance with private claims; the need for the subordination of individual lives to the general life will cease, and the latter, having from the beginning had furtherance of individual lives as its ultimate purpose, will come to have this as its proximate purpose. between the commands of duty towards members of the same community and towards those of different communities as between the sentiments answering to these relations, there is, at present, conflict. in the course of evolution, however, the various forms of subjection countenanced by a warlike régime--slavery, the subjection of women to men, and paternal absolutism, become more and more unpopular, and are done away with. for each kind and degree of social evolution, there is an appropriate compromise between the moral code of enmity and that of amity; this is, for the time being, authoritative.[ ] but such compromise belongs to incomplete conduct; the end of evolution is in the annihilation of enmity between societies as between individuals. nor is a mere abstinence from mutual injury enough. without coöperation for satisfying wants the social state loses its _raison d'être_. in all efforts for coöperation equivalence of exchange is a necessary basis; all failure to fulfil such equivalence causes antagonism and thus a diminution of social coherence; in the social, as in the animal organism, waste without repair destroys the equilibrium of the parts; fulfilment of contract is, therefore, the primary condition of the welfare of society. and even mutual punctiliousness in the fulfilment of contract is not sufficient to the moral ideal. daily experience proves that every one would suffer many evils and lose many goods, did none give him unpaid assistance. the limit of the evolution of conduct is not reached until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others. the form of nature which thus adds beneficence to justice, 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."[ ] but of beneficence, as well as of justice, sympathy is the root. the assumption that feelings can be arranged in a scale of desirability, against which mr. sidgwick especially argues in his objections to (empirical) egoistic hedonism, is not necessarily an element of such hedonism, although bentham, in naming intensity, duration, certainty, and proximity as traits entering into an estimation of the relative value of a pleasure or pain, has committed himself to it. but if a debtor who cannot pay offers to compound for his debt by making over to me any one of various objects of property, will i not endeavor to estimate their relative value, though i may not be able to do it exactly; and if i choose wrongly is therefore the ground of choice to be abandoned? mr. sidgwick's argument against empirical hedonism must tell, moreover, in a still greater degree, against his own utilitarianism, since this is applicable, not to the individual simply, but to many classes of differing individuals. to this difficulty must be added, moreover, the future indeterminateness of the means for obtaining such universal happiness. mr. sidgwick's objection contains, however, a partial truth; for guidance in the pursuit of happiness through the 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." the fact cited by mr. sidgwick as the "fundamental paradox of hedonism," that to get the pleasures of pursuit one must "forget" them, is explained by the fact that the pleasures of pursuit lie greatly in the consciousness of capability in the efficient use of means, and the sense of the admiration excited thereby in others. and so the "fundamental paradox" disappears. yet the truth of the pleasure derived from means as distinguished from ends is of significance. throughout the evolution of conduct we find a growing complexity of adjustment of acts to ends, the interposition of more and more complex means, each as a step to the next, and leading to the final attainment of even remoter ends. of these means, each set, with its accompanying satisfaction, developed with the function, comes at last to be regarded as proximate end, and constitutes an obligation; and each later and higher order of means comes to take precedence in time and authoritativeness of each earlier and lower order of means. in this manner arises the authoritativeness of moral requirements, as designating the latest and highest order of means. such means are more determinable than the end--happiness--for any society. what constitutes happiness is more difficult of determination than what constitutes the means of its attainment. we may now see our way to reconciling sundry conflicting ethical theories, which generally embody portions of the truth, and simply require to be combined in proper order in 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 conformity to those principles by which the highest life is achieved, is furtherance of that end. the doctrine that perfection or excellence of nature should be the purpose 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 fulfil 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 it is the concomitant of that highest life which every theory of moral guidance has, distinctly or vaguely, in view. thus, those ethical systems which make virtue, right, obligation, the cardinal aims, are seen to be complementary to those ethical systems which make welfare, happiness, pleasure, the cardinal aims. spencer follows up this argument with a chapter on the relativity of pleasures and pains, and then proceeds with an argument against excessive altruism as, in the end, selfish, since it is destructive to the power for work and to individual life, diminishes the vigor of offspring, and finally results in the survival of the less altruistic as the fittest; this chapter is under the heading "egoism versus altruism." it is followed by a chapter on altruism versus egoism, in which is shown that some individual self-sacrifice, at least to offspring, is found far down in the scale of being; that altruism is, therefore, "no less primordial than self-preservation,"[ ] and hence no less imperative; that this altruism, at first unconscious, becomes, in higher stages of evolution, conscious; and that if often selfish in motive, it may be without any element of conscious self-regard, although it conduces greatly to egoistic satisfaction. indeed, pure egoism defeats itself, since pleasure palls by over-indulgence, is dulled by maturity, and almost destroyed by old age. he that can find pleasure in ministering to that of others has, however, a source of pleasure which may serve in place of personal pleasure. in the associated state, a certain altruism is, and must necessarily be, an advantage to each member of the community. whatever conduces to the well-being of each is conducive to the well-being of all. here follows a criticism of utilitarianism as one form of pure altruism, since, according to the utilitarian doctrine, each individual is to count for one, not more than one, and the individual share of happiness thus becomes infinitesimal as compared with general happiness. shall a, who has, by labor, acquired some material happiness, take the attitude of a disinterested spectator with regard to their use, as mr. mill recommends? and will he, as such, decide on a division of these means to happiness with b, c, and d, who have not labored to produce them? from the conclusion that a really disinterested spectator would not decree any such division, spencer seems to draw the conclusion that mr. mill's position is untenable. he further illustrates the untenability of utilitarianism (as pure altruism) by the figure of a cluster of bodies generating heat, each of which will have, as long as it generates heat for itself, a certain amount of proper heat and a certain amount of heat derived from the others; whereas the whole cluster will become cold as soon as each ceases to generate heat for itself and depends on the heat generated by the rest. utilitarianism involves the further paradox that, to achieve the greatest sum of happiness, each individual must be more egoistic than altruistic. "for, speaking generally, sympathetic pleasures must ever continue less intense than the pleasures with which there is sympathy." and while the individual must be extremely unegoistic in that he is willing to yield up the benefit for which he has labored, he must, at the same time, be extremely egoistic, since he is so selfish as willingly to let others yield up to him the benefits they have labored for. "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 laws of biology.... to yield up normal pleasure is to yield up so much life; and there arises the question:--to what extent may this be done?... surrender, carried to a certain point, is extremely mischievous, and to a further point, fatal."[ ] after beginning, however, with this assertion that to assume that egoistic pleasure may be relinquished to any extent is to fall, from ignorance of biology, into an error of ethical speculation, spencer reaches only the conclusion that, if the individual is to continue living, he _must_ take "certain amounts" of those pleasures which go along with the fulfilment of the bodily functions, and that "the portion of happiness which it is possible for him to yield up for redistribution is a limited portion." he further argues that "a perfectly moral law must be one which becomes perfectly practicable as human nature becomes perfect"; but that the law of utilitarianism does not so become practicable, since opportunities for practising altruism, which originate in imperfection in others, will diminish and finally disappear in the ideal state. there is no addition to happiness by redistribution, and there is the additional labor and loss of time of such redistribution. the conclusion must be that "general happiness is to be achieved mainly through the adequate pursuit of their own happiness by individuals, while reciprocally, the happiness of individuals is to be achieved in part by their pursuit of the general happiness." the chapter on the conciliation of altruism and egoism is occupied with the development of sympathy, as the militant spirit grows less. the expression of emotion, as also the power of interpreting such expression, must become greater as the impelling cause to concealment found in lack of sympathy, disappears. when conditions require any class of activities to be relatively great, there will arise a relatively great pleasure accompanying that class of activities; the scope for altruistic activities will not exceed the desire for altruistic satisfaction. such altruistic satisfaction, though in a transfigured sense egoistic, will not be pursued egoistically--that is, from egoistic motives. general altruism will resist too great altruism in the individual, and as the occasion for self-sacrifice disappears, altruism will take on the ultimate form of sympathy with the pleasure of others produced by the successful activities of these. and so there will disappear the apparently permanent opposition between egoism and altruism. the last two chapters of "the data of ethics" deal with ethics as the law of the ideal man in an ideal society, and treat of the attainment of general principles in this science as in other sciences by the neglect of conflicting factors, and the recognition of fundamental factors, in the gradually accumulated knowledge of society. on account of the diversity of men and societies, a code of perfect personal conduct can never be made definite; only certain general conditions of perfection can be pointed out. as life is now carried on, the conflict of claims is continual; and ethical science, here necessarily empirical, can do no more than aid in making least objectionable compromises. absolute ethics, which supplies the law of perfect right-doing possible only in an ideal state, does not greatly aid relative ethics, yet it aids somewhat, as keeping before consciousness an ideal conciliation of claims, and suggesting search for the best form of compromise possible under the circumstances. "justice," which constitutes part iv. of "the principles of ethics," and to which "the data of ethics" belongs as part i., was published ( ) in advance of parts ii. and iii. the argument of the book runs as follows:-- ethics properly involves a consideration of the conduct of animals as well as of human beings, for the primary subject-matter of ethics is conduct considered as producing good and bad results to self or others, or both, not, as most people believe, conduct as calling forth approbation or disapprobation. and even on this latter view, ethics includes animal ethics, since we feel approbation or disapprobation with regard to many actions of animals. animal ethics includes, as its two cardinal principles, the opposed classes of altruistic and egoistic acts. for preservation of the species, benefits received must be, during immaturity, inversely proportionate to merit or capacities possessed, merit being measured by powers of self-sustentation, and after maturity, directly proportionate to worth as measured by fitness to the conditions of existence. furthermore, though the species is made up of individuals, many of these individuals may disappear and the species still be preserved, whereas its disappearance as a whole involves absolute failure in achieving the end, so that, where preservation of individuals conflicts with preservation of the species, the individuals must be sacrificed. the principle that among adults benefits must be in proportion to merits, implies in its biological aspect survival of the fittest. its violation involves double harm to the species by sacrifice of the superior to the inferior, and consequent increase of the inferior. "interpreted in ethical terms, it is that each individual ought to be subject to the effects of its own nature and resulting conduct"; and throughout sub-human life this rule holds without qualification. the same principle is displayed in the mutual relations of the parts of organisms, every part being nourished in proportion to its use or function, a balancing of the relative powers of the parts being thus effected, and the organism "fitted as a whole to its existence by having its parts continuously proportioned to the requirements." in a parallel manner, the species as a whole is fitted to its environment by the greater prosperity to self and offspring that comes to those better adapted. but sub-human justice is extremely imperfect, alike in general and in detail. in general it is imperfect, in that the sustentation of multitudinous species depends on the wholesale destruction of others; so that, in the species serving as prey, the relations between conduct and consequence are so habitually broken that in very few individuals are they long maintained. it is true the destruction of the species serving as prey is the result of their natures; "but this violent ending of the immense majority implies that the species is one in which justice, as above conceived, is displayed in but small measure." sub-human justice is also imperfect in detail, in that the relation between conduct and consequences is, in such an immense proportion of cases, broken by accidents,--such as scarcity of food, inclemencies of weather, invasions by parasites, attacks of enemies,--which fall indiscriminately on the superior and the inferior. as organization becomes higher, sub-human justice becomes more decided; as general superiority increases, there is less dependence on accident, and individual differences become more important. with the beginning of gregariousness, we find the new element of coöperation, passive or active, which is an advantage to the species. this involves so much restraint of conflicting acts as will leave a balance of advantage; else survival of the fittest will exterminate the variety in which association begins. the experience of the evils of not maintaining such limits to action results in an inherited tendency to maintain them. the general consciousness of the need for maintaining them results in punishment of their disregard. self-subordination among solitary animals is found only in parenthood; among gregarious animals there is a further subjection of the individual to his kind, and where an occasional sacrifice of life furthers the preservation of species, sub-human justice may rightly have this second limitation. in order of priority, the law of relation between conduct and consequence, the principle that each individual ought to receive the good and evil resulting from his own nature, stands first; it is the primary law holding of all creatures. the law of the restraint, in gregarious animals, of interfering acts, is second in time and authority, and is simply a specification of the form which the primary law takes under conditions of gregarious life, since, in asserting restriction of the interactions of conduct and consequence, it tacitly reasserts that these interactions must be maintained in other individuals, that is, in all individuals. the third law, of the occasional sacrifice of individuals to their kind, is later and narrower in application, and a qualification of the first law. the first law is absolute for animals in general; the second is absolute for gregarious animals; but the third "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." as human life is a development of sub-human life, so human justice is a development of sub-human justice. according to pure justice, the individual should suffer the consequences of his acts, and that such is the general opinion is implied in such common expressions as: "he has no one to blame but himself"; "he has made his own bed, and now he must lie on it"; "he has got no more than he deserved"; or, "he has fairly earned his reward." the truth that, with higher organization, danger from accident becomes less, longevity is greater, and so differences count for more, showing their effects for longer periods, and justice therefore becomes greater, applies also to human beings. the rate of mortality decreases with man, and according to his civilization. more clearly in the case of human beings than in that of other animals is it shown that gregariousness establishes itself because it profits the variety. where a variety live on wild food, they associate only in small groups; game and fruit, 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 coöperations." the advantages of coöperation can be had only by conformity to the conditions which association imposes--by such limitation of the pursuits of individuals as to leave a surplus of advantage to associated life. "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." mutual restraint being more imperative with human beings than with animals, there is with them a still more marked habit of punishment. "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." in the highest gregarious creature, the necessity which we found, of an occasional sacrifice of the individual in defence of species, assumes large proportions, the defence being not only against enemies of other kinds, but also against enemies of the same kind. this obligation is less than that of care for offspring, or mutual restraint. it exists only as necessary to protect the society against destruction, hence only for defensive, not for offensive, war. it may be objected that war peoples the earth with the stronger, but this is not necessarily so, since the conquered may merely be fewer in number. and further, it is only during the earlier stages of human progress that the development of strength, courage, and cunning are of chief importance. but for an accident, persia would have conquered greece; and tartar hordes once very nearly overwhelmed european civilization. the races best fitted for social life do not necessarily conquer, and there are injurious moral reactions on both conquering and conquered. only defensive war retains a quasi-ethical justification. it belongs, however, to a transitional state, and is not justified by absolute ethics. as the organs of inferior animals are moulded into fitness for the requirements of life, so, simultaneously, through nervous modifications, their sensations, instincts, emotions, and intellectual aptitudes are also moulded to these requirements,--in the gregarious animals to the conditions of gregarious life. many evolutionists appear to regard the variability of man as ceasing with civilized life, but the whole analogy of nature is against such a theory; we must assume that man, like other animals, is moulded to suit his requirements, and that moral changes are among those thus wrought out. aggressive actions often entail suffering on the individuals of a group performing them, as well as on the group as a whole, and on the other hand, harmonious coöperation in a group profits the average of its members; so that there is a tendency to survival of groups having such adaptation of nature. and just as a love of property, formerly gratified by possession of food and shelter, came later to be extended to the weapons for obtaining these, and, later, even to the raw materials, the pleasure in ownership becoming more and more abstract and remote from material satisfaction, so the natural impatience of animal nature at restraint of its powers becomes in man a sentiment of egoistic justice, for justice requires the free play of all forces in order that the results of character may fall upon the individual. it is more difficult to understand how the altruistic sentiment of justice comes into being. on one hand, its implication is that it can be developed only by adaptation to social life; on the other, it appears that social life is impossible without the maintenance of those equitable relations which imply a sentiment of justice. these requirements are fulfilled by a pro-altruistic sentiment of justice, which takes its place. the first deterrent from aggression, among animals, is fear of retaliation; a further restraint, with man, is fear of reprobation or social disgrace. to these are to be added the feelings arising under political and religious authority--the dread of legal punishment and the dread of divine vengeance; and these four kinds of feelings coöperate, forming a body of feeling, which checks the primitive tendency to pursue the objects of desire without regard to the interests of fellow-men, and though containing nothing of the altruistic sentiment of justice, makes social coöperation possible. creatures which become gregarious, tend to become sympathetic in degrees proportionate to their intelligence--by sympathy being meant the arousing of kindred feeling by the witness of a display of feeling in others, sympathy being fostered by common enjoyments and sufferings. 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." as, until pain has been felt, there cannot be sympathy with pain, so the altruistic sentiment of justice cannot be developed until the egoistic sentiment has arisen; moreover, the sentiment of justice is concerned, not only with concrete pains and pleasures, but also with their conditions, and hence this sentiment demands a development of the power of mental representation. there is a close connection between the sentiment of justice and the social type. predominant militancy affords no scope for the egoistic sentiment of justice, and at the same time sympathy is perpetually seared by militant activities. on the other hand, as fast as voluntary coöperation, which characterizes the industrial type of society, becomes more general than compulsory coöperation, 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. the idea of justice is different from the mere sentiment of justice; the former gradually arising from the latter, in the course of generations, by experience of the limits to which action can be carried without causing resentment from others. 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. a further reason for the slowness of development is, that the arising ideas of justice have been perpetually confused by the conflicting requirements of internal amity and external enmity. two elements, a positive and a negative, constitute the idea of justice--that of man's recognition of his claims to unimpeded activities and the results they bring, and that of the limits which the presence of other men necessitate. the primordial ideal suggested is inequality, for since the principal is that each should receive the results due to his own nature, then, since men differ in their powers, unequal benefits are implied. but mutual limitations suggest a contrary idea, experience showing that the bounds to which one may pursue his own ends are, on the average, the same for all, so that the idea of equality arises. unbalanced appreciations of these two factors in human justice lead to divergent moral and social theories. among the rudest men the appreciations are no higher than among inferior gregarious animals. where war has developed political organization the idea of inequality predominates, but the idea is one, not of natural, but of artificial apportionment. and in general, we find that the primary or brute factor in justice is but little qualified by the human factor. all movements are rhythmical, social movements included, and after the idea of justice in which inequality predominates comes a conception in which the idea of equality unduly predominates--as in bentham's ethical theory, where "one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree (with proper allowance made for kind), is accounted for exactly as much as another's"; and this is the theory which communism would reduce to practice. it is an absolute denial of the principle of inequality, and must apply alike to the worthy and unworthy, as well as to the superior and inferior in physical and intellectual capacities, since moral inequalities are as much inherited as others. here 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." the true principle shows an amalgamation of these two. "the equality concerns the mutually limited spheres of action which must be maintained if associated men are to coöperate 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." "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." during the thirty, or rather forty years' peace, and weakening of militant organization, the idea of justice became clearer; but since then the idea of regimentation has spread. it is predominant in the conception of socialism with its army of workers with appointed tasks and apportioned shares of products, and every act of parliament which takes money from the individual for public purposes shows a tendency in the same direction. in the countries where militancy is most pronounced, socialism is most highly developed. "sympathy, which, a generation ago, was taking the shape of justice, is relapsing into 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." the formula of justice may be expressed thus: "every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." this is not to be interpreted as meaning that aggression is permissible as long as retaliation is permitted; for the formula means that interference with another's life is limited, that life shall not be impeded in one case further than is necessary to the maintenance of other lives; it does not countenance a superfluous interference on the ground that an equal interference may balance it. in earlier stages, the conception of justice was this erroneous one of a balancing of injuries--an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. by oscillations which become gradually less, social equilibrium is approached; and with this approach to equilibrium comes approach to a definite theory of equilibrium. in the reigning school of politics and morals, scorn is expressed for every doctrine which implies restraint of immediate expediency, or what appears to be such;--contempt for generalizations and abstract principles, with unlimited faith in political machinery. strangely enough, we find this approval of political empiricism and disbelief in any other guidance, in the world of science also. the accepted scientific fact that causation holds of the actions of incorporated men as of other parts of nature, remains a dead letter; there is no attempt to identify the causation, and ridicule is visited upon those who endeavor to find a definite expression for the fundamental principle of harmonious social order. peoples with whom confusion is not caused by the conflicting disciplines of outer war and internal peace, early arrive at the principle of equity, and accordingly some uncivilized tribes show a stronger sense of it than is found among civilized peoples. nevertheless, the conception of justice has slowly evolved to some extent, and is expressed in such formulæ as, "do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" (too sweeping a statement of the equality of claims, since it implies no recognition of the inequality necessary in the shares of good respectively appropriate), or in the kantian rule, which is an allotropic form of the christian rule. jurists, too, have recognized a natural law of equity underlying human law. to the reproach that belief in such a law is an _a priori_ belief, it may be answered that _a priori_ beliefs are explained by the theory of evolution, as arising with determination of the nervous system and certain resulting necessities of thought, and that they differ from _a posteriori_ beliefs merely in the circumstance "that they are the products of the experiences of innumerable successive individuals, instead of the experiences of a single individual." if we ask for the ground of the greatest happiness principle, we come to an _a priori_ belief also; for whence is the postulate? if it is an induction, where and by whom has the induction been drawn; and if it is a truth of experience derived from careful observation, 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 inductions, but it is impossible that any should be assigned." the like is true of bentham's rule: "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," and also of the objection to this rule, that happiness cannot be divided, or greatest happiness obtained, by equal division of the means to happiness; they all lead, in the last analysis, to an _a priori_ belief. moreover, the rule of natural equity, the freedom of each limited only by the like freedom of all, is not an exclusively _a priori_ belief, but although the immediate dictum of the human consciousness after subjection to the discipline of prolonged social life, it is deducible from the conditions to be fulfilled, firstly for the maintenance of life at large, and secondly for the maintenance of social life. rights, properly so-called, are corollaries from the law of equal freedom, and "so far is it from its being true, as some claim, that the warrant for what are properly called rights is derived from law, it is, conversely, true that law derives its warrant from them." in the application of this theory to practical questions, mr. spencer's "justice" differs from "social statics," which it resembles in form and method, in general in the greatly increased conservatism of the views expressed. this is shown in all parts of the book, though perhaps most clearly in those parts relating to the rights of women, to the land question, and to the limits of state-duties. "social statics" advocated land-nationalization; but "justice," though still asserting the original right of the aggregate of men forming the community to the use of the earth, as that from which all material objects capable of being owned are derived and so that on which the right to property is originally dependent, denies the expediency and the justice of a present redistribution of the land according to this principle; and this because of the confusion of claims at the present time, the impossibility of ascertaining whose ancestors were the robbers and whose the robbed in the gradually arising monopoly, the wrong of making descendants responsible for the sins of their ancestors, and leaving those now dependent on the land without compensation for their loss, and the fact that any claim to the land is merely a claim to it in its original condition, not in its present state of drainage and cultivation effected by the labor of generations. moreover, "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." the whole of the practical part of "justice" is especially directed against socialism; in general, the course of history shows a less and less interference with personal freedom, and growing benefit from this cause. the practicality of woman suffrage and of universal man suffrage at the present time is denied. if earlier legislation was too much for the benefit of wealthy and ruling classes, recent extensions of the suffrage have resulted in still more injurious class-legislation of another sort. in this book, mr. spencer seems to adhere to his theory of a "final perfect adaptation to the conditions of social life." not only is the distinction between relative and absolute ethics still drawn, but there are numerous references to an "ultimate state," though certain of these references might suggest the view that by such a state was meant only the attainment of so great a degree of civilization as would involve the cessation of wars.[ ] other passages, however, seem to contradict this view. one may be especially cited; it is as follows: "this law [of the gradual reëstablishment of deranged harmony, through adaptation and heredity], 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 after some consideration of adaptation up to the present time, the paragraph concludes: "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."[ ] but in the abridged and revised edition of "social statics" ( ), the following passage occurs as part of a note at the end of the chapter on "the evanescence (? diminution) of evil." "the rate of progress towards any adapted form must diminish with the approach to complete adaptation, since the force producing it must diminish; so that other causes apart, perfect adaptation can be reached only in infinite time."[ ] vol. i. of "the principles of ethics," including parts i., ii., and iii., appeared in august, . in this volume, "the data of ethics," reprinted as part i., remains unchanged, except for one or two unimportant sentences. to this part i. is, however, appended a chapter which was, according to mr. spencer, written for the first publication of "the data of ethics," but was either put aside for some reason, or else overlooked, probably the latter, says the author, since it contains material which should have been embodied. the chapter is headed "the conciliation," and seems to correspond to the two chapters on "trial and compromise" and "conciliation" which follow the chapters on "egoism _versus_ altruism," and "altruism _versus_ egoism"; for it begins with a consideration of the conflict of claims shown by "the last two chapters," the apparent impossibility of the establishment of an equilibrium, and the consequent apparent necessity of self-sacrifice. but this conflict between egoism and altruism is merely transitional and is in process of gradual disappearance, in the same manner in which the present degree of conciliation of the two has been reached,--namely, by the growth of such a constitution in each creature as entails pleasure in altruistic action. even with the lower animals, the acts which are necessary to care for ova or young are the fulfilment of an instinct which is gratified by the act; and in the human race, conciliation between egoism and altruism, which goes hand in hand with evolution, has reached a high degree. in the evolution of the human race itself, from savagery to its present condition, there has been a marked increase of this conciliation; this is true not only in the family, but to a small extent also with regard to the larger groups of men constituting societies. there is decrease of cruelty, increase of justice, both in the form of state institutions and in their methods of administration, more active benevolence, and a public sentiment that leads large numbers of people to find egoistic gratification in the pursuit of the general good even to the neglect of private interests. self-sacrifice thus ceases to be sacrifice in the ordinary sense of the word, since it comes to bring with it more pleasure than pain. the future must hold in store changes analogous to those of the past, but these must go on much more rapidly under the present comparatively peaceful organization of society than they have during the militant life of the past. this moral development is retarded, however, not only by the degree of militancy yet existing, but also by the necessity for a certain degree of bluntness of feeling, too great sensitiveness to the suffering of others entailing, while the pressure of population is as great as at present, a misery that would make life intolerable. it is likely that, with social progress, human fertility will decrease as cerebral activity increases, until a comparative balance of fertility and mortality is reached as "human evolution approaches its limit of complete adaptation to the social state"; and sympathy will increase in proportion, no longer entailing on its possessor more of pain than of pleasure, but the contrary. "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." the general corollary from the above-described process of evolution 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 does this, 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, becomes 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." thus altruism will overgrow egoism, becoming itself a source of egoistic pleasure, and eventually, with the diminution of the pressure of population, there will come a state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges in the other. among the social animals, with the ant and the bee, for instance, who cannot be supposed to possess a sense of duty, we see that this identification of egoism and altruism, as necessary to social life, has taken place to a considerable extent; and since pleasure of every kind is the concomitant of nervous structure, we can understand the pleasure in altruistic as well as in egoistic activities, as soon as there exists the nervous structure answering to these activities. as certainly as there yet exist in civilized men instincts of the chase inherited from savage ancestors, there are growing up and will continue to grow up in men, these other structures which will prompt to altruistic activities. part ii. of "the principles of ethics" is concerned with "the inductions of ethics." it opens with a chapter on the confusion of ethical thought due to the fact that, conforming to the general law of evolution, "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 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." "originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution. religion itself, in its earliest form, is undistinguished from ancestor-worship," which passes, in the second stage, into worship of dead rulers, and is a method of propitiation, prompted by self-interest. among some peoples, the idea of sin is limited to offences against the gods; and in those other cases where there are ethical commands, the propriety of not offending god is the primary reason given for obeying them. this last phase of thought is illustrated by the religion of the hebrews, among whom good and bad conduct was but little associated with the intrinsic natures of right and wrong. the popular belief is still that right and wrong become such by divine fiat. the gods of primitive, warlike peoples were gods of war, and the belief in the moral virtue and honor of war still holds large place in the thought of the world. the ethics of enmity, thus taught at the same time with the ethics of amity necessary to the internal life of society, gave rise to utterly inconsistent and contradictory sentiments and ideas, which, in considerable measure, still exist side by side, in our churches and outside them. but, together with these ethical conceptions, there have slowly evolved other, utilitarian conceptions, derived from a recognition of the natural consequences of acts. authority has been introduced into these conceptions as the source of the duty of action in accordance with them; yet there has generally been also some perception of their fitness. such utilitarian conceptions are to be found in the later hebrew writings, among the egyptians, greeks, etc. "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." a still further simultaneous origin of moral dictates is found in the sentiments which have arisen with such habits of conformity to rules of conduct as have been furthered by survival of the fittest. we thus have a conflict of ethical ideas arising from the conflict of these various sanctions; and also from the further conflict that ensues where a later religion has been grafted on a more primitive one, as is the case everywhere in christendom. among modern writers who assert the existence of a moral sense, there is a division between those who regard the dicta of conscience as supreme, and those who hold them to be subordinate to divine commands. the two are agreed in so far as they regard conscience as having a supernatural origin; and, in that they both recognize the moral sentiment as innate and suppose human nature to be everywhere the same, they are also, by implication, alike in supposing that the moral sentiment is identical in all men. but as a matter of fact, the moral sentiment is connected with entirely different rules among different peoples, prescribing monogamy among one people, polygamy among another; demanding faithfulness and chastity on the part of women among one people, encouraging adultery among another, etc. common elements in all codes of rules for conduct are the consciousness of authority, whether that of a god, of a ruler or government, or of conscience, the more or less definite sense of power or coercion on the part of this authority, and the representation of public opinion. these elements, combined in different proportions, result in an idea and a feeling of obligation, forming a body of thought and feeling which may be termed pro-ethical, and which, with the mass of mankind, stands in place of the ethical. "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 fulfilment of which happiness is achieved or misery avoided." it may or may not be in harmony with the pro-ethical sentiment; but in any case 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." with the established supremacy of this ethical sentiment, the feeling of obligation retires into the background, right actions being 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, non-conformity 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." where the really ethical sentiment conflicts with the factitious idea and sentiment of obedience to legal authority, the latter may rule at the expense of the former, as, for instance, in the case of a pedler condemned for selling without a license. "his act of selling 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." the remainder of part ii. of the "principles of ethics" is occupied with data cited to show that the amount of internal aggression, of revenge and robbery, is greater among peoples much occupied with external aggression, and that these decrease, while justice, generosity (which mr. spencer defines as having a double root, in the philoprogenitive instinct and the relatively modern feeling of sympathy), humanity (including kindness, pity, mercy), filial obedience, and industry, increase as more peaceful habits are reached. a greater veracity is also indirectly the result of this evolution, since a coercive internal structure of society is connected with external enmity, and such coercive structure is unfavorable to veracity. chastity also increases with the social evolution, though it does not necessarily characterize societies of the non-militant type. its increase is connected with the growth of the higher moral and æsthetic feelings; romantic love plays a predominant part in our art. intemperance, as causing, indirectly, social evil by a lowering of social efficiency, must, in like manner, decrease with social advancement. in summing up his inductions, spencer says: "though, as shown in my first work, 'social statics,' i once espoused the doctrine of the intuitive moralists,... 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... unite in proving that the sentiments and ideas current in each society become adjusted to the kinds of activity predominating in it.... 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.... men so conditioned will acquire, to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. there needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally, and a rigorous insistance on non-aggression internally, to insure the moulding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues." complete exemption from war has already been attained by some few isolated peoples. "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?" part iii. of the "principles of ethics" is occupied with practical considerations concerning "the ethics of individual life," under the headings "activity," "rest," "nutrition," "stimulation," "culture," "amusements," "marriage," "parenthood." of the general ethical relation of the individual to society, spencer says:--"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." ethics has been commonly regarded as merely a system 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, though these have their ethical aspect. the pleasurable has been too often regarded as outside the legitimate sphere of ethical approval, where not directly the rightful subject of ethical disapproval. but pleasure is an accompaniment of vitality, and furthers the vital activities; and if the general happiness is to be the aim of action, then the happiness of each unit is a fit aim; and there is unquestionably "a division of ethics which yields sanction to all the normal actions of individual life, while it forbids the abnormal ones." there is an altruistic as well as an egoistic justification of the care for self, since the health of descendants and the ability to provide for offspring is directly concerned; and since such care is needful to exclude the risk of becoming a burden to others. and there is a further positive justification of egoism which results from the obligation to expend some effort for others, and to become, as far as possible, a source of social pleasure to others. it will be seen, from the above analysis, that the chapter appended to part i. still speaks of an ultimate state of complete adjustment to social life[ ]; this chapter was, however, published from the original ms. without alteration. some passages in part ii. seem to involve the same idea of a possible complete attainment of the ethical end,[ ] but part iii. closes with reference to "an approximately complete adjustment of the nature to the life which has to be led." footnotes: [ ] spencer elsewhere says "due exercise," _vide_ p. . [ ] essay on "morals and moral sentiment." [ ] p. . [ ] _vide_ "principles of psychology." [ ] p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] pp. , . [ ] pp. , . [ ] p. . [ ] pp. , . [ ] p. . [ ] see pp. , . [ ] pp. , . [ ] as the "revision" of the theoretical part of this book chiefly consists, like its abridgment, in the elimination of the references to divine will and other earlier views held before acquaintance with darwin's theory of life, there is nothing in the book, in distinction from mr. spencer's other later works, that needs especially to be considered here. [ ] see, for instance, _supra_, p. . [ ] see _supra_, p. . john fiske as herbert spencer's closest follower, john fiske deserves to stand next him in order of analysis. fiske accepts, though evidently with reluctance, what he terms "the terrible theory" of evolution, which establishes the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts. in his book on "the destiny of man" ( ), he sets forth his theory of the evolution of society as foreshowing man's final destiny. with regard to the beginnings of psychical development in the course of evolution, he thus expresses himself: "at length there came a wonderful moment;--silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of man. through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until bye and bye the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousandfold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.... no fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical divergence between man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. it shows that when humanity began to be evolved, an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. henceforth it appeared that the process of zoölogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place. henceforth along this supreme line there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected.... henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be, not the genesis of species, but the progress of civilization.... in the deadly struggle for existence, which has raged throughout countless æons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of god's handiwork, the human soul." and further, of the genesis of this human soul: "with the growth of the higher centres, the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direction is not given to them until after birth." by the increase of cerebral surface, infancy, which is the period of plasticity, is prolonged, man becomes teachable, and though inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of character, yet the career of the individual is no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, but individual experience comes to count as an enormous factor in modifying the career of mankind from generation to generation. the psychical development of humanity since its earlier stages has been largely due to the reaction of individuals upon one another in those various relations which we characterize as social. foreshadowings of social relations occur in the animal world. rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders and in all but the lowest members of our own order. but in respect of definiteness and permanence, the relations between animals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society. the primordial unit of human society is the family, the establishment of which was made necessary and took place through the lengthening of infancy. when childhood had come to extend over a period of ten or a dozen years, a period which would have been doubled where several children were born in succession to the same parents, the relationships between father and mother, brothers and sisters, must have become firmly knit; thus the family came into existence, and the way was opened for the growth of sympathies and ethical feelings. the rudimentary form of the ethical feelings was that of the transient affection of a female bird or mammal for its young. first given a definite direction through the genesis of the primitive human family, the development of altruism has yet scarcely kept pace with the general development of intelligence; the advance of civilized man in justice and kindness has been less marked than his advance in quick intelligence. but the creative energy which has been thus at work through the bygone eternity is not going to become quiescent to-morrow; the psychical development of man is destined to go on in the future as it has in the past. and from the "origin of man," when thoroughly comprehended, we may catch some glimpses of his destiny. the earlier condition of things was a state of universal warfare, on account of the limitation of the food-supply. this warfare was checked by the beginnings of industrial civilization, which made it possible for a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways favored social compactness. a new basis of political combination was now furnished by territorial continuity and by community of occupation. the supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and, moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labor, it ceased to be true that one man's interest was opposed to another's. men did not, it is true, at once recognize this fact, but have done so only gradually. when the clan had grown into the state, and the state into the empire, in which many states were brought together in pacific relations, the recognized sphere of moral obligation became enlarged, until at length it comprehended all mankind. the coalescence of groups of men into larger and larger political aggregates has been the chief work of civilization; and the chief obstacle to such coalescence has been warfare. great political bodies have arisen in three ways. the first, conquest without incorporation, proved itself suicidal. the second way was conquest with incorporation, but without representation; and this lacking, the government retrograded and gradually became a despotism. the third method, federation, has been the policy of the english government. the advantage of the habit of self-government has been shown in england's wide conquest and colonization. the federative method of political union, pacific in its very conception, is assuming an unquestionable sway and destined to become universal; the progress of the race will be, as it has been, with the gradual elimination of warfare. in a race of inferior animals, any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection. but in man there is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degree of completeness which are compatible with maintenance of life; in all grades of civilization above the lowest, there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot, by itself, rectify any particular unfitness. hence, the action of natural selection upon man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions. therefore the wicked flourish. vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, besides the bad ones, which enable it, in spite of them, to subsist and achieve progress. the fundamental difference between civilized man and the savage lies in the representative power, the imagination, by which men comprehend pleasure and pain in others. use and disuse, in place of natural selection, have come to be paramount with man; and though the ethical emotions are still too feeble, they will be more and more strengthened by use, while the manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more weakened by disuse. man is slowly passing from a primitive social state, in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state, in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. the "original sin" of theology is the brute inheritance, which is being gradually eliminated; and the message of christianity: "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" will be realized in the state of universal peace towards which mankind is tending. strife and sorrow shall disappear. peace and love shall reign supreme. the goal of evolution is the perfecting of man, whereby we see, more than ever, that he is the chief object of divine care, the fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe. we know soul only in connection with body. yet nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of cabanis that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; the molecular movements of the brain and the phenomena of thought and feeling are merely concomitants related in some unknown way. it is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. he who regards man as the consummate fruition of creative energy and the chief object of divine care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the life upon the earth. difficulties to this theory he will meet; yet the alternative view contains difficulties at least as great; nor is there any problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. a broad common sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical analysis has confessed itself baffled. the doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man; the darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology as it destroys. in the titanic events of the development of worlds from the nebular mist and their after-destruction, we may find no signs of purpose, or even of a dramatic tendency; but on the earth we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency; though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. are we to regard the creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks just for the pleasure of knocking them down again? on such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. "i can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark [the soul] may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages." fiske gives some further definition of social evolution in man, in his "cosmic philosophy" ( ). he there denies the incompatibility of free-will with causation, saying that "it is the doctrine of lawlessness, and not the causationist doctrine, which is incompatible with liberty and destructive of responsibility."[ ] he further postulates heterogeneity of the environment as "the chief proximate determining cause of social progress," and defines such evolution as "a continuous establishment of psychical relations within the community, in conformity to physical and psychical relations arising in the environment, during which both the community and the environment pass from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the constituent units of the community become ever more distinctly individual."[ ] "the progress of a community, as of an organism, is a process of _adaptation_--the continuous establishment of inner relations in conformity to outer relations. if we contemplate material civilization under its widest aspect, we discover its legitimate aim to be the attainment and maintenance of an equilibrium between the wants of men and the outward means of satisfying them. and while approaching this goal, society is ever acquiring in its economic structure both greater heterogeneity and greater specialization. it is not only that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the judge, and the physician, have, since ancient times, grown immeasurably multiform, both in their processes and in their appliances; but it is also that this specialization has resulted in the greatly increased ability of society to adapt itself to the emergencies by which it is now beset."[ ] religion, too, is adjustment; form after form has been outgrown and perished, yet the life of christianity, incorporated in ever higher forms, is continually renewed. the omission of the moral feeling, as a factor, from comte's interpretation of the progress of society, is a fatal defect, since moral and social progress depend more on feelings than on ideas. as wallace shows, tribes which combined for mutual help and protection, restrained appetite by foresight, and felt sympathy, would have an advantage in the struggle for existence. "as surely as the astronomer can predict the future state of the heavens, the sociologist can foresee that the process of adaptation must go on until, in a remote future, it comes to an end in proximate equilibrium. the increasing interdependence of human interests must eventually go far to realize the dream of the philosophic poet, of a parliament of man, a federation of the world. "'when the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,' and when the desires of each individual shall be in proximate equilibrium with the means of satisfying them and with the simultaneous desires of all surrounding individuals."[ ] footnotes: [ ] vol. ii. p. . [ ] ibid. p. , . [ ] vol. ii. p. . [ ] ibid. pp. , . w. h. rolph "biological problems" ("biologische probleme," ) for what purpose are we in the world? asks the philosopher, and lays, with this question, the foundation for later errors. in the effort to rescue from destruction the theory of a creative intelligence, teleology has adapted itself to many forms of scientific theory, not excepting that of evolution. it reads into evolution progress towards what is, in one way or another, assumed to be an end. but we really know, in the universe, nothing but continuity, eternal change according to natural law, and so only _causæ efficientes_, never _causæ finales_; and organic development as well as processes in inorganic nature are to be explained in this manner. the assumption that the result of a process is an end towards which the process was directed is unwarranted. the question of science is not: wherefore is any creature in the world? but: what is he? what is his actual aim, that is, his endeavor? in the answer to this question, all philosophical schools have something in common. happiness, in one form or another, is acknowledged to be the "end" of life in this sense. a follower of the utilitarian school may define happiness as the "sublime feeling that one has taken part in the continuous improvement of humanity, and the increase of human happiness," but his words are less a definition of the concept than a designation of the way in which happiness is to be arrived at. the "sublime feeling" can be represented only as a feeling of happiness, of joy. the religious theory, too, which represents the joys of religion on earth and in heaven, as compensating for the evils of this life, makes happiness the end of life, though in a different manner. spencer is right in declaring that happiness, however it may be defined, always means, in the end, a greater amount of pleasure than of pain. at this point, however, the harmony of the schools ceases. the question as to the method by which this surplus of pleasure is to be obtained is answered in different ways. all say, indeed, by seeking good and avoiding evil. but opinion is divided as to what is good and what is evil. rolph here introduces a long criticism of the different schools. against utilitarianism he urges that, in so far as it makes the happiness of the greatest number its principle, it asserts the right of the majority over a minority, and so advocates, by implication, an absolute subjection to authority. our whole moral education has for its aim to give the young as high a conception as possible of the happiness which springs from virtue and, on the other hand, to decry the pleasure which may result from forbidden acts. we seek, in this manner, to diminish the inward struggle and bring about the right result. he who has grown up under good influences escapes many temptations to which a man of less moral education falls a prey. according to wallock, who makes the degree of inner struggle the measure of virtue, the man of better education in this case, the more moral man, must have less merit than the less moral man. wallock thus founders on the rock which kant so skilfully avoids; according to the former, the man whose lusts have been mastered by education could never equal the man of evil instincts, and the chastity of a magdalen must be regarded as more moral than that of a pure woman. spencer's theory, that the conduct of the higher animals is better adjusted to ends than that of lower species, is erroneous; the lower animals are exactly as well organized for the ends of their existence as are the higher animals for theirs; the tapeworm is relatively just as perfect as the human being, in comparison with whom he possesses many superior qualities. the common judgment that the human being is superior does not accord with the real adjustment of things, but with our human conception of the ideal end of organization, our anthropocentric idea of the aim of life. we foolishly believe that the tapeworm and every other animal has the same end as the human being, and rank the animals according to this principle, instead of tracing the different genealogical branches to a like height and then comparing them. not the fitness for ends, but the kind and multiplicity of the ends for which there is fitness, determine our judgment; and the ends by which we judge are those of our own life. we judge subjectively and absolutely instead of objectively and relatively. we are ever unconsciously influenced by the conception that nature, in creating the tapeworm, merely made a false step and a step backwards in her way towards the creation of man. that all animals are adapted, some in a greater, some in a less degree, to the ends of their existence, is proved by the simple fact of their existence, that is, of their survival in the struggle for existence; but which are in a higher, and which are in a less degree so adapted, is, in the individual instance, extremely difficult to determine. in any attempt at such an estimate, we must meet with peculiar difficulties, resulting from the fact that we judge of the adaptation to ends with less certainty the further from us any animal is in its organization. a comparison such as spencer institutes is possible only with respect to like functions of similar organs in closely related forms. the assertion that increase of ability for self-preservation leads to better care for the young, and makes of such care a duty, is likewise erroneous. for, up to the highly organized class of the crustacea, we have no example of care for the young. in the struggle for existence, the species which survive must be such as not only are in themselves best fitted for survival, but as also bring forth best fitted progeny. nor has spencer made clear on what ground natural process is to be regarded as identical with duty. in truth he has succeeded in showing only that care for the young is wide-spread in the animal kingdom, from which fact naturally follows that it is a quality which tends to the preservation of species. it cannot be conceded that such a perfection as spencer pictures, where each shall fulfil all the functions of his own life in the most perfect and complete manner without interfering with a like freedom in others, is possible. the assertion involves the extension to all living beings of that ideal principle of equal claims which spencer repudiates with regard to man,--showing that not all men are capable of a like degree of happiness and that individuals desire, moreover, pleasure differing in quality. furthermore, a world of beings which, like the animals and many plants, can support life only by means of organic material, must, in order to exist, destroy organic life, either animal or vegetable. the theory does not even hold with regard to individuals of the same species; spencer himself acknowledges the truth of the principles of malthus and of darwin, according to which, even with the lowest rate of increase, a struggle of competition must soon arise between individuals of the same species. nor does spencer's proof of the fundamental character of altruism hold, on investigation. he demonstrates that through the animal species up to man, there is less and less self-sacrifice of the mother animal in giving birth to offspring. but this physical sacrifice is not altruism; altruism lies in conscious care for the young after birth, and this is not lessened, but increased, the higher we ascend. that morality is but greater adjustment of acts to ends cannot be admitted. if, in ordinary speech, the word good refers to greatest adjustment to ends, whatever the ends may be, that is no proof that it must have the same significance in ethics. a good shot may be a good one in that it hits the mark; but what if it kill a man? the acts of criminals may be as well adjusted to their ends and as easy to predict as those of a good man. spencer's theory would lead, consistently carried out, to the principle that the means justify the end, an assertion that is even more dangerous than its opposite. the fact is, that in ethics it is the nature of the end which is of importance. spencer endeavors to show that only normal exercise of function is favorable to life, and so moral;--that excess and deprivation are both injurious. it is not true, however, that excess is always injurious; within certain bounds it is made up for by reserves in the animal organism. or, if spencer should answer to this objection, that his "normal" is not to be represented by a sharp line, difficult to keep to, but by a broad road within which excess is safe, such a representation would both burden his theory with two dividing-lines, and moreover would not save it. for he has not deemed it necessary to treat the concept "normal" to an exact definition, and we find him using it in his later deductions in an entirely new sense--not as equilibrium between capacity of function and its exercise, but in the ideal significance of a harmony between the claims of the individual on the one side, and those of the environment on the other. this normal is nowhere actually to be found and cannot, from the nature of things, be arrived at. by addition of this significance, the word normal becomes indefinite in meaning, and is used, now in one sense, now in the other. normal exercise of function has, however, nothing to do with the claims of the environment, which generally demands, indeed, a deviation from the normal. nor is spencer's analysis of the beginning of the process of food-seizure, adduced in support of the theory that happiness and morality are commensurable, confirmed by facts. according to this theory, the process of food-taking begins with the contact of animal and food, in which act the commencement of diffusion of food in the body of the animal causes a pleasure which leads to the seizure of its prey and the further act of devouring it. the theory might hold of the lowest organisms, but could not be true of any animal furnished with an impenetrable shell or skin. nor would the seizure follow with sufficient promptness if it were left to the action of the pleasure caused by diffusion. moreover, we should expect to find, according to this theory, a much more general and finer development of the organ of taste among the animals,--to find it as a special organ on the lowest planes of animal life; it is, on the contrary, the latest of the special senses to develop. it is the reaction on the sense of touch, the lowest and most general of the special senses, which causes the seizure of nourishment. we must, therefore, deny that pleasure is the motive to the seizure of food, and so, too, reject the conclusion that it is the motive to every other act. besides arguing that normal function brings pleasure, spencer has attempted to prove that all pleasure has its spring in normal function, and is therefore moral. could he succeed in so doing, hedonism would be proved. for since all schools agree in regarding happiness as the end of life, and since all these, in common, acknowledge happiness to be an excess of pleasure over pain, enjoyment might be regarded as the absolute guide. but if, as spencer acknowledges, pleasure and morality are only in a perfectly adapted society commensurate, then in only such a society can pleasure be the criterion; and since we do not live in a perfectly adapted society, the theory is not applicable to us, and if practicably applied would be fatal to society. against spencer's theory of the final spontaneity of morality, many objections may be urged, among others especially the one that such a morality ceases to be morality at all, virtue being possible, as kant has demonstrated, only where a certain conquest of desire is achieved. such a morality is, moreover, unattainable, an extravagant fancy. the problem of food-taking rolph thinks spencer's theory awakes the conjecture that it was not first arrived at through investigation, but rests upon a preconceived opinion, as do to a greater or less extent all theories on this subject. it seems as if the author had first attached himself to that theory which best accorded with his scientific bias, and then tried whether this theory might be proved or supported by facts of biology and psychology. one might surmise, from the very skilful, but often too artificial argument, that the author pursued the following train of thought. pleasure, and indeed the greatest possible pleasure, is the end of endeavor in the organic world, that is, the psychical cause of endeavor. may it not also be the physical cause? rolph answers this question with a denial, and endeavors to show that the taking of food has its cause in the insatiability of all organic substance. the theory of spontaneous generation contains nothing impossible or improbable; is, on the contrary, a necessary logical assumption not to be disproved by the mere result of experiment under conditions of the laboratory. it is easy to imagine that organic elements, which are to be found in great quantities in inorganic nature, may come together by chance, or rather in the natural order of things, to the formation of protoplasm. the movement of these masses of protoplasm seems, at first glance, to set the law of gravitation at defiance, but we may answer that an ascending balloon might seem, to an uninstructed observer, to do the same, although its movement is merely the natural result of that force; it is not necessary, therefore, to assume a free inner motive, the soul, as the cause of the one motion or the other. the first assimilation of food has its beginning in the process of endosmose and exosmose, in which the protoplasm, as in general the denser fluid, increases in volume, taking up more than it gives out; the process occurring, in detail, according to the special relations of attraction in the parts. the organism always takes up the greatest amount possible under the circumstances, exactly as, in the inorganic world, water takes up the greatest amount possible of salt or any other soluble substance; the growth of a crystal, and the oxidation of iron are illustrations of the same principle. of the limit of this capacity to take up new matter into the organism we know nothing; all recent experiments go to show that the organism is capable, under propitious circumstances, of an enormous receptivity, such as, under natural conditions, it never reaches. the lower animals feed continually, and their whole lives are passed in this employment. in plants the tendency is seen still more clearly. experiments with electric, violet, and ultra-violet light show an enormous growth in plants exposed to its action. but this can be only an indirect growth, namely, the exorbitant acceleration of organic change and assimilation. this fact is proved by experiments turning on increase of warmth in soil; from which is seen to result an unusual development of that part of the plant to which growth is especially directed at the time. when the warmth of an incubator is increased, the animal organ especially engaged in development at the time is affected in like manner. so that we may assume that the organism is capable of responding to every demand that nature makes upon it under normal conditions; and since the greatest possible assimilation under the existing conditions is thus removed from the control of the creature, the latter appears practically insatiable. this insatiability must appear to the observer an inner impulse of the organism, an effort towards increase of nourishment. it may be called mechanical hunger in distinction from psychical hunger, of which it is the basis. it is not necessary to take into consideration, in the question as to the degree of assimilation possible, the amount of excretion of substance by the organism; we must, on the contrary, assert that this is dependent upon the amount of assimilation. the measure of growth depends, therefore, on the degree of assimilation of new material. this degree, however, like the degree to which the matter may be dissolved in a liquid in the case of inorganic matter, is especially affected by light and warmth. the creature which comes into existence in the sun will experience a decrease of organic change when placed in the shade; and the creature which comes into existence in the shade will experience an increase of such change under the influence of the sun, a decrease again with a return to the shade. this decrease means hunger,--harm. experiments with zoöspores throw an interesting light upon these relations. they show that the zoöspores, although suited to very different degrees of light, all shun darkness. although when in the light they soon come to rest, divide, and copulate, they remain, in the darkness, in a state of continual unrest and motion. they grow so thin "that they almost excite pity" (strassburger), and finally perish of hunger. only such zoöspores as are distinguished by sex and copulate come to rest, or those of such sorts as prey upon others. it is easy to perceive that the unrest of the zoöspores in the darkness springs from lack of nourishment, from hunger; they seek feverishly for the light, without which assimilation follows with insufficient energy to satisfy need and render life possible. in darkness, copulation alone can do this; copulation takes, then, the place of normal nourishment. or let us consider the case of an organism which has originated in the shade. heat, as we know, increases chemical change, in inorganic as well as organic matter; it hastens the disintegration of certain compounds, and alone renders it possible in many cases. in general, we may assert that increase of temperature within certain limits increases assimilation; that is, capacity to assimilate. therefore, if an animal is placed in the sun, its capacity, that is, its need, to assimilate is increased, although assimilation is much more energetic than before. need to assimilate or hunger is, therefore, dependent upon the supply of food, although, doubtless, also on other conditions, especially those of light and temperature. if this is true, the hunger of a simple organism that assimilates energetically must be more intense than that of one which assimilates slowly, in spite of the consumption of an enormous quantity of food in the case of the former. botanists know (sachs, "lehrbuch der botanik," p. ) "that growth may be so hastened by too high a temperature that assimilation (especially under scanty light) does not suffice to provide the necessary material for it. the transpiration of the leaves may be so increased that the roots cannot repair the loss. and on the other hand, a too low temperature of the soil may so diminish the action of the roots that even a small loss by transpiration cannot be repaired." at what stage of organization psychical hunger is added to mechanical hunger, or whether it may be identified with it, we cannot say. in any case, the former appears exceedingly early, for excitations of hunger may be observed in creatures very low in the scale of being. certainly hunger is never absent where there is movement. hunger, a sense of pain, is, therefore, the first impulse to action.[ ] with a like effort in the attempt to obtain food, that organism will be best nourished which commands the best means of obtaining and preparing its food,--the best apparatus for the seizure and grinding of food, and the best salivary gland. and finally, greater surface of skin, of lungs, of gills, or of intestines, causes greater capacity for assimilation, and since this surface is increased by cell-division or propagation, the capacity of the organism for assimilation grows with its capacity of propagation.[ ] protoplasm is never entirely homogeneous, and we must suppose some difference even in the beginning; such difference is, indeed, fundamental through the very composition of protoplasm from the four fundamental elements, and this or that other element. these different elements must be held together by forces of attraction, and the direction of these forces must have some common centre represented by some differentiation of the protoplasm, whether as clearer spot, or as nucleus. this spontaneously generated organism, neither animal nor plant, is nourished, as we have seen, by diffusion, by the transformation of inorganic into organic substance. the lowest organisms possess no definite organs for taking food; they manifest, however, phenomena of movement which are exactly like those of the animal organism, for they appear unconditioned and hence voluntary. locomotion is, in the lowest animal forms, the only means of obtaining nourishment. the amoeba surrounds and takes in whatever is by chance met with. animals a little higher in the scale swim about and seek their food; or, remaining in one place, they cause, by means of cilia, a movement of the water towards a certain part of the body, a sort of mouth where the protoplasm is open and can take up the prey in the same manner as does the amoeba. ascending the scale of life, we find more and more complicated apparatus for the seizure of food, for its preparation and digestion, and the beginning of a nervous system, first as the differentiation of certain muscle-cells, then in connection with a special sense, that of hearing. if we assume any pleasure to be connected with the earliest acts of assimilation, it must be that of the satisfaction of a want, the stilling of pain in the form of hunger. the problem of perfectibility in the earliest forms of propagation, the younger organism is a true copy of that from which it springs, the trifling differences being due, as schmankewicz has shown, to outer influences. the differences of male, female, worker, and soldier are due to such outer influences. the differences in the younger organism, where propagation takes place through copulation, may be explained by the mixture of types, through which, by action and reaction, some qualities are intensified, while some others become latent or are entirely destroyed. to these mutual influences are to be added such as come from without, especially those of warmth, and of quantity and quality of food. under too great an increase in temperature, the young organism may even be destroyed, the process of assimilation not being able to keep pace with it. those variations which have led to the development of existing forms, that is, which were favorable to life, are chiefly such as could be brought about by relative or absolute increase of assimilation. this is true of mental, as well as of physical, qualities. it is a fact established without doubt, that the most common and most widely distributed species show the greatest variability, and that those species, on the contrary, which are now rare, although they were, perhaps, at earlier periods, the most common and extremely variable, vary, at the present date, the least of all. following darwin, one generally draws the conclusion that the severity of the struggle for existence favors the formation of varieties. for, it is said, the most common species fight the severest battle with one another, while the scanty representatives of rarer species come the least into competition and continue unchanged. but this theory is, in two ways, erroneous. in the first place, no attention is paid to the fact that a rare species may be exposed to a severe struggle against another species for the same nourishment, while a common species may, on the other hand, be exposed to no such struggle, and, supporting life from a generous supply of food, be subjected to but slight pressure. the conception of the darwinians means nothing more or less than that the individuals of a species vary the more, the less favorable the conditions of nourishment; and this cannot be conceded. again, the fact is to be taken into consideration, that the species at present common must have passed through a favorable period in which food was so plentiful that it not only afforded an abundance to individuals past the dangers of infancy and youth, but allowed, in addition, the existence of an ever-increasing number of individuals. and it is this period of increase, of abundance, not a period of struggle, which has developed the variations we now have before our eyes. in the same manner one must conclude, with regard to the rarer species, that the formerly existing numerous varieties were destroyed during the period of decline, that is, of overpowering pressure. we have abundant proof of this in the fact that domesticated species, which are carefully tended and fed, and so wholly withdrawn from the struggle for existence, vary enormously, and produce the most wonderful monstrosities. to what direct causes the appearance of a variety is due, is a question as yet unanswered. but weismann's investigations have shown us that climate plays a large part in their development. embryology teaches us, moreover, that the development of the young organism does not take place with the same uniformity in all organs, but that, on the contrary, in one period one organ, in another, another, undergoes a more rapid growth, which may be influenced by variations in food or temperature. through such variations the development of monstrosities is explained. we know that influences of nourishment are operative in the development of the larvæ of bees to workers or to queens, and we can easily conceive that other organs besides the sexual are subject to these influences. the field in which such influences may be operative is, indeed, boundless. all these considerations lead us to the conclusion that variability in general, but especially that variability resulting in a so-called improvement of the varieties producing it, is an accompaniment of prosperous conditions. this is a conclusion not yet reached in zoölogy, although botanists long ago recognized, in abundance of food, the most essential condition for the development of variations. darwinism fails to account for any need of nourishment beyond that necessary for the maintenance of the _status quo_ of life. according to darwin, the animal can acquire only sufficient for the repair of loss. the struggle for existence is, therefore, according to him, a struggle of self-defence, and its results could be, at the best, only the maintenance of species in their present position or, in a less favorable case, their decline, and finally their destruction. but this view is wholly false. the animal acquires not only enough to repair loss, but much more. how could the first amoeba have propagated itself, if it consumed no more than it needed for mere self-maintenance, and how could evolution have taken place? we have seen that, even in the inorganic world, there is not an equality of loss and repair, but that, in osmose, the denser fluid takes up more than it gives, while the fluid that is less dense loses more than it receives, and the mutual exchange reaches the maximum possible under the existing circumstances. it is this characteristic which renders the involuntary and forced tendency of the organism to satiation independent of the amount of waste; this mechanical hunger is the spring of the insatiability of organisms, and explains to us their increase in number, the process of increasing perfection, and individual development. without it, an eternity would not have sufficed for evolution; we should still have only a world of primitive amoebæ. this theory of development is, then, the opposite of that ordinarily assumed. the latter asserts that increase of growth demands increase of nourishment, whereas this asserts the fact that increase of nourishment determines growth. the struggle for existence is not a struggle for the mere necessaries to maintain life, but a struggle for increase of acquisition, increase of life; it is not a struggle of defence, but an attack which only under certain circumstances becomes a defence. the rule with which we advise our friends is, "forward! strive to better yourself!" though we may endeavor, in hypocritical spirit, to persuade to contentment those who come into competition with our interests. the chief points, therefore, in which this theory differs from that of darwin, are as follows:-- "the struggle for existence is really a struggle for increase of nourishment, of life; and independent of the supply of the moment, it goes on at all times, hence even in a state of abundance. "limitation of supply by competition leads to fixation of the species and, in the end, to its decrease and disappearance. "sickness, climate, and direct enemies are the destructive agencies, and must secure more propitious conditions for survivors, the stronger their effect. "only under conditions of prosperity can the survivors propagate largely, and perfect themselves, separating into varieties and species. "the increase and differentiation of the organic world shows us that conditions of prosperity have been the rule, those of want the exception." rolph's extremely interesting chapter on propagation traces the sexual instinct to the "mechanical hunger." the earliest example which may be adduced in support of this theory is that of the zoöspores which, by copulation, sustain life for a time under the unfavorable conditions of darkness, the thinner male representing, as does also the spermatozoön, the seeking individual suffering from want, the female representing a means of sustenance. the sex of the young organism is in like manner referred by rolph to conditions of nourishment during development. we now come to the chapter on animal or natural ethics the existence of morality presupposes the existence of commandments of duty, and of an authority. among animals, as well as among human beings, we find recognized authority and can discern the principles of action which constitute the duty of any particular animal. authority among the lower animals is based on might, which is, indeed, the universal source of authority, without which no authority can exist. personal authority is but a particular form of the authority of circumstances; and to this authority every creature must be subject. it consists of two factors: the outer authority of the environment, and the inner authority of impulse. duty is obedience to authority. the duty of the organism consists in action that corresponds to these two authorities, following the direction given as the resultant of the mixture of the two components. that is, that manner of life is right or moral which renders the life of the organism the fullest possible under the circumstances. the unreasoning organism is unconsciously drawn to seek this maximum, while the reasoning being seeks it through reflection. the impulse to happiness includes, therefore, for the reasoning being, the impulse to morality; or, ideally expressed, the relative morality equals the relative happiness; morality and happiness are the same thing. an authority without the means of enforcing itself is a self-contradiction. the means by which nature makes its authority felt is organic excitation. in proportion to its strength, an excitation produces sensation, in case it is not too weak to make itself felt at all. every excitation has a definite significance and may come from without or within. pleasant excitations are always, primarily, the feeling of the stilling of pain, though there are pains, such as, for instance, that of a wound, the toothache, headache, an aching corn, which have no corresponding feeling of pleasure. nor is pleasure the only offspring of pain, since pain may bring forth pain. pleasure depends, in its character as pleasure as well as in its strength, on the feeling preceding it in the organism; that is, its quality is the result, not of the degree of organic excitation, but of the order of succession of the feelings. for this reason, the same feeling which brings pleasure to one individual may bring pain to another. this whole deduction is at variance with spencer's theory that pleasurable excitations are favorable to life, painful ones injurious. and since observation is in direct opposition to his assertion, his followers have been obliged to supplement it with the conception that pain is gradually weeded out by natural selection. on the contrary, we need pain at every instant, since it is the impulse to action; persistence in the same condition through lack of excitation, must result in death; pleasure can never originate action, it can only cause persistence in action already begun. the fact has been too often overlooked, that the motive and the "end" of an action are by no means the same. the motive is pain, and the end is either simply the stilling of pain or an additional positive pleasure. there are, therefore, many actions which are directed to no concrete positive end, but only to the purely negative end of escape from pain without consideration of the further results; a striking example of such action is suicide. even where positive pleasure appears as an end, it is never in itself the motive to action. in order to become a motive, it must first be transformed into an excitation, into desire for pleasure; and this desire for a definite or an indefinite pleasure is, in its essence, pain--the pain of the absence of pleasure.[ ] the pleasure sought may be one already known through experience, or it may be one not yet experienced. in the latter case, the desire is awakened by instruction or reflection, or else induced by instinct. but the motive is always the same, namely, a seeking after pleasure, hence a feeling of pain. this view furnishes us with a psychical explanation of the association of ideas, the mysterious so-called transferrence of the feeling of pleasure from the end to the means. pleasure begins as soon as we have begun the action which will bring us with certainty to the end desired, and this pleasure may reach such a degree of strength at some point of the process as to conquer the desire for the real end, hem further action, and dispose to continuance at the point reached. the action of the miser may be thus explained. the objection that, if pain is the motive, the organism is nothing but a bundle of pains, is by no means valid, for it overlooks the fact that pain remains, in an immense number of cases, below the threshold of consciousness; as in the case of organic action, where it is rhythmic. the same is true of reflex action. to any close observer of the lower organisms, it seems most probable that these possess consciousness (see wundt, "physiologische psychologie"), nor is it by any means proved that the plants do not possess it likewise. it is certainly remarkable that exactly the lowest plants, which stand so near the animals in the phenomena of their life, exhibit movements closely resembling those of animals. and it is, moreover, a fact that automatic and reflex actions increase with the degree of organization, and are most numerous in human beings. with increased exercise, one chain of movements after the other is withdrawn from consciousness; and through this removal from consciousness action gains in certainty and rapidity, and in energy also, since the part of the force which was before lost in inducing consciousness is now released. such removal from consciousness is, therefore, a benefit to the organism, as an adaptation to the increased demands of circumstances. movements which thus become unconscious are each and every one of them movements which have but one definite end and an interruption of which either kills or seriously injures the organism, or at least brings disorder into its life for the time being. an easily excited consciousness would be an exceeding danger to the animal. conscious action is directed to the attainment of variable ends by means which are also variable. it cannot, therefore, astonish us that consciousness disappeared in plants after the loss of free motion. by the regular exercise of certain actions or of trains of thought, either through necessity or by habit certain tracks are worn or taken possession of, so that the whole process, from the excitation to the action resulting upon it, takes place with such rapidity that we are no longer conscious of its separate phases and so of the growth of the result. the first commandment of animal ethics is, therefore: "flee pain"; and closely associated with it is a second commandment furnished by the insatiability of the organism, the impulse to happiness, to increase of life. the principle of spencer's ethics, according to which normal living is right living, would result in stagnation. right living consists, on the contrary, in progress, in passing beyond the normal. no educator would hesitate for an instant to pronounce the continuance of a pupil upon a present normal immoral, and to oppose it with all his powers. from day to day the developing organism advances the line of its normal activity. and as in the individual, so in the species: every new generation exceeds in a certain measure the activity of the last. not rest, but motion, constitutes the normal; not rest, but motion, is happiness, and the spring of happiness. not that being which has no wants, but that which develops and satisfies the greatest possible number of wants, is the happiest, leads the most pleasurable life. when we apply these principles to the animals, we reach the conception that all such as lead a solitary life live morally when they endeavor, with all their powers, to better their own condition. that they injure plants and other animals in so doing need not trouble us, since they are forced to do so in order to maintain life. the principle on which animal life is based is hence preëminently egoistic and acknowledges no other right than that of might. spencer, in speaking of altruism on the lowest plane of animal life, makes the fundamental and quite fatal mistake that he does not first sharply and distinctly define egoism. had he done this, he would certainly have found that, for egoism, as for altruism, the criterion of consciousness, of will, is indispensable. in his definition of altruism as consisting in those acts which in any way benefit others, he does nothing less than get rid of egoism altogether, since there are no acts which do not, in the end, benefit others than the performer. the greater number of the young brought forth by lowest organisms serve as food for other species, and hence the parent animal, in bringing forth such numbers, favors these species rather than her own flesh and blood. the fly would act altruistically, according to spencer's definition, in being caught in the net of the spider. a creature which gets its food, as do many of the lower species, without exertion of its own, does not act egoistically, nor does the animal which, in the natural course of its growth, brings forth young by spontaneous division; but that animal may do so which acquires its food by means of any voluntary actions, however insignificant, or which voluntarily protects and cares for its young; and such voluntary action increases rather than decreases with greater organization. real egoism begins with the voluntary acquisition of food, a process continued in the forced excretion of the young. but since this action benefits the second generation, we may regard it as the connecting link between egoism and altruism. it is not purely altruistic; altruism proper begins with the nourishment and care of the young. and to what degree we have a right to consider even this as really altruistic can be determined only by further investigation. the emptying of the milk-glands is combined with pleasure; it may therefore be regarded as primarily egoistic, and furnishes us with a further example of the development of altruism from egoism. altruism increases, not only with higher organization, but also with a higher development of social life. the beginnings of society are to be found in the family life of animals; the most primitive form of this is the temporary, voluntary association of male and female among the higher species; that is, the anthropoids and vertebrates. on this merely temporary association follows, as a higher stage, the lasting family union, which exists among comparatively few animals. the so-called "states" of the animals are, in their most typical instances, nothing but families living in a condition of polyandry. closer association gives opportunity for a misuse of the powers and aims of the individual, before impossible. examples of this are the theft of honey from one hive of bees by the workers of another, and the carrying off of the young by wasps and ants, as also the slaughter of the drones. since the robber of yesterday may be the robbed of to-day, such acts are harmful to individuals, to the family, and to the species. they diminish the degree of life, and are opposed to animal ethics. the association of male and female, since only temporary, affords little opportunity for immorality, and the duties of parents to their young are, for the most part, faithfully performed. in striking contrast to the natural morality of wild animals is the immorality of domestic animals, which give themselves up to every sort of vice when not restrained. the moral conditions of any associated animals not under control, whether in zoölogical gardens, in the town, or in the country, is, in fact, monstrous. immorality increases with the closer association of animals. the closer the contact and the looser the bond between the individuals of a species, the greater the opportunity for immorality, and the worse the resulting habits. the careless life of pleasure led by animals that live in solitude, is interfered with, in a state of association, by certain duties. how far the performance of such duties springs from a concealed pleasure, or from instinct, or follows upon the command of authority, we, unfortunately, cannot say. the limitation of gratification signifies, however, decrease of pleasure. the needs of different animals differ according to differing organization; higher organization means greater and more complicated desire, the satisfaction of which is often impossible, but it means also the attainment of capacity for greater pleasure in form and intensity. hence even the partly attained pleasure of the higher animals is, in intensity as well as in fulness, much greater than the completely attained pleasure of the lower animals. humane ethics rolph contests lubbock's theory that the early type of man lived in a condition of sexual promiscuity, and gives as a reason for his opinion the "strict" monogamy of those animals which are most closely related to man. the customs of such animals should have as much weight, as evidence, as those of any of the present tribes of savages, since these tribes are as old as civilized races, and their customs cannot, therefore, be unhesitatingly regarded as primary ones. the real needs of men, those the gratification of which is indispensable to the maintenance of life, are few. by experience, and by experience alone, can man learn that present gratification may mean future pain, and so be withheld from such gratification; for only disinclination to one form of pleasure can induce inclination to another form. in the simplicity of primitive social conditions and the uniform character of action under such conditions, rules of experience must have been early formed, which, inherited by succeeding generations, became the rules of conduct.[ ] with the development of authority,--first the paternal authority, then that of the family, and finally that of the elders of the tribe,--the possibility of establishing rules of action, and inducing morality, increased. the very nomination of elders, to which primitive authority may almost everywhere be traced, shows how great was the respect for experience. spencer remarks, in one place in his "data of ethics," that human beings first banded themselves together because they found it more advantageous to coöperate. this is only conditionally true. before human beings could find association advantageous, they must have accumulated experience of it. that they did this by their own inclination is certainly not true. wherever we find two solitary beings coming together by chance, enmity is the first feeling excited, and war the result. everything new, everything unknown, causes aversion, and this aversion must lead to misunderstandings and war the more surely because each of the opponents feels himself disturbed in his supposed right to limitless possession. human beings must first have warred with one another before they came to the knowledge, not that social life, that is, mutual forbearance, was more advantageous, but that more closely associated individuals gained in power against a common enemy by their association. man did not choose society, but was, on the contrary, forced into it, for good or evil, through increase of his kind. the discovery of the first tools must have had an immense influence upon increase in the number of individuals, which was before limited by struggle with wild animals, and by the restriction of food to fruit. we must conclude that, under such circumstances, a lasting contract was inevitable, and that, with it, vices suddenly appeared which had before existed only potentially, as predisposition. war or theft must have followed the mutual limitation of rights, but against this disturbance of the peace other members of the society must have banded themselves together. the weaker must soon have been driven from their possessions by the stronger, and must then have united for the purpose of obtaining, by association, what they were unable to acquire otherwise. the growing children settled near their parents, with whom they entered into a family union, in which the father represented the authority. in this arrangement is the germ of civil order,--of the ideas of right and wrong. inner conflicts can at first scarcely have occurred, since the possessions of the family were in common, and a conception of theft between members of the family could not exist. furthermore, there was scarcely anything worth stealing, for the implements must have been so primitive that each individual could easily manufacture them for himself. only women could have been, in the beginning, an object of conflict, and for avoidance of this conflict laws and customs arose, which are, to our modern minds, inexplicable. real polyandry may doubtless be explained by the idea of the common right of possession among brothers; it has, in most cases, this significance. it is extended, indeed, later, to more distant relatives, and gains finally a solemn significance, the presentation of the wife, or of one of a number of wives, being a symbol of fraternity by which the guest is honored. with the manufacture of better tools and weapons, temptation to theft was increased, and authority began to be directed inwards to the society itself, since inner conflict injured the family in its contests with outer enemies. what is true of the family in this connection, is true of the tribe. a joint egoism of the society as a whole must thus have been developed, as soon as the first step of association was taken. the earliest law is always negative, a prohibition, not a positive command. war had its good as well as its evil side, since it made different peoples acquainted and gave them knowledge of each other's tools, weapons, and customs. war was, at first, the only means by which peoples learned to know each other. the establishment of peace led to the union of different peoples, or at least to peaceful intercourse by exchange, which united the tribes by common interests, corrected ideas, and tempered customs. the egoistic impulses, the feeling of unconditional right to possession, are the impulses with which the child is born; morality is not inborn, but must be developed by education, as is shown by the example of such children as are neglected in education.[ ] or, if there is anything innate in the direction of morality, it is merely a certain inherited predisposition acquired in the course of the thousands of years of social intercourse, which makes it easier for us to respond to education. if this is not so, and the impulse to morality is innate, why has it required so many centuries for man to make the simple connection of ideas, that what is just towards one man is just towards another. in this feeling of justice, acquired through an extension of egoism, is the root of all virtue. it is the spring of sympathy or benevolence, which can be developed only where the feeling of the like rights of others is strong. but an unconsidered over-estimate of this feeling is the source of spencer's utopia, as it is of that of present socialism. we have seen that authority is a primary and necessary factor of society. authority, virtue, and duty are interdependent, and must be of about the same antiquity. from all compulsion imposed by authority, the creature, by its nature, attempts to escape, and the feeling which prompts this attempt has been falsely called the instinct of freedom. authority exceeds its bounds, where it issues commands not demanded by the general conditions existing in the society. but though these conditions may demand a limitation of personal freedom, their requirements must, nevertheless, in general, be enforced. natural and humane ethics may thus be at variance in some things; may in others, coincide. there is no necessary conflict and no necessary agreement between them; therefore the theological theory of an absolute contradiction between them is false, as is also the teleological theory of their coincidence. the latter theory, not being able to deny that the moral and the natural do not always coincide under present circumstances, endeavors to avoid the difficulty by calling these conditions abnormal. the theory falls into two errors: in the first place, it ignores the fact that we have our organs, not _for_ use but _by_ use; and that our inherited characteristics may be regarded as an adjustment to the conditions of our ancestors, but not an adjustment to our own; and in the second place, there are no abnormal conditions. there are new or changed conditions, but either there are no abnormal ones, or all are abnormal. but although increase of life means also increase of desire, although the organism is insatiable, yet there is, as we have seen, an increase of happiness, both in quantity and quality, with higher organization. the absolute amount is increased, but not the relative amount, the amount realizable in proportion to desire. want does not lead to improvement, as darwin maintains, and the individual cannot be just or sympathetic in a condition of want. the freer he is from the direct care of the acquirement of necessities, the more manifold capabilities will he develop, and the greater will be his happiness. the task which authority must set itself, in order to secure greater justice in society, and so greater happiness, is twofold, a positive and a negative task. the positive task consists in such an education of the young as will enable them by their own effort to advance towards their individual ideal of happiness, and in the inculcation of such an ideal as corresponds to their individual talents and means, and is attainable under the existing circumstances. the negative task, already implied in the positive one, is the imposition of necessary restrictions in the means used for the attainment of happiness. within the limits set by justice, the individual has a natural right to seek his own pleasure, and for each individual an attainable maximum may be reckoned. this is not saying, however, that the individual has a just claim to this maximum, in case he cannot, or will not, be sufficiently energetic to gain it by his own efforts. it is an error of modern times to suppose that the realization of happiness rests in any other hand than that of the individual himself--that the state can make and decree happiness. happiness cannot be secured by means of decrees, by a division of goods, or by gifts. division is always unjust, since it leaves out of consideration that individuality of character which is the only measure of sensibility to pleasure. the negative part of the task is to be accomplished less by inculcation of many special virtues than by the continual direction of the attention to the fundamental virtue of justice. the positive task is to be accomplished by the most thorough education of the intelligence of the individual, through which he shall learn to inquire the reason of moral precepts, to judge for himself, and then to act on the decision he arrives at. we have seen that the ethical education of the present time tends to reduce inner struggle, rendering the results of wrong-doing as repellant as possible. one in whom has been instilled a very terrible conception of the sufferings resulting, in the present and future life, from wrong-doing, will perhaps automatically avoid the evil; and the means for a moral education seem thus attained. however, it is not so; for when the individual accustoms himself to being directed in action, not by his own carefully won experience, but by feelings instilled by others, concerning the ethical character of which his own insight does not, and cannot, afford him any explanation, he opens the way to every chance influence, and becomes the plaything of unknown forces; while he at the same time divests himself of that personal responsibility without which no society can exist. the true ideal of education is such as sharpens the judgment and accustoms the individual to consider his action from all sides, in the consciousness of personal responsibility. only through such action is man the possessor of freedom. he who acts without reflection, from unreliable emotion, is not free. the freest possible decision is that which is reached as the result of such a careful consideration of all the single components of reflection that no one of them exceeds in its influence its real worth. the ideal of education is not, therefore, the production of spontaneous decision and action, but of reasoning, conscious action. that this principle is the only right one is shown by our former observations, according to which, as society develops, more and more actions are the result of reflection. and in case a state of moral perfection is attainable, it can be arrived at only as each member of the society acts from perfect reflection, not from impulse or instinct. in attempting social improvement, we must take example by the chemist, who does not attempt a chemical combination by force but endeavors to attain the conditions under which the elements will unite, through their own inner laws, to the desired, homogeneous body. this is a wearisome process; but it is the shortest and swiftest, for it leads us to the desired end. the single virtues cannot be regarded as ideal principles. they contradict each other, and whether the one or the other should have the preference depends on the individual case and can be decided only by reflection. the formulation of these general rules of conduct under the name of virtues has, practically, only the advantage of reducing the numberless possibilities of action to a few; but such principles can never be exhaustive. wherever the individual forgets this fact and is led to regard virtue as an end, instead of as the means to an innocent happiness, virtue ceases to be virtue and becomes its opposite. thus thrift becomes avarice, generosity extravagance, courage foolhardiness, openness want of consideration, gentleness weakness, and chastity celibacy. the single virtues are only abstractions from special circumstances generalized to an ideal of action. but in practical life, we have to do with individual cases whose conditions are by no means ideal, and cannot be treated as ideal. we must act, in each case, for the relative best, not for absolute good; and what is best for one sex or in one society may not be best for the other sex or in another society. a compromise between idealism and realism is everywhere necessary; and such a compromise is made, despite all fine words to the contrary, by every one,--by one only more openly or consciously than another. it is comforting to remark that mankind shows itself, and always has shown itself, instinctively taking the road to the attainment of the end. through an extension of relations, authority, at first represented by a single individual, the head of the family or tribe, reaches the point of development where the one ruler is unable to rule all parts, and decide all questions, alone, so that he is obliged to call in help. he naturally chooses men near to him, with whose character he is acquainted. but there arises, by this division of authority, the danger of its misuse to the disadvantage of the ruler himself. since despotic government depends on might alone, and the voice of the people has no influence, every person in any way related to the ruler represents a danger. nevertheless, the establishment of new powers to assist the ruler was the starting-point of constitutional government. for by this division of power the ruler rendered it impossible for himself to govern without help from others, and opened the way to a contract of compromise with the people. the influence of individuals upon the state spread, thus, to the people itself. self-government, pure parliamentarism, is the ultimate end to be reached by the process. we have seen that neither pleasure, nor utility, nor virtue, nor, finally, religion, can be regarded as the absolute means, but only as the relative means to the attainment of happiness. both the hedonist and the utilitarian need to correct and further define their principle, as well in respect to the end to be attained, as in respect to the means proposed. their principles are not to be rejected, but fanaticism is to be condemned. principles may have exceptions; but fanaticism recognizes no exceptions. as to man's final end. though he has attained to the power of shaping, to some extent, his own environment and means of existence, yet he does not occupy an exceptional position in the animal kingdom, and must cease to exist unless he submits to adapt himself. it has been almost the rule that the highest animals of an epoch have later died out and been replaced by some new aristocracy, developed from somewhat lower forms. it is to be supposed that man, also, will be destroyed, whether by a new ice-age or by a period of heat. by the very fact of his supremacy, he disturbs the primal equilibrium, and originates conditions which, even now, press hard upon single lands and may easily become dangerous to all civilization. destruction may also threaten mankind morally, for the development of morality hitherto gives no surety of its continuance. every advancement brings with it some evil, every virtue contains the germs of some vice. modern humanity has given us an unreasoning soft-heartedness, with an extravagant malady of forgiveness which is nothing less than immorality itself, since it on the one hand undermines the general sense of justice, while on the other it prompts and encourages wrong-doing. footnotes: [ ] for further arguments in support of this assertion, see "biologische probleme," pp. - , etc. [ ] und da diese fläche durch zelltheilung oder fortpflanzung vergrössert wird, so wächst die aufnahmefähigkeit des organismus mit der fortpflanzungsfähigkeit desselben (p. ). [ ] und diese begierde... ist ihrem innersten kerne nach, eine unlust, ein leid: das leid des entbehrens des genusses (p. ). [ ] bei der binfachheit der primitiven socialen verhältnisse und der einförmigkeit der lebenstätigkeit müssen sich bald erfahrungsregeln gebildet haben, die nun durch vererbung übertragen und damit zu lebensregeln vertieft wurden (p. ). [ ] compare _supra_, p. , note. alfred barratt alfred barratt's "physical ethics" ( ) deals with first principles, "pure," as distinguished from "applied," ethics, the aim of the science, as stated by the author, being "to try to establish the first principle which is the condition of further progress. if we can establish a principle _a priori_, and then verify its universality by an appeal to mental phenomena and to philosophical theories, its existence as a fact will be made certain; if, in addition to this, we can connect it with laws still more general and with the family of natural sciences, it will be no longer a fact, but become a scientific law, a section of the universal code; and the title of this essay will be justified." _part first_ of "physical ethics" is occupied with the statement of axioms, definitions, and propositions "derived from general experience." they are as follows:-- "_axiom ._--actions, like objects, are capable of being classified according to their properties, and of being measured by a definite standard. "_obs._--this axiom merely means that the qualities of actions, like those of objects, are fixed and constant, so that the same action has always the same properties and moral value, and, under the same circumstances, always produces the same effect.... it follows from this axiom that it is possible to act so as to attain a definite object, and thus a general end of action may be arrived at.... "_axiom ._--the end of action (being some common property or effect) is a possible object of knowledge. "_axiom ._--we are capable of being affected by any external object only through our faculties, or (in other words) as a part of our consciousness. "_axiom ._--faculties are known only by their action, or (in other words) so far as they are portions of our consciousness. "_axiom ._--the sphere of action lies in the adaptation of 'inner' to 'outer' sequences, of faculties to the laws of nature. "_axiom ._--the constitution of man and other animal beings is an organism consisting of a number of parts, each having its appropriate function, and the end of each part results from the performance of its function. "_axiom ._--approbation is the standard whereby we judge of the moral value of actions, and is the universal mark of the due performance of a function and of the attainment of an end." definitions " . good is the object of moral approbation. the highest good is, therefore, the ultimate object of such approbation, the end of action. " . pleasure is that state of consciousness which follows upon the unimpeded performance (as such) of its function, by one or more of the parts of our organism." proposition i "the good is relative to our faculties. for no object can affect us except through our faculties (axiom ); but to be known by us is to affect us; "therefore, nothing can be known except through our faculties, or (in other words) except in relation to our faculties; "but the good, or end of action, is a possible object of knowledge (axiom ); "hence the good is relative to our faculties. "_corollary ._--the highest good of man at any time is relative to his faculties at that time. "_corollary ._--since ideas derive their elements from experience, the idea of perfect good, or god, can only be an idealization of humanity. proposition ii "the good is a state of consciousness. for, the good is a possible object of knowledge (axiom ); but all objects of knowledge are states of consciousness; "hence the good is a state of consciousness. or, the good exists (or is capable of being known) only by affecting our faculties, or, in other words, only as an affection of our faculties (proposition i); "but an affection of our faculties is a state of consciousness; "hence the good exists only as a state of consciousness. "_obs._--... to speak of anything existent external to our consciousness, is, as we saw, a pure hypothesis, incapable of proof, perfectly unintelligible and void of utility. when, therefore, we make use of the ordinary dualistic phraseology, we must remember that the two worlds there distinguished are merely two divisions of the universe of self considered as distinct for convenience of language, but differing only as two classes comprehended under a common genus. proposition iii "the good is relative to circumstances. for, the good is determined by, and therefore lies in action (axioms , , obs.); but action is relative to circumstances (axiom ). hence the good is relative to circumstances. proposition iv "the good depends upon the adaptation of faculties to circumstances. "for, the good is identical with the end (def.); which results from the performance of function by each part of the organism (axiom ). "but the function of each part is its adaptation to circumstances (axioms , ): hence the good depends upon the adaptation of faculties to circumstances. "_corollary._--since man is an organism composed of parts (axiom ), the whole good of man is the sum of the goods of his parts, and therefore depends upon the adaptation of all his parts to their corresponding circumstances. proposition v "the good is pleasure. "for the good results from the due performance of functions (prop. iv); but the good is a state of consciousness (prop. ii), therefore the good is the state of consciousness which results from the due performance of functions (as such). hence (by definition), the good is pleasure. "_obs._--by our definitions of good and pleasure it was evident that they were coëxtensive, being both marks of the same thing; to prove their identity it was necessary to show that good is a state of consciousness." of these propositions barratt says that i and ii are perhaps the most important, since they assert the impossibility of transcendentalism. _part second_ of "physical ethics" is a "verification by special experience." the origin of the moral sense the assumption of a moral sense has already been made in the definition of good as the object of approbation. our previous reasoning would lead us nevertheless to guess that this sense is not, in its nature, a simple and indecomposable faculty. how, then, did this sense arise, and what is its nature and composition? in the lowest animal organization, there are merely vague and indefinite states of consciousness corresponding to the undeveloped state of physical function. with the development and specialization of advancing evolution arises perception; by which likeness and unlikeness among sensations are distinguished, and classification is begun. "at first only the most obvious resemblances are noticed, but as experience progresses, wider and wider classes ever tend to be formed, till at last we arrive at those highest ideas which are coëxtensive with experience. these, though the last in order of birth, become the starting-points of science--just as men formed the idea of stones falling long before they discovered the law of attraction, yet by that law they afterwards 'explain' the former fact. thus we trace the whole of perception or knowledge to this power of comparison and noting likenesses, and this we see to be coincident with the organization of consciousness into central meeting-places or ganglia, in which different sensations are presented to a common tribunal and so compared together. we see, therefore, that perception does not originate consciousness; it only organizes and develops it. we cannot, therefore, agree with mr. herbert spencer, who will not allow consciousness to the lowest animals."[ ] the process of perception or knowledge works, not only on states of consciousness themselves, but on the changes from one state to another, or, in other words, on relations. thus results, on the one hand, recognition of objects; on the other, argument and reasoning, for the most abstruse reasoning is nothing more than a classification of relations. "we have now, therefore, two distinct divisions of consciousness: _sensation_, which as before consists only of pleasure and pain, though now of different kinds; and _perception_, which classifies states of consciousness and their relations, and is therefore concerned only with change. knowledge, therefore, has originally no other object than different pleasures and pains, but eventually it attends so much to the differences and resemblances that it ceases to remember the pleasure or pain; in its absorption in the relation it well-nigh forgets the things related. this process is furthered by the fact that, as the medium gets more extended, each part of it has less average effect upon the organism: the primary pleasures and pains being spread over a larger surface are less intense, and so obtrude themselves less. this is exemplified by the common observation that sensation and perception tend to exclude each other.... nevertheless pleasure and pain ever remain indissolubly connected with consciousness, though their presence is often unheeded, and only the more violent forms force themselves on the attention. "what is true of these simple forms of consciousness, is true of their later development. the relation of sensation to perception is the same as that between the faculties of which these are respectively the germs, emotion and intellect. for emotion is associated sensations of pleasure and pain; and intellect is associated perceptions of change and relation. hence by their very nature these are at once mutually exclusive and inseparable. a strong emotion drives out reason, and much reasoning chills emotion.... yet we can give _some_ reason for any emotion; and we feel some emotion in working a mathematical problem.... in every intentional act it is evident that both are involved; the end being given by emotion, the means by reasoning. reasoning can give no end, it can only arrange, elicit, suggest; emotion can give no means, for it cannot classify or observe relations. in the building up, therefore, of any moral faculty, both these elements must take a part. hence it will be well to trace, a little more closely, their mode of formation, and their connection with muscular activity. "when in the course of experience a certain sequence of sensation frequently recurs, the consciousness becomes habituated to it, and the return of the first sensation is followed by an idea or associative image of the others.... hence the idea of pleasure or pain not actually felt comes to be associated with objects, which, if placed in certain different positions, would effect us in the way imagined.... pleasure may thus be associated through a train of ideas of any length.... after a time this process becomes organic, the intermediate terms are lost, and pleasure is _directly_ connected with sensations and ideas that are in themselves not distinctly pleasurable. "now by various trains of association, various pleasures and pains are connected with the same object. these different combinations of pleasures and pains, some of which arise, before reasoning, by unintentional association, but the higher of which are the results of automatization of reasoning, form the different emotions.... "action in its origin is simply the correlative of sensation. contractility and irritability are the two general properties of vital tissue, or rather are two sides of one fundamental property which is also known under the name of sensibility--the power of contraction under irritation, or of expressing impressed force. irritability means merely the phenomena of consciousness, the development of which we have hitherto been tracing, though we have been throughout obliged to express ourselves in the language of the inner, and not of the outer experience.... this internal development we have already examined; we must now turn to the obverse external development which takes its origin in contractility. "the connection between these two fundamental properties is exceedingly intimate, that of ultimate identity or at any rate inseparability. for not only is contraction universally the result of irritation, but the only evidence that we have of irritation is the contraction which follows, and in their early stages the two represent one and the same process. when, however, the expression, in action, of force impressed in sensation, becomes indirect and immediate, the name of irritability is given to the _immediate_, internal results of its impression, while contractility expresses the action _ultimately_ expressed. hence the seat of irritability is preëminently the nervous system, while contractility, or the _vis musculosa_, is the name of the special property of the muscular tissue. "considering them however in their origin, they together represent a certain form of the transmission of force.... some kinds of impressed force are followed by movements of retraction and withdrawal, others by such as secure a continuance of the impression. these two kinds of contraction are the phenomena and external marks of pain and pleasure respectively. hence the tissue acts so as to secure pleasure and avoid pain by a law as truly physical and natural as that whereby a needle turns to the pole, or a tree to the light.... hence, the law of self-conservation, or of the direction of action, is merely another mode of expressing the fundamental property of animal tissue, which we have every reason to believe is derived from the more elementary physical properties of matter. the course of action is just as dependent on physical laws as that of a stone which falls to the ground. the belief in external consciousness makes no difference either way; the earliest phenomena of such consciousness are those of pleasure and pain, therefore we can suppose it to exist only as pleasure and pain. in the one case we say that action aims at, or naturally results in, the phenomena of pleasure; in the other case that it aims at the actual consciousness of pleasure. "the expression of impressed force, or the connection of action and sensation, is at first in the unorganized tissue direct and immediate, without the agency of nervous communication, or to return again to the ordinary psychological language, is unintentional or involuntary.... the earliest modification is due to association, whereby secondary sensations, or (as they are called later when they become perceived) ideas are produced. these manifest themselves as weaker repetitions of the primary pleasures and pains, and, therefore, are naturally followed by like results.... the process is this: the force originally impressed by the first sensation, instead of being all expressed in action, is partly induced by habituation into an internal channel, and so transformed into the kind of force which generally impresses the second kind of sensation, and this now produces its appropriate action. hence part of the original force has undergone two transformations instead of one; the immediate antecedent of action being the force produced by association, or in other words, the associated pleasure. this is the rudiment of _motive_, which, however, is not generally called by that name till it is _perceived_. the same process may go on through two or more links of association; the first transformed force being again transformed internally instead of expressed, and the second again in its turn, until eventually a transformation is reached which finds its easiest way of escape in action; the immediate motive power being that transformation of force, or that associated pleasure, which immediately precedes the action. actions of this kind constitute the lower phenomena of instinct: and we see therefore that they may depend on any number of links of unperceived, or, as we say, unconscious reasoning; and that their motive is also 'unconscious.' these actions stand half way between reflex and voluntary actions.... "we now come to the third and last development of associated action. here not only is each associated idea perceived, but the change, in each case, is also a fresh centre of association; whereby similar changes are connected with it, and it is referred to a class. hence the whole train is perceived, not only by the classification of each of its parts with similar previous sensations, but by the classification of each of its sequences with previous like sequences: in other words, it is now a chain of reasoning from the past to the present. that associated pleasure from which this reasoned train commences is now called the _motive_ (though really the immediate motive power lies in the last transformation which directly precedes the active expression) and the series of ideas intervening between this and the action is called the _means_. hence the motive associates the means, and the motive power is transmitted through them till it is finally expressed in the action which is appropriate to the attainment of the pleasurable state whose idea is its source. this association of means with ends is at first sight opposed to the natural direction, which is from antecedent to consequent; but when a line of nervous connection is formed, a current may be transmitted indifferently in either direction. an effect may lead us to think of its cause, as easily as a cause associates its effect. by the sequence of action and sensation, a connection is established between their ideas, which is independent of the order of excitation. this last kind of action is that which we call voluntary, and the series of classified ideas and relations which lead to it is called reasoning. if at any point the current is attracted in two or more directions by different trains of association, deliberation is the result; and the eventual victory of one and the consequent transmission of the force along it is entitled will. "we have therefore distinguished four kinds of action: _reflex action_, which is purely physical and independent of association, and which is the last link in all the derived varieties; _lower instinctive action_, which is caused by the first introduction of association, and is hardly to be distinguished in its phenomena from the last;... _higher instinctive action_, which involves perception of qualities or objects;... and finally, _voluntary_ or _intentional action_, such as we find it in man.... though we have separated these classes from each other for clearness of description, there is no distinct line to be drawn anywhere between them. each fades insensibly into the next.... evolution, we must remember, does not advance by stages; these are merely marks that we make ourselves, like the constellations in astronomy, for convenience of study. "finally, we must remark that the last two kinds of action ever tend to relapse into the second, which subjectively is a mere form of the first. association of all kinds tends to become organic. by this we mean that, as the connection becomes more definitely marked and easy, the perpetual radiation which occurs as the current passes the different points on its path, disappears; and the whole current passes unimpaired. first, the radiation caused by the changes disappears, and reasoning becomes instinct, as in doing a mathematical example from mere memory of the different steps. secondly, the radiation from the different nervous centres also disappears, and the current which ends in action becomes not only unreasoning but unperceived, as in walking or reading aloud while thinking of something else.... "long habituation has two effects: it increases the number of trains connected with each object, and also the length of each. if we suppose the simpler emotions to have, by this time, become organic or apparently simple states of consciousness, a continuance of association tends to connect them together in bundles, as they themselves were originally bundles of elementary pleasures and pains. hence the emotions become organized in their turn so as to form higher emotions, and eventually, when association has completed its work,... this organization ends in one supreme emotion, which is the head of the emotional or sensitive side of the consciousness.... "turning next to the second effect of prolonged habituation, we find that, with objects or actions with which pleasure was at first associated and which so were called pleasurable, further association often connects a subsequent pain which increased experience has shown always to follow upon the immediate pleasure. this pain often more than counterbalances the preceding pleasure; hence when it is taken into the emotion, that emotion becomes one no longer of appetition but of aversion, and the object or action is remembered as one not to be sought after but avoided. it cannot, however, be called painful, because it causes immediate pleasure, so a new name has to be invented, and it is called bad, or evil. similarly, many things which are immediately associated with pain are found to be eventually followed by pleasure which more than counterbalances the pain, and as this experience becomes consolidated by the power of association, they attract rather than repel, and for a name whereby to distinguish them, are called good; so that good and evil are correlative terms like pleasure and pain, and mean respectively the greatest total pleasure, and the greatest total pain. now this experience when once acquired is never lost, but by virtue of hereditary transmission descends from parents to children. but, as in the case of the simpler emotions, only the results survive, and not the means whereby they were arrived at; so that, in a short time, the words good and evil come to be quite separated from pleasant and painful; nay, as might be expected from their origin, they tend to acquire exactly opposite meanings; for pleasure and pain come to signify only immediate pleasure and pain; and the final reckoning is often considerably at variance with the first item; as in a race the man who leads for the first lap seldom wins in the end.... "this, then, is the origin of the moral sense.... the moral sense, therefore, is merely one of the emotions," though the last of all in the order of evolution; it can only claim a life of some two or three centuries; and there are even some who still doubt its existence. "man at any rate is the only animal who possesses it in its latest development; for even in horses and dogs we cannot believe that it has passed the intentional or conscious stage.... good, with them, has no artificial meaning; it is simply identical with the greatest pleasure." only by complete and perfect obedience to all emotions can perfect freedom from regret be obtained in the gratification of all desire. man is at present passion's slave, because he is so only in part; "for the cause of repentance is never the attainment of some pleasure, but always the non-attainment of more: not the satisfaction of one desire, but the inability to satisfy all. the highest virtue, therefore, consists in being led, not by one desire, but by all; in the complete organization of the moral nature." of the social relation of the individual when we assert the end of action to be pleasure, do we mean the pleasure of the individual, or universal happiness? "good has been shown to follow immediately on the adaptation of an organism to circumstances; it is evident that external objects can affect it only in so far as they form part of these circumstances. hence it follows that the pleasure and pain of others can come in only incidentally; from the fact that each man is not an isolated unit, but a member of society. but further, this social medium itself is, after all, nothing but a part of the individual affected by it; it is one division of that primary side of his nature, by which the other side, the emotional, the intellectual, the moral, is being continually moulded and fashioned; and even if we take the narrower meaning of self, the pleasures and pains of others cannot possibly affect a man's actions or emotions except in so far as they become a part of his. if man aims at pleasure merely by the physical law of action, that pleasure must evidently be ultimately his own; and whether it be or be not preceded by phenomena which he calls the pleasures and pains of others, is a question not of principle but of detail, just as the force of a pound weight is unaltered whether it be composed of lead or of feathers, or whether it act directly or through pulleys. "the principle, therefore, is clear enough, that the happiness of others can have only an indirect influence upon the good of each individual. but it is equally clear that this direct influence must be of no mean extent, and that it is now our duty to trace its history." here follows a scheme of the development of the state from the family, which last was necessitated by the helplessness of infancy, and from which arose the habit of human association. we have no evidence from history or science that mankind has not always existed in a state of society; there is no warrant for assuming an earlier condition of isolation. "hence to the human race the earliest good was inseparably bound up with what we now call the family virtues."[ ] the state, thus originated, developed as a social organism, with ever greater integration, heterogeneity, and complexity of parts, and "the end or good of each individual became largely modified by the extension of the medium to which his actions had to be adapted"; man became a member, not only of the family but of the state, and the conceptions of his nature and duty became wider, "so that at last the more perfectly each attains his own interest, and the more pleasure he gathers to his own store, the more certainly does he secure the universal happiness of mankind." if a man aims, as spinoza remarks, at doing real good to himself, he will be sure to do most good to others. the unselfish emotions under this head is traced the genesis of sympathy through representation of the pains and pleasures of others and interpretation of them by individual experience in the same environment; and the genesis of benevolence, the active side of sympathy, through habit associated with the ideas of the pleasures and pains of others. love is defined as "originally the association of many pleasures with one individual." from the wider experience of man as a member of a state is developed justice or the sense of equality of right, patriotism, etc. all these feelings are hereditary. of the relation of man to nature this portion of the book treats of the gradual development of knowledge to wider and wider generalization; of the extension of sympathy from man to the animal world also; of the universality of consciousness, which exists in the inanimate as well as the animate world; of the perfection of morality through the perfection of knowledge, since "knowledge moulds emotion, and absolute virtue is nothing but absolute correspondence with nature in action resulting from thought"; and of the evolution of religion, through knowledge, to a religion of knowledge of the real universe or of humanity. of the will under this heading the metaphysical doctrine of freedom of the will is combated as a contradiction of the laws of cause and effect. praise and blame, reward and punishment, are desirable because of their effect on action. of obligation barratt defines obligation as a "violent motive." paley says: "if a man finds the pleasure of sin to exceed the remorse of conscience, of which he alone is the judge, the moral-instinct man, so far as i can understand, has nothing more to offer." what, then, asks barratt, has he himself to offer if a man finds the pleasure of sin to exceed the pain entailed by disobedience to the external command? it may, indeed, be the fact that particular kinds of motive only come from particular sources, but unless we can prove that those coming from a command are always the strongest, we cannot claim for them a position such as that implied by the word obligation, of being the highest or most universal motives. in a contest between two motives, it is not the kind but the quantity which decides. for if two pleasures or pains be equal, what does it matter where they came from? and if they be not equal, the greater, whatever its source, will always be the stronger motive. "hence obligation is nothing more than a 'violent motive.' prudence and duty are both the following of the greatest pleasure; but so far as in ordinary language we make a distinction between them, the pleasure aimed at in prudence is proximate and only slightly greater than the pain, whereas in duty it is not only very considerably greater, but the greatness is further glorified by a dim aureole of magnificent generalities and the halo of an unfathomable future.... "and as the result of a motive is in no way dependent on its external source, so neither is it influenced by its mode of internal operation. a motive may be strong either by its own natural force as a large excess of associated pleasure in one direction, or by the facility artificially given to its expression by the long-continued custom, either in ourselves or in our fathers, of acting in a certain way on certain occasions. in other words, the strength of a motive is not absolute, it is relative to the habits and predispositions of our organisms; but the strongest motive, whatever its kind, prevails in all cases. "obligation is often, again, confounded with compulsion: but submission to physical force is not morally an act at all, because its [greek: archê] or immediate antecedent is external to us, and therefore independent of our moral laws." of pleasures that are called bad "we saw that good differs from pleasure simply by a widening of the field of calculation; whereby the pleasure of the moment is often found to entail future pain greater than itself (allowance being made for perspective), and is therefore condemned as bad. when, therefore, we speak of pleasure as opposed to good, we always mean the pleasure of the moment; or very often by a still further narrowing of the term, sensual as opposed to intellectual pleasures." footnotes: [ ] pp. , . [ ] p. . leslie stephen "the science of ethics" ( ) while with regard to the matter of ethics,--the general classifications of right and wrong conduct,--moralists are almost unanimous, with regard to its form,--the essence and criterion of right and wrong,--there is great disagreement. all widely spread opinions deserve respect by their mere existence; they are phenomena to be accounted for. on the subject of morals, as on all other subjects, opinions gradually modify and approach each other; but a perfect agreement will probably not be arrived at. leaving aside metaphysical questions, however, we may be able to find, as in physical science, some constants or ultimate elements which, though they, according to the metaphysician's view, require further analysis, yet constitute, within their sphere, scientific knowledge independent of metaphysics. the follower of hegel means, in all probability, precisely the same thing as the follower of hume, when he says that a mother loves her child; though, when they come to reflect upon certain ulterior imports of the phrases used, they may come to different conclusions. the formula remains the same; for all purposes of conduct it evokes the same impressions, sentiments, and sensible images, and it therefore represents a stage at which all theories must coincide, though they start, or profess to start, from the most opposite bases. "mothers love their children" is not unconditionally true; some mothers do not love their children; but the statement is of worth as approximating scientific truth. it may be well to attempt to ascertain in how far it may be rendered scientific. in the physical sciences, the statements of laws arrived at by the labor of generations are ideal statements, in which a mass of modifying circumstances are disregarded for the sake of simplification. even in these sciences, the power of prediction is small. of the complicated conditions of human action we have even less accurate knowledge than of those of physical phenomena, though this does not lead us, any more than in the physical sciences, to suppose that prediction would not be possible if we knew the conditions. so far as man is a thing or an animal, it is comparatively easy to determine his conduct. given a starving dog and a lump of meat in contact, you can predict the result. but to determine the behavior of a human being with a glass of water presented to his lips, you must be able to calculate the action of human motive and to unravel the tangled skein of thought and feeling in its variation in the individual under consideration. moreover, much of the life of the individual is ruled, not by conscious motive, but by automatic habit, acquired through education. the prediction of action in society as a unit is not less difficult than the prediction of individual action, for if individual differences neutralize each other, so that a certain uniformity in the influence of circumstances is shown by statistics, it is not the less difficult to predict what these uniformities will be. society as an organism, not a mere aggregate, presents, in the interaction of more complicated conditions, greater difficulties than does the individual as such; and it may be said that prediction of the course of history, even in general terms and for a brief period, would require an intellect as much superior to that of socrates as the intellect of socrates is superior to that of an ape. and yet mankind does possess knowledge of conduct, which does not differ in kind from scientific knowledge; there is, in fact, but one kind of knowledge, which passes into scientific knowledge as it becomes more definite and articulate. the knowledge that mankind possesses consists in what we have thus far taken for granted, that under the same circumstances of outward environment and inward character, human conduct does not change. of society, as of an organism, we cannot say _a priori_ that it is so and could not have been otherwise; we can only show, _a posteriori_, how different parts mutually imply each other, so that, given the whole, we can see that any particular part could not have been otherwise. our gain from such knowledge is the recognition that there may be discoverable laws of growth essentially relevant to our investigation of conduct. so long as reasoning was conducted upon the tacit assumption that social phenomena can be satisfactorily explained by studying their constituent elements separately, attention was diverted from the important principles of the interrelation of parts to the whole. the theory of evolution brings out the fact that every organism, whether social or individual, represents the product of an indefinite series of adjustments between it and its environment. every race or society is part of a larger system, product of the continuous play of a number of forces constantly shifting with an effort towards general equilibrium, so that every permanent property represents, not an accidental similarity, but a correspondence between the organism and some permanent conditions of life. to solve the problem of existence by calculation is an impossibility; but our own lives are working it out; the evolution of history is the solution of our problem. and when we fully recognize that a problem is being solved, we have only to gain some appreciation of its general nature and conditions, in order to reach some important, though limited, conclusions, which may fairly be called scientific, as to the meaning of the answer. these conclusions are not scientific in the sense of giving us quantitative and precise formulæ, but they may be so far scientific as to be certain and reliable. thus we may be able to show how a given set of instincts corresponds to certain permanent conditions under which they were developed, and (returning to the problem of differing theories of morals with which we started) to show what is the cause of differing opinions. our investigations of the problem of morality have nothing to do, in the first instance, with moral principles which are, or profess to be, deduced from pure logic, independent of any particular fact; they deal with actual moral sentiments as historical facts. the word moral, as used in our considerations, does not, therefore, refer to an ideal moral code, but to the one actually existing in the case considered. ethical speculation, as thus understood, must be concerned with psychological inquiries--inquiries in regions where the vague doctrines of common sense have not yet crystallized into scientific coherence; we must therefore proceed with caution. the contention between materialist and idealist is irrelevant to our discussion. the fact that mechanical processes underlie all mental process does not make the latter the less a fact; nor can the mechanical statement ever supersede the psychological statement. the proposition that hunger makes men eat will express truth, whatever material implications are involved in the statement. conduct is determined by feeling; we fly from pain, we seek pleasure; life is a continuous struggle to minimize suffering and lay a firm grasp upon happiness. "good" means everything that favors happiness, and "bad" everything that is conducive to misery; nor can any other intelligible meaning be assigned to the words. the difficulty of proving these propositions lies in the fact that they are primary doctrines, for proof of which we must appeal to the direct testimony of consciousness. but critics oppose, not so much the propositions themselves, as certain supposed implications. by pain and pleasure is here meant every conceivable form of agreeable or disagreeable feeling. the assertion that conduct is determined by pain and pleasure is not meant as a denial that it is also, in some sense, determined by the reason; but a state of consciousness which is neither painful or pleasurable cannot be an object of desire or aversion. the reason is often contrasted with the feelings in its determination of conduct, the reasonable man being defined as one who, instead of being the slave of immediate impulse, is capable of adapting means to ends and following, thus, courses of conduct not in themselves agreeable but promising a greater total of happiness. the fact is, however, that all happiness that determines the will is future; conduct is determined, in every case, not by a future feeling of pleasure, which, as future, does not yet exist, but by present feeling. it is therefore more accurate to say that conduct is determined by the pleasantest judgment than to say that it is determined by the judgment of what is pleasantest. the intention of the agent is defined by the foreseen consequences of his conduct; his end is defined by that part of the foreseen consequences which he actually desires; and the end defines the motive, that is, the feeling, which actually determines conduct. the pleasantest end is adopted because the foretaste of the pleasure is itself pleasurable. the intellect and the emotions are in reality related as form and substance, and cannot be divided. in the action of pain and pleasure, it seems to be an obvious fact that pain, as pain, represents tension, that is, a state of feeling from which there is a tendency to change; pleasure represents equilibrium, or a state in which there is a tendency to persist. the worm writhes on the hook, and the mind may be said to writhe under a painful emotion in the effort to writhe into some more tolerable position. in the act of choice, each mode of action is tried ideally, and the individual settles into that which is, on the whole, the easiest. the analogy which naturally offers itself and seems to give the best account of the facts is the mechanical principle of least resistance. it is not, perhaps, superfluous to remark that the volition may exercise a very small influence, even when the limiting conditions are in a great part ideal. the more painful is not necessarily the less permanent condition. it is one in which there is an additional chance against permanence. terror sets up so disturbed a condition that the mind cannot settle into any definite course. we can no more alter arbitrarily the circumstances of our microcosm than those of the external world. it is as difficult to avoid brooding in vain regret as to evade a physical constraint. reason and feeling are bound together in inseparable unity. but reason, whatever its nature, is the faculty which enables us to act with a view to the distant and the future. a great part of conduct is automatic; it is either not determined by conscious motives, or it is determined by motives which, though they rise for a moment to the surface of consciousness, are forgotten as soon as felt. of our conscious conduct, again, part may be called instinctive and part reasonable. these modes of action pass into each other by imperceptible degrees. the instinctive may be converted into reasoned as the consequences become manifest, and the reasoned become instinctive as the consequences are left out of account. so, again, the instinctive action becomes automatic when it is performed without leaving any trace upon consciousness. it may still be voluntary in the sense that the agent may be able to refrain from it if his attention happens to be aroused. habitual actions pass through all these gradations. when the reason is called into action, it is not in virtue of a purely logical operation that it conquers if it does so; it is in virtue of the fact that it reveals a new set of forces ready to spring into action to the necessary degree. we may be said to feel by signs as well as to reason by signs. the sight of a red flag may deter us from crossing a rifle range without calling up to our imagination all the effects of a bullet traversing the body. if the motive which prompts us to run the risk be strong, it may be necessary to convert a greater volume of latent, into active emotion; and as we frequently fail to do this, we often run risks which we should avoid were the consequences distinctly contemplated. the development of the whole nature implies a development of both the emotional and the intellectual nature; new sensibilities imply new sentiments; and increased range of thought is associated with an equal growth in complexity and variety of emotion. the more reasonable being acts with emotion, but his emotions have more complex and refined methods. the reasonable man is a better mirror of the world without him, his conduct shows a better adaptation to ends and a greater logical consistency in its parts; more harmony of action between the different instincts. the important question is not solved by these facts. we may still ask: how is the relation between the different instincts, the influence exerted by each member of the federation, determined? we start with certain fixed relations between our various instincts; and however these may change afterwards, our character is so far determined from the start. again, it is plain that this inherited balance varies greatly with different peoples and gives rise to different types. in one man the sensual passions have a greater relative importance than in his neighbor, and so forth. and the question arises, whether we can determine which of these types is most reasonable. in the construction of the bow, we may suppose that, from rude beginnings, through discovery of better and better forms as adapted to ends in view in its construction, a form of bow would finally be reached which would represent the maximum of efficiency. this bow may be called the typical bow. as exquisitely adapted to its purpose, it arouses in us æsthetic satisfaction. like the bow, every organism represents the solution of a problem, as well as a set of data for a new problem. as the bow is felt out, so the animal is always feeling itself out. the problem which it solves is how to hold its own against the surrounding pressure and the active competition of innumerable rivals. though we cannot apply an _a priori_ method, cannot define the materials of which men are made or the end which they have to fulfil, we can determine to some extent their typical excellence. recognizing the general nature of the great problem which is being worked out, we can discover what is implied in some of the results. the process of evolution must be, at every moment, a process of discovering a maximum of efficiency; though the conditions are always varying slowly, and an absolute maximum is inconceivable. at every point of the process, there is a certain determinate direction along which development must take place. the form which represents this direction is the typical form, any deviation from which is a defect. it is conceivable that the highest efficiency in different departments of conduct may imply consistent conditions. the greatest philosopher may also be the greatest athlete and the greatest poet. it is equally clear that there is no necessary connection. what, then, is the relative value of different kinds of efficiency? a complete answer to the question might bring out the fact, which seems on other grounds probable, that it is an advantage to a race to include a great variety of different types. it is enough, however, to say that, in speaking of a type, the assertion is not intended, that there is one special type conformity to which is a condition of efficiency, but that evolution is always the working out of a problem, the solution of which implies the attainment of certain general qualities. we have changed our point of view from the consideration of pain and pleasure to that of the conditions of existence. the fact is simply, that the constants in one problem are variables in the other. given a certain character, the agent does what gives him pleasure. but if we ask how he comes to have that character, the only mode of answering is by referring to the conditions of existence. his character must be such as to fit him for the struggle for existence. there must therefore be a correlation between painful and pernicious actions on the one hand, and pleasurable and temporal on the other. the useful in the sense of the pleasure-giving must approximately coincide with the useful in the sense of the life-preserving. all conduct may be considered as a set of habits, to each of which there is a corresponding instinct--the word habit being used to designate any mode of conduct, automatic or voluntary, which may be brought under a general rule, instinct denoting all conscious impulses to action, whether including more or less reasoned choice, and whether innate or acquired. habits graduate from the essential processes which constitute life rather than maintain it, and which are, for the most part, automatic, to the most superficial and transitory. in order that the proposition "this habit is a bad one" may have any real meaning, we must assume that the organism can exist without it. a habit cannot be removed as one takes off a coat, as has been too often assumed; the whole character of the man is affected by its removal. a capacity is essential if it is essential under normal conditions of environment. the quality which makes a race survive may not always be a source of advantage to every individual, or even to the average individual. since the animal which is better adapted for continuing its species will have an advantage in the struggle, even though it may not be so well adapted for pursuing its own happiness, an instinct grows and decays not on account of its effects on the individual, but on account of its effects upon the race. the qualities of the individual and those of the race mutually imply each other, since the individual can no more be considered apart from society than the apple can be considered apart from the tree on which it grows. it remains true, however, that certain qualities of the apple may vary whilst the relation to the tree remains approximately the same, as also that the individual may vary in his qualities to some extent, his relation to society remaining approximately constant; and qualities thus variable may be regarded as, in so far, independent of society. social development takes place without corresponding change of individual organization. we cannot interpret the changes from savage life arrived at in present civilization, as representing an essential, great, or corresponding difference in the innate faculties of the civilized man from those of the savage, but must regard them rather as representing the accumulation of mental and material wealth. the child, learning, with the words of his language, their implicit meanings, has his feelings modified by them, is thus a philosopher and metaphysician in the cradle by the associations given him, and is educated from infancy by the necessity of conforming his activities to those of the surrounding mass. all organization implies uniformities of conduct, and therefore continuous discipline. society is an organism in this sense, not in any mystical sense. it is not an organism with a single centre of consciousness. an organization implies organs; and these are to be found in the various organizations, political, religious, etc., by which, through a greater or less division of labor, certain special functions are relegated to particular associations. we thus have not only to go beyond the individual and refer to the organs in order to determine the "law" or form of any instinct developed through the social factor, but we have also to classify the various social instincts by reference to the complex structure of society, which implies a distribution into mutually dependent organs. moreover, such organs, though primarily directed to a specific end, acquire a vitality independent of any special end, become organs discharging a complex function, and imply the existence of a correspondingly complex set of instincts. we come really to love an organization because it supplies us with a means of cultivating certain emotions and of enjoying the society of our fellows; it would be an entirely inadequate account of the facts if we regarded it simply as the means of attaining that pleasure which has given the pretext for its formation. the organs of society are not, however, distinct from each other as the physical organs are distinct; the same individuals may be members of various organizations. the race is not, in fact, analogous to the higher organism, which forms a whole separated from all similar wholes, but to an organism of the lower type, which consists of mutually connected parts spreading independently in dependence upon external conditions, and capable of indefinite extension, not of united growth. we may consider the race, thus, as forming social tissue, rather than constituting an organism. the tissue is built up of men, as the tissue of physiology is said to be built up of cells. the laws of growth and vitality of the organs of society are always relative to the underlying properties of the tissue; although, in particular cases, the more civilized race may be supplanted by the less civilized, we may assume that these accidental and contingent advantages will be eliminated on the average, and the general tendency will be to the predominance of those races which have intrinsically the strongest tissue. not the state as such, and (as we have seen) not the individual, is the unit of evolution; the state may develop when the external pressure is little or nothing; the social tissue is that primary unit upon which the process of social evolution impinges. the family is not, itself, a mode of organization coördinate with other social organs, but rather represents the immediate and primitive relation which holds men together. it is quite possible to suppose men living together without any political and social organization; but some association between the sexes, however temporary and casual, and some protection of infants by parents, are absolutely necessary to the continuance of the race beyond a single generation. a change in family associations implies a corresponding change of vast importance in the intimate structure of society itself, in the social tissue. the state may make a marriage law, but it cannot create or modify the family tie beyond certain narrow limits. it can bestow privileges upon some one kind of association, but it cannot originate it, cannot enforce fidelity and chastity. the social tissue is its own end, or depends upon the whole system of instincts possessed by man as a social and rational creature. the development of society as an organic structure implies the development of customs in the race, and habits in the individuals forming it. there must be certain rules of conduct which are observed by all, in order that corresponding rules may be observed by each. custom in the civilized society may be distinguished from positive law. in primitive states, the distinction is imperceptible. the authority of law itself must rest upon custom,--the custom of obedience. but physical force alone, or the dread of its application, cannot produce obedience; the application of such force is so little essential that a state of society is conceivable, in which it should disappear altogether; men might be willing to obey their rulers simply from respect and affection. the power of applying coercion in case of need must no doubt increase as the strength of the social bond increases; but that bond is also the stronger, in proportion as the need of applying it becomes less. the whole social structure, then, must rest, in the last resort, upon the existence of certain organic customs, which cannot be explained from without. they depend, for their force and vitality, upon the instincts of the individual as modified by the social factor; they correspond to a given state of the social tissue. a legal sanction may be added to any custom whatever, and thus it may seem that a state can make its own constitution and define its own organic laws; in reality, however, the power of making a certain constitution presupposes a readiness to act together and accept certain rules as binding, and thus implies a whole set of established customs, essential to the life of the society and giving rise to special types of character in its members. every law of conduct more or less affects the character of the persons subject to it, so long as it is enforced; and necessarily, every variation in the character more or less affects the sentiments from which the external law derives its force. the correspondence, however, is not so intimate that one mode of statement can always be rendered into the other. for laws, indeed elaborate codes, are developed without seriously affecting the general character of the underlying customs, and in the same way instincts may vary widely without producing any normal change in the external order, though they affect the mode in which it works. the essence of any law is in the mutual pressure of the different parts of the social structure. any association with a given end will have laws determined with reference to that end. when we pass, however, from the organ to the tissue, we still have an organic structure with certain rules of conduct and corresponding instincts, but we no longer have a definite end or a fixed material. the material, that is, is to be regarded as developing and determining the development of the subsidiary organs. and since the most efficient society normally survives, we may inversely infer from the survival of a society that it has developed the properties on which its efficiency depends. the actual laws existing at any period may not represent the greatest degree of efficiency possible; but they must be an approximate statement of the essential conditions. the moral law, as applicable to all members of a society, defines some of the most important qualities of the social tissue. it is as independent of the legislature as are the movements of the planets. this is true whether you resolve morality into reason or make it dependent upon utility. the action of any set of people can no more change the nature of facts than that of logical necessities. this is, however, fully true only of morality as it ought to be in correspondence with facts. actual morality corresponds to men's theories about facts, and it may, therefore, deviate from what the code would be if they were incapable of error. but it is plain that, though it varies, it must vary within incomparably narrower limits than other systems of law, because its variation is determined by far more general conditions; it maintains itself, so to speak, by the direct action of the organic instincts. the doctrines of the greatest moral teacher, though somewhat in advance of prevailing standards, are successful only in proportion as they are congenial to existing sentiments, give articulate shape to thoughts already obscurely present in the social medium. like socrates, the reformer must be something of a midwife. morality grows, and is not made; that is, it is the fruit of a gradual evolution of the organic instinct continued through many generations. the ordinary mind resists any change in principles instilled into it from birth; the great masses are sluggish in movement. the moral law has to be expressed in the form: "be this," not "do this." the existence of a character such that variations of circumstances will cause no deviation from morality is the only security for morals. the legislator is forced to classify conduct by its objective manifestations. but the cunning of the man who desires to evade the code can still devise innumerable methods of accomplishing his end indirectly. law permits what it does not prohibit, and is, therefore, in danger of producing hypocrisy instead of virtue. the process by which the moral law (or rather, the law of conduct which includes, but is not coincident with the moral law) is developed, is a process of generalization. it corresponds to a vast induction carried on by the race as organized in society. beginning with modes of conduct which are seen to be bad, society gradually perceives that the ultimate principle of classification must be by the primary feelings, that rules of conduct must be expressed in terms of character, and other rules which concern the application of these to more special cases must take a subordinate position and be regarded as only of conditional value. all these rules must necessarily correspond, within very narrow limits, to a statement of the conditions of vitality of the tissue which they characterize. in an ideal state of society, every general principle would also be recognized in every particular rule. this is a result a gradual approximation to which, rather than its actual attainment, must be anticipated. morality implies action for the good of others in some sense. society may be regarded both as an aggregate and as an organism. there are certain qualities which we may suppose to vary in the individual without necessarily involving a change in the social structure. how is the general rule, as distinguished from other rules, deduced from the general principle of social vitality? the law of nature has but one precept, "be strong." but when we regard the individual in his relations to society, the law takes on different forms. this may be expressed by saying that the law "be strong," has two main branches, "be prudent" and "be virtuous," the first applying to cases in which the individual is primarily affected, the other to those in which the units are affected through society and the social factor must be taken into account. to find a classification of the virtues that will not run into infinite detail or be a simple affirmation of the general principle, the internal development of moral character under its emotional and intellectual aspects may furnish a sufficient method. the general formula of primary individual virtues is: "be strong." the condition of vitality of the individual as a complex of instincts, is expressed by the formula: "be temperate." and the class of virtues referring to the conditions of intellectual efficiency, has the general rule: "be truthful." _ceteris paribus_, an increase of individual energy is an advantage to society; and, as a matter of fact, we find that civilized society differs conspicuously from the ruder in stimulating more vigorously and systematically the various energies of its members. the most conspicuous virtue of this class is the virtue of courage. in more primitive conditions, courage, as necessary to the preservation of society, is regarded as a virtue in itself; later, some mixture of judgment and reason is required in its exercise; and finally, since it may be combined with other anti-social qualities, it is not approved in the same manner as the more directly social virtues. courage is now regarded merely as one manifestation of a character which is fitted for all the requirements of social existence. the courage of the bulldog is blind instinct. where such an instinct exists, the animal survives by reason of it, not because he forms any conscious judgment of its advantages. it seems necessary to suppose that races owed their survival to military prowess when reflection was still in the most rudimentary stage. the utility of courage must have been a very obvious discovery as soon as reflection became possible; but the quality must have existed, in some degree, before it could be discovered, although the existence of a distinct moral sentiment doubtless implies some reflection. moreover, the instincts which imply a perception of utility must themselves comply with the conditions of existence, must themselves be useful. increased intelligence might act to the disadvantage of the race by increasing selfish cowardice through a keener perception of personal, as distinct from social, risk; but this cannot be true ultimately, since we perceive that intelligent races have an advantage; we may suppose that those races are most successful in which a perception of the vitality of courage goes along with an increase of courage. this principle must be regarded, therefore, as working, not only through the less conscious instinct of the lower races, but also upon the judgments of a highly civilized society. the like is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of other qualities (such as industry, energy, and so forth) which belong to the same class. the estimate of courage differs with respect to the two sexes, as does also that of chastity. the historical explanation is simple; courage was necessary in men in early social stages, to race-preservation; to women, on the other hand, has been given, from early times, a class of social functions not requiring courage. the estimate, once fixed, survives even when some of its early conditions disappear. the savage acquired his wife by knocking her down; to him the ideal feminine character must have included readiness to be knocked down, or at least unreadiness to strike again; and, as some of the forms of marriage recall the early system, so in the sentiments with which it is regarded there may still linger something of the early instinct associated with striking and being struck. the virtues of chastity and temperance occupy an intermediate position between the virtues of strength and the directly social virtues. some of them are a part of the prudential, and others of the directly moral code. temperance is primarily prudential, but the sexual and parental instincts concern the most intimate structure of society. our instinctive classification of temperance as higher than courage has good reason; the classification of it as a personal virtue cannot be maintained. a man whose vice injures only himself in the first place, becomes incapable of benefiting others. as we condemn the man whose character is bad, whether external circumstances do, or do not, give him an opportunity of displaying it, so we object logically to the man who is destroying his social qualities, whether the immediate effect of his conduct tells upon himself or upon others. another element, an instinctive disgust at sensuality, seems to precede judgment upon intemperance, with a strength not to be accounted for by a mere summing up of consequences. the human hog revolts us as the smell of the sty turns our stomach. the justification of the instinct is not that it implies a judgment of what is useful, but rather that it is a useful judgment. as men become more intellectual, sympathetic, and so forth, they gain fresh sensibilities, which are not simple judgments of consequences but as direct, imperative, and substantial, as any of the primitive sensibilities. to get rid of the sensibility you must lower the whole tone of the character. asceticism, which has arisen chiefly at times of great indulgence, may have been of use if only as a demonstration of the possibility of conquering the prevailing passions. in a similar manner, we may think a great reformer, a howard for example, admirable, though he neglects duties which must be performed in the ordinary case. we thus admit that the general moral code of benevolence prescribes different conduct according to a man's opportunities and talents. truth is a virtue of slow growth; the savage, like the child, is unable to distinguish clearly the difference between imagination, hypothesis, and historical statement. the perception of the utility of truth first takes the external form: "lie not," which corresponds approximately but not perfectly to the internal rule: "be trustworthy." the internal rule, as such, is the higher; the external may have exceptions. we come, at last, to the directly social virtues of justice and benevolence. so far as truth and temperance are strictly virtuous, they may be classed, the one under justice, the other under benevolence. there is no real conflict between justice and benevolence; so far as a man is really benevolent, he will not wish to benefit some to the injury of others. justice seems to consist in the application to conduct of the principle of sufficient reason. it is not safe to infer altruistic intention merely from altruistic consequences. the sexual appetite appears to be the most selfish of impulses, in that it prompts to conduct often ruinous to its objects. on the other hand, it is the root of all social virtues. we cannot be sure that the hen who covers her chicks regards them as more than comfortable furniture in the nest. altruism begins with the capability of benevolent intention; where the conferring of pleasure upon others becomes a possible motive. the generation of pleasure in others' happiness has been traced to association; but, though the pleasant association doubtless prepares the way for the higher sentiment, the latter is something more. it is true that all conduct is egoistic, in the sense that all conduct has its source in the pain and pleasure of the doer; but there is great difference between conduct that regards human beings as mere means to personal pleasure and that which takes into account their feelings as sentient beings. sympathy springs from the primary intellectual power of representation. i cannot properly know a man without knowledge of his thoughts and feelings. cruelty is, in many cases, simple insensibility, incapacity for projecting ourselves into the position of other beings. we may desire the pain of others when it is useful as a deterrent, or secures our own safety; yet to think about other beings is, in general, to stimulate our sympathies, our sensibility being thus quickened by the same power which implies intellectual progress. to believe in the existence of sentient beings is to take into account their feelings, to believe that they have feelings, which may persist when i am not aware of them. a real belief, again, implies that, at the moment of belief, i have representative sensations or emotions corresponding to those which imply the actual presence of the object. to take sentience into account is to sympathize, to feel with. the only condition necessary for the sympathy to exist, and to be capable, therefore, of becoming a motive, is that i should really believe in the object, and hence have representative feelings. systematically to ignore these relations is to act as i should act if i were an egoist in the extremest sense and held that there were no consciousness in the world except my own. but really to carry out this principle is to be an idiot; for an essential part of the world as interesting to me is constituted by the feelings of other conscious agents, and i can ignore their existence only at the cost of losing all the intelligence which distinguishes me from the lower animals. it is true that this vicarious sympathy, this pain at another's pain, may result in our simply getting rid of our own pain by going away from the sufferer, removing him, or dismissing him from our mind; as a fact, these methods are often pursued. but in many cases, such a course is impossible without the renunciation, at the same time, of many pleasures. if a man is to live with his friends, he must share their joys and sorrows; the choice is not between a particular pain and its absence, but involves the whole question of the renunciation of companionship. emotions are inevitable, whether sympathetic or not, in proportion, not simply to the pain and pleasure at the moment, but to the intensity and degree in which they form part of the world of the individual,--the world constituted, not by mere sensations, but by the whole system of thoughts and emotions sustained by the framework of perception. the existence of pure malignity must, it is true, be admitted; it may be partly explained as love of the "sensational," the novel; the full explanation must be left to the psychologist. sympathy is the natural and fundamental fact. if intellectual progress carried with it inferior sociability, it would tend to be eliminated; the world would be to the stupid; it must carry with it something which counterbalances the anti-social tendency. reason is that which enables a human being to take account of future, as well as present pleasures. the working of the instincts or feelings, which dictates conduct, approximately coincides with the prevision as to the maximum of happiness obtainable by the agent; normally, it is prudent to be virtuous; and the sympathetic motives, so to speak, always develop within the framework provided by the other motives. to become reasonable is to act on general principles, and to act consistently; and this includes the condition that a statement of the real cause of my action should equally assign the reason of my action. the law which my feelings actually follow must coincide with the principle which commends itself to my reason. in order, then, that a being provided with the social instincts should act reasonably it is necessary that he should take that course of conduct which gives the greatest chances of happiness to the organization of which he forms a part. as the pain or pleasure in another's pain or pleasure is direct, so the end willed is willed as pleasurable to the subject, and the statement that altruism involves the contradiction of aiming at something else than the real end--the pleasure of the subject--in order to secure that end, is erroneous. the fact probably is that the mind "flickers," taking into consideration various consistent and mutually dependent ends, some of which may be primarily egoistic, some altruistic. the physician is not benevolent enough to cure me unless he expects a fee; but he may act also out of sympathy; he need not be always thinking of his fee. our sympathies would be stifled, if it were not for the coöperation of motives of a different kind. altruism is the faculty essentially necessary to moral conduct; but the altruistic sentiment is not to be identified with morality. the elementary sympathy must be regulated and disciplined, in order that it may give rise to true morality. virtues, for instance, which belong to the type of truthfulness and justice, generally imply a severe restraint of the immediate sympathetic impulses. we recognize the internal motive as desirable, and recognize a difference between the man who acts only from prudential motives and the one who acts from moral motives. we consider the latter meritorious, that is, that he has a certain claim upon society, inasmuch as he has done for nothing what another man will only do for pay, or has refrained from action from which a less moral man can be restrained only by coercion. wherever society finds sacrifice of the individual necessary, it pays for it in terms of merit. merit is the value put upon virtue; it is a function of the social forces, by which our characters are moulded. every character is developed under circumstances, and depends upon mutual adjustment with these; we cannot disentangle the two factors. upon the power to infer future action the science of ethics depends. the action of the individual is not a matter of chance; in this sense it is caused. but the instinct from which the action springs is not something external to the man, which moves him; there is not the man plus the instinct; the whole man, including the instinct, acts in a certain way, in which he would not act if he did not possess the instinct. we are accustomed to say that a man has inherited certain qualities; but the man is not one thing and the inherited qualities another; the whole man is inherited. merit implies effort. this does not mean that effort, taken absolutely, is the measure of merit. such an assumption would lead to our excusing men for the very qualities that make them wicked,--the murderer because of his spiteful disposition, for instance. the man is most meritorious who is virtuous with the least effort--provided always that he has the normal passions of a man. by these, however, since they are morally neutral, he is accessible to temptation and to a certain struggle. conscience appears, historically, as a development of simpler instincts; it is not a primary or a separate faculty; material morality makes its appearance long before the conscious recognition of a moral law. the existence of conscience is undeniable. yet moralists are much given to exaggerate the sorrow which it actually excites. in almost every case, the pain which we feel for a bad act is complex, and due only in part to our conviction that we have broken the moral law. if we regard conscience as a separate faculty judging of action by some inherent power, we have to attribute to it reason and feeling. it is not a primary attribute of the agent (to borrow spinoza's language), but a mode of the attributes. there is, indeed, a sensibility which seems to have as good a claim as any to be regarded as elementary, and which is clearly concerned in most of our moral judgments: the sense of shame. this is excited by the consciousness of the judgment of others. it operates, however, not only in cases of a breach of morality; but often more strongly even in cases not concerned directly with morality; and may even operate against the moral code. but the variation is clearly not indefinite. social development implies the development of a certain type of character, which includes, as essential, certain moral qualities; the consciousness of the code and of the condemnation of certain classes of acts, which it would cause, is implied in the sense of shame. the sense is closely connected with the instinctive disgust before noticed. it seems to have especial reference to decency and indecency. the value of the sense of decency cannot be measured by a consideration of a particular set of bad consequences from indecent actions other than the shock to decency; we must consider the whole difference between a state of society which does, and one which does not, possess it; it is an essential symptom of refinement and delicacy. again, the judgments of conscience may be compared to æsthetic judgments. the difference between the æsthetic and other pleasures depends upon the form of gratification, not upon the instincts gratified, and seems to correspond to the difference between work and play. the artist may appeal to our moral emotions, giving us imaginary ideals; but emotion at the contemplation of such types is in the æsthetic phase when we simply enjoy their contemplation, and it passes into the practical phase as soon as it begins to have a definite relation to the conduct of our lives. only in so far as the moral law has become internal, is the delight in heroic or benevolent energy spontaneous; in so far, we may speak of the existence of a moral, as of an æsthetic, sense. a man of fine moral sensibility may, indeed, like the artist, perceive finer moral discords than can be measured by formulæ; and may thus supply a more delicate test. but the complex problem of a difference in moral judgment may yet be solved approximately by reference to the test of social welfare; the highest type is that which is best fitted for the conditions of social welfare. the collective experience of the race is always progressing towards a more accurate solution of the problem. the utilitarian theory, which makes happiness the criterion of morals, coincides approximately with the evolutionist theory which makes health of the society the criterion; for, as we have seen, health and happiness approximately coincide. the utilitarian theory fails, however, in one or two respects. it gets rid, as much as possible, of _a priori_ truths, and rejects intuitions; it bases its argument on the assumption that all knowledge is empirical and the ethical problem to be solved by a summing up of the consequences of action. it thus neglects the truth which is implied by evolution,--that the organism itself is solving the problem; it neglects the instinctive sense generated by social evolution. moreover, it considers society as an aggregate of similar individuals, taking little account of the variability of human desire. and, further, the utilitarian theory lays its stress upon morality as extrinsic; according to it, love of morality for its own sake, as love of the means to the end, must be as unreasonable as the miser's love for his gold. association, in this sense, means illusion; and the more reasonable we become, the more we should deliver ourselves from the bondage of such errors; the theory fails just at the point where true morality begins. furthermore, in substituting the external rule: "do this," for "be this," it seems to fall into the error of expediency. though lying is assumed to be, on the whole, detrimental to happiness, truth is maintained to be desirable only where it contributes to happiness. the utilitarian destroys, to some extent, the force of the objection to this by asserting the danger of trusting ourselves. the force of this objection is only seen, however, when it is applied, not to the external, but to the internal code; we instinctively feel the danger to character in the lie, and hesitate to trust human nature in the establishment of such a precedent, just as we object to permitting the taking of life even in cases where prolonged life means prolonged misery, because we cannot trust human nature with the decision as to life and death. we make binding laws of morality, and leave it to the man of exceptional qualities to break them; for the generality of mankind, the stricter code is safer. what is the sanction of morality? why should a man be virtuous? the answer depends upon the answer to the previous question: what is it to be virtuous? if, for example, virtue means all such conduct as promotes happiness, the motives to virtuous conduct must be all such motives as impel a man to aim at increasing the sum of happiness. these motives constitute the sanction, and the sanction may be defined either as an intrinsic, or as an extrinsic, sanction; that is, it may be argued either that virtuous conduct leads to consequences which are desirable to every man, whether he be or be not virtuous; or, on the other hand, that virtuous conduct as such, and irrespectively of any future consequences, makes the agent happier. the problem is, thus, to find a scientific basis for the art of conduct. the "sanction" must supply the motive power by which individuals are to be made virtuous. this is, for the practical moralist, the culminating point of all ethical inquiry. now there is, by our theory, a necessary and immediate relation between social vitality and morality. but it does not follow that there is the same intimate connection in the individual case. the sacrifice of some of its members may be essential to the welfare of the society itself. we have, then, to answer three questions: first, whether the virtuous man, as such, is happier than the vicious; second, whether it is worth while, on prudential grounds, for the vicious man to acquire the virtuous character; and third, whether it can be worth while, in the same sense, for the vicious man to observe the moral law. if any man outside the pulpit were to ask himself what were the main conditions of happiness, the answer would certainly include health as the first, most essential, most sufficient condition. but the whole process of nature, upon the evolutionist doctrine, implies a correlation between the painful and the pernicious, and thus the elaboration of types in which this problem is solved by an ever-increasing efficiency and complexity of organization. hence we may infer that the typical or ideal character, at any given stage of development, the organization which, as we may say, represents the true line of advance, corresponds to a maximum of vitality. it seems, again, that this typical form, as the healthiest, must represent not only the strongest type--that is, the type most capable of resisting unfavorable influences--but also the happiest type; for every deviation from it affords a strong presumption, not merely of liability to the destructive processes which are distinctly morbid, but also to a diminished efficiency under normal conditions. however, the typical man, though he is, on this theory, the virtuous man, is also much more than is generally understood by that name. happiness is the reward offered, not for virtue alone, but for conformity to the law of nature, "be strong." beauty, strength, intellectual vigor, æsthetic sensibility, prudence, industry, and so forth, are all implied in the best type, and are, so far, conducive to happiness. if virtue be taken in the narrower sense as implying chiefly the negative quality of habitual abstinence from forbidden actions, there is no reason to suppose that it coincides with happiness. you can raise a presumption that moral excellence coincides closely with a happy nature only when you extend "moral" to include all admirable qualities. it is chiefly practical reasons which cause an attempted evasion of this conclusion; the practical moralist holds that the non-social qualities may be left to take care of themselves, but that stress must be laid upon the social qualities as the more important, in order to obtain them in society. sympathetic motives may lead to self-sacrifice; but this is also true of selfish motives; gin is a more potent source of imprudence, even in a moderate sense, than family affection; and the sympathetic motives have on their side the far greater intrinsic advantage, that they promote ends more permanent, far richer in interest, and giving a proper employment to all the faculties of our nature, besides the intrinsic advantages that spring from friendly relations with the society of which we form a part. it is, however, true that higher activity of any sort may cause pain in an uncongenial medium, and that, hence, the man who is morally in advance of his age may suffer through his morality; every reformer who breaks with the world, though for the world's good, must expect much pain. "be good if you would be happy," seems to be the verdict even of worldly prudence; but it adds in an emphatic aside, "be not too good." we must acknowledge that excessive virtue cannot be recommended to the selfish person upon grounds intelligible to him. there is, however, a general advantage in possessing more varied possibilities of enjoyment, and in being on the side of the strongest forces, those of progress. extreme self-sacrifice is sometimes demanded of a man by his moral principles. is the sacrifice worth making? would regulus have suffered, from remorse, pain worse than death, had he chosen life at the cost of honor, or would he have found, as many do, that remorse is amongst the passions most easily lived down? to these questions can only be answered that morality must often involve pain, but that the virtuous man nevertheless chooses it. we must thus conclude, leaving one great difficulty unsolved; and this is because this difficulty is intrinsically insoluble; there is no absolute coincidence between virtue and happiness. the scientific moralist has to do with facts; beyond these he cannot go. from the scientific point of view, we may hold that evolution implies progress, and that progress implies a solution of many discords and an extirpation of many evils; but there is no reason for supposing that all evil will be extirpated and perfect harmony attained. new sensibilities bring with them new dangers; even sympathy, when not guided by knowledge, may lead to rash changes productive of evil as well as good. to improve, whether for the race or the individual, whether in knowledge or in sympathy, is to be put in a position where a new set of experiments has to be tried, and experience to be bought at the price of pain. it is true that beyond the science lies the art; we must incite the intrinsic motives to good through the pressure of the social factor. a certain disadvantage to the individual cannot form a reason for our not endeavoring to make him moral as far as possible; the good of society as a whole is involved; and even the man who is himself immoral sees the advantage of living in a moral medium, and would prefer that the world at large should not be guided by his own principles. b. carneri carneri begins his book on "morality and darwinism" ("sittlichkeit und darwinismus," ), with the rejection of the older spiritualism in favor of idealism, on the ground that modern investigation has made it impossible for philosophy to assume any foundation but one sanctioned by science; and with a rejection of dualism in favor of monism, on the ground that the investigations of wundt and others have shown the psychical and the physical to be identical. instinct is defined by carneri as thought upon the standpoint of mere sensation, but following the laws of the same logic as governs conscious thought. there is, thus, according to his view, no exception to be taken to the conception which represents instinct as the action of mental force, the difference between it and human reason as one of degree only. it is nevertheless a confusion which ascribes reason to the animals. even their intelligence is one-sided, since it does not reach self-consciousness, and it is not to be regarded as an unqualified improvement upon instinct, since the latter loses both in intensity and in certainty of action when it no longer governs undisturbed by other influences: only such animals as are endowed with intelligence ever eat of injurious food. in human beings instinct has almost disappeared;--almost, we say, since savages do many things in an instinctive manner, and even civilized men at times perform acts which, on account of the exceeding rapidity of their execution, cannot be regarded as the results of reflection. instinct may be compared to polarity in magnetism, according to which opposites are attracted. instinct was evolved by natural selection. but intelligence and judgment are doubtless also to be found even far down in the scale of species. the brute consciousness is, nevertheless, only a transition-stage, in which the individual is still lost in the species; and, as such, it is not to be confused with human reason. consciousness in the brutes is purely subjective, a consciousness "für sich"; while in human beings it is consciousness "an und für sich," consciousness that becomes subject-object through the concepts developed by language. man is as unconditionally subject to the law of causality, psychically and physically, as the merest atom. there is no such thing as chance; but in this very fact lies a consolation. in the concept of individualization in its broadest sense, is included the conception of freedom, and in the very nature of man there is an indestructible impulse to freedom; his being, as self-conscious, is identical with the latter impulse. this increases with increasing civilization, and has finally become the problem by the solution of which alone man can attain to self-satisfaction. it is true that the power of choice is inconsistent with the law of causality; but in the manner in which the man, as a thinking being, takes his stand over against the species, he becomes a person, an individuality. as one of the species, he shares the characteristics of the species, is an expression of the species-idea, and his action is determined outwardly by things; but it is so determined only mediately by means of thought, of concepts; these are the immediate determinants. hence, man's relation to things is a different one according to the grade of his knowledge. in so far as this is adequate, that is, corresponds to the truth of actuality, his relation is an active one; in so far as it is, on the contrary, inadequate, the relation is a passive one. character is inborn and can never be effaced but only clarified, though this least through the bitter experience of the results of action. as the horse loses his sure-footedness after one fall, and falls again more easily, so we lose, through many a deed, the motive furnished by the consciousness of never having committed it, and have a greater tendency to repeat it. if an act has bad results, it is more likely that an attempt to avoid these results by cunning will be made at later opportunities for the act, than that the act itself will be avoided. and even if it were to be avoided, such avoidance would not constitute an improvement of the character; the latter would but hide itself under a mask to reappear at the first prospect of exemption from punishment. that which alone can modify character is a considerable extension of knowledge. for, since all things influence us only in proportion to the worth we attribute to them, their power over us must differ according to the correctness or incorrectness of our judgment. therefore, the more we regard things in the light of their actual worth and hence also in their relations to each other, the more our character, beholding in these relations the general as the true, will incline to avoid extremes in action. a preponderantly sensual character remains such through life; but there is no doubt that a careful education, which makes it acquainted with nobler principles and develops a sensibility to true beauty, may ennoble it; while, if the education is, on the contrary, neglected, it must sink deeper and deeper into the mire of coarseness and vulgarity. character is the sum of its "affections," that is, of all states and motions of the disposition. these are divisible into "passions,"--included under selfishness, which is the general, all-embracing passion,--and the active conditions of existence. these two divisions are also identical with pain and pleasure, passion with pain, and activity with pleasure. all desires have their root in the primary instinct of self-preservation and self-propagation, the instinct of self-propagation being only the racial form of the instinct of self-preservation. the instinct of self-propagation is the highest of all the passions, yet, as spinoza says, every form of love which recognizes another cause than mental freedom is easily turned to hate,--if it is not already a sort of madness, nourished rather by discord than concord. the various forms of family love, the love of country, and friendship, noble sisters of love in the narrower sense, result in desirable activity only as they exist in the form of concepts. civilization is nothing but the struggle of inadequate and adequate concepts, in which, as in the struggle for existence in nature, only that is triumphant which, instead of assuming a position of separation, makes the general and the conditions of existence its own; so that charity in the widest sense of the term is, of all humane feelings, that to which the palm has been given. in this feeling, the dialectic movement of the concept "man" is completed and perfected, the single man, instead of perishing in the struggle of all against all, first working his way upward out of his species and then taking up, in his own being, the whole of mankind through the medium of benevolence. by this evolution he raises himself to the level of the general. far higher than that confused sympathy which, in lending temporary aid to one, brings lasting harm to many, is this adequate concept; true benevolence is founded upon the clearest reasoning, and is the activity of the mind's fullest power. the discord which self-consciousness has caused in man can be done away with only by the greatest possible clarification of self-consciousness: man returns mentally to the bosom of the universal, when every living thing causes him to exclaim in the words of the indian philosopher: "behold thyself." ethics ranks higher than morals, the latter merely comprising a collection of particular rules of conduct which, as particular, bear the stamp of the individual, the non-universal. the details of morality change according to epochs and peoples. this change has been regarded as an argument that there is no absolute but only relative good. but the concept of the good is, like the concept of the beautiful, the fruit of education; that is, it is the product of mind, which, through its own evolution, arrives at knowledge. when we do away with all concessions to one-sided, extravagant desires, abstain from placing mind above the universal law of causality, and are content with the facts made known to us by science, we perceive that the absolute true, beautiful, and good, bears the character of the universal. in this universal character it has always finally found expression in human life, and in this character it will always find expression. the idea which reaches perfect expression in the dialectic movement of these three concepts, the true, the beautiful, and the good, has come into existence by the mediation of the self-individualizing self-consciousness, just as the evolution on the earth, which reaches its completion in man, is the outcome of the first chemical process. not only have the two one law,--(mind is only in so far realized[ ] as nature is expressed through it, and the actuality of nature is its expression in mind) but both are, in fact, one, the succession in their development on the earth being a succession only in relation to the earth, and for us in this respect. although to our notion of time, thousands of millions of years lie between the two, their separation does not represent a second for the universe and its eternity, for the comprehension of which it must be disregarded. the good man is he who does good for its own sake, without effort, not out of momentary caprice, but out of perfect knowledge and conviction. he is free, since he acts out of his own character, the law of nature appearing as the law of his own mind; freedom lies in the absence of discord and strife in the mind. the good man has strength of soul, just as the man who lifts a weight without effort, not he who lifts it only with the greatest effort, possesses strength of body. there is no absolute evil in contrast to the absolute good. evil is negative. the perfection of man is identical with the attainment of absolute good through evolution. morality knows nothing of either reward or punishment; for it there are only causes and effects. this truth, on which morality is based, lends to the freedom out of which its activity proceeds a deeper worth. the eternal laws of mind point the way by which mankind has to proceed; it is the same way by which man has become man and by which he must proceed, even if he did not will to advance thus. in the struggle for existence, which knows only victory or destruction, progress is a necessity of nature, but it is less painful and more rapid the more clearly these laws come to be perceived by consciousness. yet, however clear they may be, it is only by a tireless endeavor which shrinks from no sacrifice, that progress takes place. the end which morality has in view is distant, for it is high; but only with its attainment will mankind fully deserve its name when "struggle has been transformed to labor, when no insignia are recognized but those of right, no weapon used but intelligence, no banner raised but that of civilization." in the volume, "man the 'end' of man" ("der mensch als selbstzweck," ), "a positive criticism of hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious," carneri defines instinct as no form of real thought, nothing dependent upon perception, but merely an inherited, mechanical dexterity dependent upon sensation. for the assumption that thought is the source of instinct must lead us naturally, on account of the existence of the latter where the centralizing organ of thought is absent, to the theory that thought is universal in nature; that is, we shall arrive at a theory of atom-souls. it is evident here that not carneri's definition of instinct so much as his conception of thought is changed from the one adopted in "sittlichkeit und darwinismus," thought being now limited, as it was not in the former book, to self-conscious mental activity, assumed to be dependent upon nervous centralization in the brain. in this book also, the author defines the idea as something having mental existence, though not, he says, in any metaphysical sense. his idealism is not of such sort that he recognizes any other way to the attainment of ideas than that of science; and to him "the service of the materialist who gives us information concerning the function of the smallest nerve-fibres is of more worth than that of the idealist who originates a whole philosophical system." the work of philosophy lies in the rejection of all that is contrary to science, and the clarification of ideals. the will may be defined, not as a definite, separate power, but as the self-conscious impulse to action resulting from excitation. any other definition is inconsistent with the theory of evolution, according to which that individuation which is the first condition of the struggle for existence, is nevertheless but the expression of all previously existing oppositions. to make of the will or of the impulse to self-preservation anything separate and individual, is as childish as to personify death. the individual is totality as unity. darwinism teaches us, not that the world together with man has been created according to any teleological principle, but that it has developed by virtue of motion. the human being moves by virtue of reciprocal action and reaction with the world. yet only by virtue of his unity as feeling does he think and will. individuality is that which stamps all our activity with the mark of the ego, which causes us to recognize every impulse that moves in us as our impulse, to call all our willing ours. the psychical, the summation of functions to which we give this name, reaches consummation in the clarification of feeling to consciousness, in which the desire of an action or of abstinence from an action appears to us as our will. as thought is based on perception, so will is based on impulse; and since thought and will appear as the two highest opposites of feeling, and this, according to our definition, springs from sensation by way of perception, the will, including action and abstinence from action, arises out of the general sensitivity. the progress of science authorizes the expectation that the close relation of sensitivity to simple reaction will one day be discovered. the conceptions of teleology are groundless. the so-called "ends" of nature have the peculiarity that they are according to the means. it does not rain in order that there may be vegetation, but vegetation exists because it is conditioned by the rain. only with thinking man, in his struggle for existence, arises the concept of ends; man has not attained to civilization by help of a friend; rather has he wrung civilization from nature as an enemy; compelled by it to the exertion of his whole strength, and growing in cunning by exercise, he has learned to use the weaknesses of his foe to his own advantage. to want he owes the greatest things that he has accomplished. by way of labor alone can victory over nature be achieved and salvation won. the standpoint of faith is childlike. faith does not reason, and may not do so if it wishes to remain faith. the child can comprehend nature and man's relation to it only by the language of faith, and there are large classes of people who, for a long time, will be accessible to no other language but this. but faith must decrease in the same ratio as mankind outgrows intellectual childhood. in the same measure, the worth of the philosophical solution of certain problems must increase; and among the most important of these problems must be reckoned that of bridging the chasm between the individual and the world, which has grown wider with the awakening of consciousness. it lies in the nature of self-conscious thought to reach out beyond itself, just as it lies in the nature of sense-perception to regard this "beyond" as the world to come. hence the endless longing which seeks the ruler of the world to come, and despairs without him; until the supposed right to a future life is perceived to be the right to the only whole, and an end is set in the attainment of this whole. for the thinking man an aimless life has no meaning; there is only one means of bridging the chasm; namely, that mankind shall set itself an end. a final destruction of life upon the earth must surely come, whether it be in the shape of a sudden catastrophe or as the result of a slow process. but such an end can no more be regarded as the "end" in the philosophical sense than death can be regarded, in the same sense, as the "end" of the individual life. by the development of ideas, which are concepts of reason in distinction from concepts of the understanding, we arrive at a notion of the ideal as end. in the ethical ideal, there is contained more than the empiricist can offer. the enthusiasm with which the true artist starves for his art, or the martyr perishes for his conviction, can never be fully explained from the empirical standpoint. one does not even need to be an idealist in order to act thus; but the materialist or the realist who possesses true love of beauty and a heart framed for great deeds, merely deceives himself when he refuses to acknowledge the all-embracing which therein overwhelms him. sociology and the history of civilization can only point out how man has attained to the ideas of the beautiful and the good; what these are and wherefore their influence is so powerful,--the real worth of the beautiful and the good,--thought by concepts alone can show. the idea of man, as he has already developed and may yet develop, is, as far as our knowledge reaches, the highest of human thoughts. we are therefore formulating no metaphysical theory in personifying mankind, and pointing out that the perfecting of which it is capable is the great end which it has set itself. we know, by our knowledge of human nature, that mankind will always endeavor to be happy, and that it will approach nearer perfection the more real and general its happiness becomes. the particular rules of morality may and must change; but the highest principle of all morality is changeless. from the purest moral feeling came schiller's words: "live with thy generation, but be not its creature; serve thy contemporaries, but in that which they need, not that which they prize. without having shared their guilt, share with noble resignation their punishments, and yield thyself freely to the yoke which they both illy could do without and illy bear. by the steadfast courage with which thou refusest their pleasure, thou shalt prove to them that it is not cowardice which causes thy submission." in these three sentences there lies a whole system of ethics. in the will to good, indivisible from a feeling of freedom, of which no power on earth can rob us, lies true happiness. for mind, as for matter, the law of the indestructibility of force, of work, is true. that which appears as force or energy is motion; every impulse to motion is motion, and only in so far as it appears, can the quantity of motion, force, energy, increase or diminish; as a matter of fact, it always remains the same. but just as the activity and force of matter increase with its differentiation, so the activity and energy of the mind increase with intelligence. it is through intelligence that we come to a comprehension of the distinction between good and evil, and through intelligence that we are able to increase social prosperity, and so morality. there are no innate, primary human rights; there are only acquired rights which man has gained for himself in the process of development. if we were to express negatively the end which mankind sets itself, we should define it as the greatest possible reduction of pain. conscious existence is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure; but the general progress heedlessly overrides the individual being, and we therefore have to erect barriers against the stream which thus turns pleasure into pain. pain and pleasure are relative to the individual. every sensation is pleasurable as long as it does not exceed in strength a certain limit corresponding, in each case, to the nature of the individual. since, however, every sensation becomes, by perception, feeling, thought appears as a modifying factor in all pain which does not arise from too extreme physical injury. the manner in which our perceptions, thought-images, are formed, the store of thought-images and concepts which we possess, and hence our thought-capacity, combined with the extent and clearness of our knowledge, are decisive not only with respect to the avoidance of pain and attainment of pleasure, but also with respect to our attitude towards pain and pleasure in general; every pain and every pleasure has, in the last analysis, such worth alone as we attribute to it. the universalization of true education, the increase of intelligence, is, therefore, the means by which man's lot may be bettered. through the conditions of the earth's atmosphere, man has grown to be the glorious creature that he is. if we gradually give him, by education, an advantageous love of life and pleasure therein, and at the same time do not neglect the cultivation of ethical principles, virtue will become, with the increase of happiness, a necessity. if intelligence is to bear the fruit which we thus demand of it, its nature must be such as not only to be nourished by actual life, but also to uplift by its increase the whole man. and this is, in fact, the case; where it is not so, we have to do with a one-sided development such as existing circumstances often condition, but which cannot be regarded as normal. this point of view is the necessary consequence of the unity which we postulate of man. if thought and will have their origin in feeling, and if will clarifies itself through the clarification of thought, then all advance in thought leads, in general, to an advance in feeling, and true intelligence is inseparable from true love. we use the word "love" here, as designating intelligence in its highest sense, and declare, moreover, that we would desire to see this meaning alone attached to love. over against the conception of love which we find in hartmann and schopenhauer, we place the conception of spinoza, who designates it as a free, reasonable activity, and says of it as distinguished from passion that "the love of both man and wife has for its cause, not a pleasing exterior merely, but especially freedom of soul." if we regard intelligence and love in their highest antithesis, the one appears as the appropriative, the other as the self-devoting conception of things. but since we form a conception of things and make them our own only in proportion to our intelligence, our attitude towards them must be according to this measure; and since there is no action without reaction, intelligence must be broadened by love as well as love clarified by intelligence. the highest of all is intelligence; but it is love that first lends it creative power; without love it cannot create, but only destroy. everything great and noble that man can point out as his work is due to love--love of mankind, love of country, love of knowledge, love of art, love of labor in general. if the devotion is deficient in purity, determined by extraneous motives, the work will bear marks of the deficiency. the reason why the power of love is so much greater than every other power is that its all-embracing, boundless character reacts upon it as a feeling of eternity, enabling it to undertake all things, as if it might conquer even death. life, considered in its parts, is cheerless; but love, regarding it in its totality, points out to it the way of salvation through itself. love is the concrete element which exalts the abstraction of intelligence to incarnate idea; therefore is love the idealizing principle from which intelligence draws belief in its own aims. and if one questions whence comes the conception of immortality, impossible to be won from experience, love must confess itself guilty of originating it, being unable, to exist without this self-delusion. carneri thus places himself in direct opposition to schopenhauer's and hartmann's notion of love, which, he says, "falls like a deep shadow over their whole conception of the world"; and he pleads in favor of a standpoint which shall make self-perfection the aim of existence for woman as for man. he propounds a theory of education for woman which, according to his own statement, places him at one in spirit with mill; but he avers that he cannot follow the latter in his more extreme views, which, he says, were evidently assumed by mill only in view of the strength of the enemy with which he had to contend. the book ends with the following paragraph:-- "we do not run after ideals; hence no plan floats before us, according to which the world should be shaped anew. he who understands how to read the book of history knows that, in no one place does the identity of form and content come more clearly into view than in others, and that, with every new content, there is always a new form also. the modern state has by no means outlived itself yet, and those who endeavor to do away with it know not what they are about. instead of thinking upon a new form, let us devote our care to the clarification of the content. no one deceives himself as to the suffering in the world; but he deceives himself who thinks that he alone can bring about a better condition. only the action of all can better things. therefore, that which remains for us to do can be summed up in these few words: _let us make every effort possible to place every one in a position to help himself._ this is the only ethical conception of universal reform. let us prize knowledge above all things, and let us show that we so prize it by increasing it and diffusing it as much as lies in our power; let us prize it above all things, and prove that we do so by using it for the good of mankind. by knowledge we have become human beings, because knowledge has brought us to a comprehension of the beautiful and the good. it is knowledge that sets life an end in the attainment of the good, and knowledge that glorifies our path to that end. let us educate for ourselves wives that shall not merely dimly feel what we think, but such as will bring to the execution of our will a clear understanding. let us educate for ourselves wives who, fired by the same feelings as our own, will unite their efforts with ours in the education of a generation that shall take _morally_ the stand upon which the science of the century finds itself. let us seek true happiness if we would find virtue. it is to no wisdom, but it is likewise to no foolishness that we owe the existence of the world. man can be foolish; but he can also be wise; and if he is wise, then the world too is wisely arranged." carneri begins his "first principles of ethics" ("grundlegung der ethik," ) with an investigation of the origin of primary concepts and our knowledge through these. in order to bring light into our conception, we must first of all learn the way to the concept; for then only can we see how the concept completes itself in the judgment, and becomes, in reasoning, the criterion of its own worth. the problem which first presents itself to us is that of life in general. the problem is inseparable from that of corporeality. if we follow phenomena to their last conceivable reduction, we finally pass from the perception of mass to the concept of matter; but further than this we cannot go. at least, we can perceive only material things, and that which we call the spiritual in distinction from the corporeal has always something corporeal as its basis; and if we do not wish to dispense with the reliable guidance of experience, we shall not overleap this barrier. science cannot reckon with supernatural factors. what matter _is_ we cannot know; that it exists, however, that the phenomena of nature are no empty seeming, sensation, as the felt result of the mutual relation between us and the outer world, testifies. sensation is the basis of our self-consciousness, of the only full and irrefutable certainty that we possess. as to what true being or existence is, there is disagreement; but there can be none regarding the fact that we are conscious of our sensations; and upon this consciousness rests the postulate of the materiality[ ] of all existence. in order to assert the materiality of all phenomena, we are forced to distinguish between a corporeal and a non-corporeal action of matter; matter operates mentally when its division or differentiation proceeds so far that the resulting phenomena can no longer be perceived by the senses, but only conceived by thought. the indivisibility of mind from corporeality follows directly from this definition of the mental side of nature. we distinguish between the two only for convenience' sake. the newer psychology knows nothing of sensuality in the old sense of the word, since the basis of all psychical effects is physical. for matter operating mentally, as for matter operating corporeally, there are no specific energies; it is, as wundt expresses it, functionally indifferent. the differing results of a high differentiation of centralized organisms arise in accordance with the changing combinations of elementary parts and nerve activities. these results are not, however, to be regarded as the mere effects of matter, but as phenomena of the same, in fact, as the consummation and crown of the whole evolution of nature. even in the sense-organs we see the differentiation of matter advance beyond the sphere of sense-perception. therefore, in distinguishing between mind and matter, we are still in the realm of the natural, and follow the path of experience, if by experience is understood not alone immediate experience, but also the conclusions which directly or by strict analogy may be drawn from it. the theory of an atom-soul and the theory of an organizing principle must be abandoned as teleological, and so inconsistent with the facts of evolution. the theory which holds force to be a transcendental existence, a something outside of matter, must also be rejected. with the endless divisibility is given an endless motion, inward or outward; the endlessly divisible matter exists in endless motion, or what is the same, the endless motion is the endlessly divided matter. hence motion, like matter, can never diminish; only the form of its appearance changes. the order in nature cannot be used as the basis of a teleological argument; what we call order of nature is necessity as distinguished from chance. for example, the statement that the life of the earth requires the alternation of day and night means merely that, since day and night alternate upon the earth, only such beings could arise and continue in existence thereon as flourish under this alternation. the first appearance of protoplasm introduces no strictly new thing, but only a new form of matter with life-motion; and the formation of germs is only a further step of the process. the most important characteristic of all life is sensation. this is the form in which, in all living things, that which in the rest of nature we call reaction, appears. that it is so easy for us to say in the same breath, the animal possesses sensation; and, by this particular excitation we produce in him this particular sensation, has its reason in the fact that the animal is not only capable of sensation, but is, moreover, continually in a state of sensation. by the fact of its continual reaction upon sensation, it keeps itself alive. hence the two concepts coincide, so to speak; sensation is to life what divisibility is to matter. we express with these words more than a similitude, since all sensation is based upon motion, is, indeed, motion, and every motion may be reduced to a division or differentiation in the broadest sense of the word. all further distinctions, as, for instance, with respect to the mode of sensation (which belongs, without doubt, to plants as well as to animals), we leave unnoticed; all differences in the forms of life are but those of degree, though they may be wide differences of degree; they are to be ascribed to the influence of outer circumstances. sensation develops in the direction of least resistance. in the animal world, we have to distinguish between outer and inner factors, with the latter of which a new element seems to be introduced. the difference between the two is not, however, one of essence, since the will, too, is determined by outward circumstance. the inner factors of evolution are comprised in the germ, from which the individual is produced; while the environment constitutes the outer factors. the individual enters the world with a certain reserve quantity of force, which represents his power of resistance to outside forces, and he passes the more rapidly from youth to age the more rapidly this force is consumed. this accumulation of force is, therefore, identical with the impulse to self-preservation, which, as modified by various inner and outer excitations, manifests itself in various forms. but he who, as unimpassioned thinker, desires progress, desires also retrogression; he who desires youth desires age, since the two concepts are correlative and the one includes the other; old age, and finally death, must come to our planet as a whole, as well as to the human individual. the original tendencies of the total character determine, for the most part, the manner in which the individual sustains the struggle for existence; yet the environment is in no less degree active in this determination. not less important than the manner of reaction is the differing susceptibility to particular kinds of excitation; the character resulting from the mutual action and reaction of individual and world depends upon the manner in which the individual adapts himself to circumstances, ennobles and disciplines himself. in idealism, as long as it remains within proper bounds, there is certainly truth; he who derides it, derides himself. but realism has also its truth, as long as it does not misjudge the worth of concepts, by which alone we clearly recognize what things are to us, what their relations to us are, and so how we have to deal with them. concrete concepts inform us as to what is true and what is not true in phenomena. there is no greater mistake than to suppose that what things are in themselves, not what they are for us, is of importance to us; as if we could have an interest in that which things are not for us. the decisive point is the fact that, not things as they appear to us, but their rightly conceived appearance, their appearance as understood by adequate concepts, is the beginning and end of knowledge. hence the true student of nature can no more do without the concept than the true philosopher can leave material perception out of account. stiff-necked materialism is as one-sided as old-time metaphysics; the one has no meaning for its form, the other no form for its content; the one is a corpse, the other a ghost, and each strives in vain to attain the warmth of life. natural science and philosophy must tread different paths, in so far as division of labor requires them to do so; but they labor at the two sides of one whole. nature is not a machine, but life in its fullest form, and the task set us is to understand her as she is, not to patch together a nature out of disconnected scraps. carneri adopts the definition given by claude bernard, to whom life is neither a principle nor a result, but a conflict. to the chemical synthesis, from which protoplasm results, is added, through mechanical integration, morphological synthesis, to whose special form inherited characteristics are related as elements. through the conflict within living forms, and between these and the rest of the world, motion, attaining to the character of function, appears as continuous consumption. destruction and renewal are inseparable correlative concepts. this fact is contained in the concept of the conservation of force, work, and motion. we may distinguish between ( ) latent life, such as that accumulated in the germ, ( ) the merely oscillating plant-life, and ( ) free animal life. with this distinction, we place ourselves upon the standpoint of the individual, for whom there is both beginning and end, and to whom renewal is subordinated to destruction; for consumption, death is the characteristic of living in distinction from non-living matter. if, therefore, we regard life as identical with death, we merely assert that we consider death identical with life, and that, in the broader sense of the word, for the universe as a whole, there is no death. that which claude bernard designates as construction is the differentiation and division of labor arising in the process of integration. the cell constitutes the first integration of protoplasm. in it, motion takes place in a particular form, organizes according to this form, causes division and synthesis, and impresses features of character that, by their action and reaction with the environment, either effect their own destruction, or else maintain their existence, propagate themselves, become fixed, and undergo further evolution. in this manner species arise and vary: and the more primitive the form, the more variable it is; the more advanced, the more fixed. hence the invariable character of the germ-cells. in bone-formation, it is clearly shown that special structure begins very early,--in the cell, namely; but it is preserved only where it is aided by the necessary action and reaction. autonomic in itself, life submits itself to the general laws of evolution.[ ] as the direction of motion is determined for whole groups of cells by the direction of the motion of the protoplasm in the single cells, so organic function is determined by the grouping of the irritable, contractile, sensible cells. from the first origin of life up to its most perfect development, everything is formed at the cost of other forms. if life is, therefore, to be conceived as a conflict, it is a conflict as wide as the universe itself, and we say, with claude bernard, that "life may be characterized, but not defined." everything that has sensation lives. as life depends upon particular combinations of particular elements, so sensation is the characteristic mark of such combinations, and a higher form of that simple reaction common to nature in general. reaction has its reason in the motion arising from the endless divisibility of matter, through which the most different combinations and reactions are produced. since we have before us, in our contemplation of corporeal nature, not abstract matter in general, but some sixty or more special chemical elements, we must, in thinking of atoms, have in mind atoms of these particular elements, and not atoms of abstract matter in general; of such atoms of matter in general, or, if one will, of primordial matter, we can know only that they would in general attract and repel. only by degrees can a particular reaction of the elements have been developed; and since our known elements have particular different reactions, they must be the product of different combinations. sensation is due to certain combinations of these elements; when the combinations no longer exist, the atoms of these elements still react according to their characteristic method as atoms of particular elements, but the sensation dependent on their peculiar combinations is destroyed. the atom as such is devoid of sensation, and we may convert our earlier proposition, making it read: only that which lives is sensible. we know quite well how much of this course of reasoning is of hypothetic nature; but the strictest consistency cannot be denied it. the method which explains life by the assumption of sensible atoms is a much shorter and easier one; but is it not likewise a method of greater risk? and is there no danger that, in rejecting a method by which all changes in phenomena are referred to functions of combinations of elements, we may seek, in matter itself, something that is not matter? the above theory of life, also, takes its departure from the assumption that all was, originally, in the formation of the world, living in the broader sense of the word. but here we are concerned with life in the narrower sense of the word, as distinguished from what we call dead nature. soul is, therefore, according to our definition, equivalent to animal life, in contrast to the life of the plant. the significance of the distinction lies in the intermediation of the general organic unity, not in a qualitative division. the elements are the same; only their connection is different, and that which distinguishes the animal is a centralization of the organs. in referring to the possession of soul by the animal, we simply point out the independent manner in which, by reason of sensation, its impulses govern, and develop, through the scale, up to consciousness and will. of course the gradations are very numerous, inasmuch as the functions of the soul are determined by the development of the organism. the difference between animals whose sensation attains clear consciousness and such as do not attain to more than a mechanical action, does not concern us, as long as we regard the psychical phenomena in their most general form. every animal possesses soul; we avoid the expression "_a_ soul," as giving the soul the significance of something by itself. in like manner, we do not say that _a_ life, but that life belongs to the animal. the chief condition necessary to soul as to life consists in union to a whole, and soul represents the gradation by which life lifts itself to the plane where it becomes a mirror of the world. sensation, as centralized in the brain, becomes perception, the sensation of a part becoming the sensation of the whole, a _feeling_ of the individual. it is perceptions which cause movement. to find a connection between perception as generally understood and the action of the muscle would be as difficult as to show the connection between body and soul in the sense of spirit. but if we regard perception as feeling, then the awakening of a corresponding impulse, and the transformation of this into will, which finds expression in a corresponding motion, is something so natural that it needs but a glance at the nerve-apparatus in order to comprehend the rapidity of the whole process. with regard to the unconscious character of the greater part of the process, and its corresponding rapidity, we have to consider the gradual nature of the development of the nervous system, the gradual drill of the parts, until the whole process becomes perfect. by feeling is here not meant necessarily feeling as pain or pleasure. this quality of feeling does not necessarily belong to every perception, else thought, as a train of perceptions, would be unbearable; a certain strength of feeling is necessary in order that it may attain the character of pain or pleasure; as we recognize a boundary at which sensation begins, so we recognize one at which feeling begins to attain the character of pleasure and from which, up to a second boundary-line, it continues to appear as pleasure; beyond this line it appears as pain. moderate feeling is beneficial to the organism, immoderate feeling harmful; hence the appearance of the one as pleasure, and of the other as pain. we say expressly "moderate," not "weak" feeling, because too weak feeling may also, under certain conditions, be painful. horwicz rightly protests against any attempt to arrange the feelings in an exact scale, since a particular feeling may lead to quite different phenomena of emotion, according to the particular circumstances and the particular development which it undergoes in the organism, and since it is furthermore nothing changeless and distinct, but merely an energy that necessarily leads to activity. hence it is that the excitation which does not pass the stage of sensation remains localized, but when it attains to the stage of feeling takes possession of the whole individual, and brings the essential tendency of his being[ ] to expression. as carneri tends to interpret the sensation which he predicates of the lower animals as a mere higher reaction of living matter, and thus wholly mechanical, so he tends to regard the activity of all animals which lack brain (under which he understands especially the nervous developments found in the gray matter which contains haeckel's "soul-cells") as devoid of pleasure and pain, and due to mere inheritance and force of habit. so the action of the ants is not to be attributed to intelligence, but to mere reaction upon sensation due to inheritance and exercise; and so the movements of a butterfly impaled upon a red-hot needle would be attributable to the hindrance of its flight, not to pain.[ ] thus, with carneri, the words "sensation," "soul," "perception," and "feeling," lose their ordinary significance; and this fact must be held in mind in the interpretation of his assertions that "all animals have soul," and "all animals have sensation." carneri further cites haeckel's definition of the organism as a cell-monarchy, in which different individuals, and different groups of individuals, having different duties, are guided by a central power. he does not intend thus to assume special centres for consciousness and will, but only to assert that, through such centralization, the expression of the whole individual, as total consciousness and total will, takes place. not only the brain, but other parts of the nervous system, are affected in perception; and the same parts are operative in remembrance. thus the association of ideas is explained. as long as the animal remains upon the plane of mere instinct, it has only blind impulses.[ ] only in the most highly organized animals do we find the first traces of conscious, though not yet of self-conscious, will. in that the animal knows what it will, it distinguishes clearly the objects of its will, and hence its own impulses. upon the earlier plane of mere self-preservation, the beneficial, harmful, and indifferent were not yet made inward, but only distinguished outwardly by nature in the struggle for existence, in which the fittest survived; in consciousness, however, the harmful and advantageous become inward, taking the form of pain and pleasure. but the animal never gets beyond the concrete case,--in which his inherited instincts, working with a rapidity and freedom we often see imitated in the passions of men, sometimes act so advantageously as almost to deceive us into believing them the result of reflection; yet sometimes, again, bring most disastrous results. the animal never attains to a notion of the whole. associations and general perceptions the higher animal species have, but not concepts. impulses appear, in their primary form in the animals, as passions.[ ] the first beginning of the ethical may be found in the passion of love in the broadest sense of the word, as sexual love and the love of offspring. the first is chiefly exacting, the second is higher, in that it gives. that which divides man physically from the brutes is merely the union of qualities, all of which, but never all of which united, we find among the animals; that which divides him mentally from them is self-conscious thought, developed by means of speech. through the development of attention, which arises in connection with a greater and greater centralization, sensation becomes perception, this develops further to general perceptions, and is still further perfected to concepts. carneri believes primitive man to have been, not more benevolent than the animals, but less so. leaving out of account the carnivorous animals, the brutes seem to satisfy their own wants without interfering with the satisfaction of others, and, except where the possession of females is concerned, to live in peace with each other. on the other hand, the influence of man upon the domestic animals may be seen in the greed of the dog, who, as capable of instruction, takes on himself all the evil qualities of his master. the cat, who is not so intelligent as the dog, is not thus influenced. for nature there is no good and evil. the animal which tears and devours its prey is no worse than the swollen stream, that uproots the trees in its course. with consciousness, intention awakes; yet in the brute this is only secondary; the brute distinguishes between pain and pleasure, but not between these as the result of its own action in distinction from that of nature outside itself. only the self-consciousness of the human being knows good and evil; nature does not know evil, for she does not know the opposition on which it is based. there is wisdom in the story of genesis, which sees in the beginning of knowledge, the commencement of evil. the awakening of self-feeling is the beginning of a chasm, through the full development of which the individual is at length separated from nature. with self-consciousness and the feeling of boundless isolation that therein comes over him, man begins his ethical development. but the ethical does not begin with the human being known to us by natural history; even yet there are races of man which stand lower than many species of animals; and the early development of moral activity was of necessity much more of the nature of that which we call evil than of that which we call good. the mind is a sort of light; and as warmth is indivisible from the motion which we call light, and the first warmth of the sun could only burn, so the motion which we call mind could at first only have destroyed; self-consciousness, in its earliest stages, can have produced only the intense feelings which lie nearer pain than pleasure. as man came to have intention, and gained new wants in development, he could regard the intentions of his fellow-men only with distrust. envy, hatred, dislike, were developed long before the family, and, later, the tribe furnished opportunity for love. self-consciousness could, at first, interpret good and evil only as having reference to self, just as it also conceived its freedom as that of its own caprice. the desire for happiness and endeavor to attain it is the primary incentive to all human undertakings. it is erroneous to suppose that man is nearer to the brutes by this impulse; the animal does not possess it, has only the impulse to self-preservation. the idea that man and wife together first constitute the complete human being, and that the real future of this human being lies in the children--the idea of the family is, certainly, of all ideas, primordial, though it probably came late to consciousness. from the family developed the tribe with the eldest at its head. the more peaceful the tribe, the more others combined against it, and by their combination compelled it still further to strengthen its resources. the feeling of power awakened by the growing concord extended further and further, and finally made its way to the individual with the full force of the idea. this development, but more especially the compelling power of the struggle for existence, soon called the bravest to command in place of the eldest of the tribe. it is by the agency of no other being that, in the mutual relation of physical and mental activity, consciousness is attained; man himself comes to a feeling of himself. in the being endowed with soul, who on the one hand attains, through integration, an independence that appears as the impulse to self-preservation, on the other hand becomes conscious of this impulse to self-preservation through a centralized nervous system that raises the part-sensations to feelings of the whole, sensation divides into two chief functions, which appear as passion and thought. we are not concerned, in thought and passion, with opposites, but with an opposition which a single phenomenon develops through manifold action and reaction with the rest of the world of phenomena. the distinction is merely a convenience in finer investigations; there is, in fact, as little thought without emotion as emotion without thought. and since emotion always manifests itself as will, this highest opposition is best defined as that of thought and will. in order to understand the human being, we must analyze these two sides of consciousness. carneri's examination of the primary laws of thought can be only touched upon here. in the law of identity, or, negatively speaking, the law of consistency,[ ] there comes to our consciousness a more general species which includes a determinate species. "the adequate, clear, correct, corresponding[ ] concept is consistent with itself," means, the adequate concept finds itself again in every object which it includes. the law of identity expresses, therefore, not entire sameness, with which the cessation of all thought would be reached, but simple consistency. it affords us, thus, the means of recognizing the untrue in that which is not what it is called, hence also the means of recognizing the true. the law of excluded middle contains an extension or doubling of the law of identity, in that the identity here appears, not in the form of consistency, but in that of contradiction; as, "either--or." not one, but two cases are supposed, only one of which can exist or be true. the disjunctive proposition which corresponds to it is not less determinate than the categorical proposition which corresponds to the law or judgment of identity, but is rather, on the contrary, a more forcible affirmation of it. in this determinate nature lies the worth of the excluded middle. du bois raymond's address on the limits of knowledge has caused much joy to conservative thinkers; but these have made much more out of it than it really means. there is either for us a transcendental, or there is not; and if not, then we are limited to the knowledge of nature. the scientific limit set to our knowledge by our hypotheses and theories is, however, merely a limit set for the purpose of rounding knowledge to a whole, not of closing it to a further advancement; but such hypotheses must be consistent with experience and founded upon it; otherwise we leave knowledge behind us and abandon the hope of it. we cannot say what, within the province of science, man will not know, except that he never will know everything. the law of causality is the most important law of thought, after that of identity. reason and result are often confused with cause and effect. the reason on account of which we do a thing is not, however, the cause by which it occurs. the cause is the complexity of all conditions which make it possible, and the reason of its performance coincides with a conscious design on our part that constitutes our purpose. causality has nothing in common with the concept of purpose. the principal of sufficient reason has been made the bridge between causality and design. probably human experience reached first the conception that nothing occurs without sufficient reason, and only later, by a further mental step, the conviction that everything for which the necessary conditions exist takes place. with this conviction, the concept of causality became clear; but, at the same time the bridge which connects it with the theory of design in the succession of events was destroyed, so that only a logical leap can restore us to this incomplete conception of earlier experience. causal necessity excludes purposed necessity. that which takes place may be regarded as, in one direction, conformable to an end, but may, on the other hand, conform to no end in any direction. a succession of events conforms to purpose only in so far as it is regarded by a particular consciousness which combines it in thought with ends of its own or such as it ascribes to another consciousness. in the law of causality, as in the law of identity, the necessity of self-consistency and the self-consistency of necessity reaches expression. the sufficient reason is simply the completeness of the conditions, with the existence of which the event takes place, and the absence of which the event fails to take place. spinoza's "will and intellect are one and the same" is the ethical law of identity. all thought is willed; that is, indivisible from a certain coloring which it has in virtue of its identity with the will, just as all will is connected with thought; there is, indeed, a will-less thought, which might, however, just as correctly be called "unthinking thought,"[ ] just as "unthinking willing" is, in reality, will-less willing. in all mental operations, the identity of the two functions is found. a will is unthinkable without something willed--an end, given by thought. it is the fact that, in his practical life, man recognizes purpose as a necessity, which causes him to read purpose into nature. "at the basis of identity lies a concept which throws light upon the teleological principle. this is the concept of the general. the basis of the principle of identity is a concept of species which embraces the general in contrast to the singular and particular; just as the judgment of identity constitutes an advance to still greater generality. the concept of the general which reaches expression in species coincides with the concept: law of nature. the law is, for a particular circle of events, what the species is for a particular circle of objects. as in the species, the characteristics are expressed which an object must exhibit in order to belong to it, so in the law the conditions are expressed which much exist in order that the instance included under it may take place. the relation of identity to causality is unmistakable. species and law include no mere plurality of objects and instances, for as often as the instance comes to pass the law is fulfilled, and the number belonging to a species is, in conception, limitless. worlds like our earth may come into existence again and again; hence specimens of a certain species, eternally destroyed, may eternally renew themselves, and instances which fall under a certain law may eternally occur. simply their conditions must exist in order that they may occur. such cases form, therefore, a whole; and this is totality in little." the importance of every whole which sets itself over against the greater whole has already been noticed. the former whole constitutes the concept of individuality which, as undivided unity, becomes independent. "the limitlessness which we claim for the whole is one of conception; we thus seek to make that which is incomprehensible conceivable." the concept does not need to be imagined; it may be thought. "every one knows what he means when he opposes the whole to the part. the whole is not a larger part, but the opposite of the part, as 'all' constitutes the opposite of the many and the particular." what we aim at, in this analysis, is a true realism in the conception of the purposeful. the purposeful is that which conduces to an end, the useful. from individuality follows the individual nature of ends. every man has his own ends, and in the attempt to attain his ends does not hesitate to set himself in opposition to all the rest of mankind. if he is sufficiently energetic and cunning, he may even succeed, for a time, in his endeavors, to the harm of humanity. yet to have the whole of humanity against oneself is to endeavor to proceed in the direction of greater resistance, and the process must, sooner or later, result in the triumph of the stronger power. in the struggle for existence, in its larger as well as its smaller manifestations, the individual seeks, with all his power, to satisfy the impulse to happiness which arises with conscious existence; while the species, as the complex of all energies developed by its parts, has an impulse to self-preservation of its own, which, by its action as type, has originated and preserved for centuries the conception of changeless kind. "here is the beginning of the dawn, whose sun, however, in order to become visible and impart warmth, must rise still higher. the certainty afforded in the law of identity in positive form, in the law of contradiction in negative form, in the law of excluded middle in the form of an opposition, and in the law of sufficient reason in conditional form, is based upon causality, community of species, or totality. for this reason, deduction and induction are only then to be relied upon when the first form of reasoning has for its middle proposition one that expresses causality, community of species, or totality, and the latter form of reasoning takes these for its point of departure. the analysis of deduction is of worth as clarifying and confirming thought, and thus extending its field as often as the syntheses of induction stand the proof of the process of clarification. the supernaturalism of dualism leads to a dead, the natural character of monism to a living, dialectic,--to the dialectic of becoming. the concept assumes a concrete form, and, as higher and higher rising sun, enables us to conceive what it will be to us as idea. the understanding knows nothing of ideas; their realm is that of the reason; yet since the reason is but a higher development of the understanding, the commencement of this dawn must be perceptible in it. moreover, the division which we make between the two originates in our genetic treatment of the subject, which seeks to explain the concept by showing the course of its development. yet the distinction is no empty abstraction which may not claim life and form to a certain extent. the human being is always the whole human being; but he is not always uniformly developed, either physically or mentally. in one individual the understanding, in another the reason, manifests itself more plainly in thought. this is also true of the race, the people, and the epoch, as of the individual. modern development has turned more and more from the ideal to material interests; we seem to be progressing towards a reaction," but what that reaction will be, we cannot say; it may be a reaction in the worst sense. the mistakes of the understanding cannot be predicted. with the point of culmination, the extreme is reached, and in spiritualism may be found traces of a touching of extremes. yet the influence of the understanding is to be relied on in so far as it is the clear mirror of necessity. the understanding may err, just because it is conscious; but experience always corrects these mistakes. nature, as gifted with mind, is no new nature; the laws of thought are the natural laws of the mind. in their mirror the will sees the accomplishment of the first mental development, and learns to comprehend this, on higher mental planes, as common weal. the opposition of the individual to the rest of the world which arises with self-consciousness and individuality is greater, the greater the individuality. to the struggle for existence is added the struggle for happiness, which, separating into numberless desires that gain in attractiveness with every obstacle opposed to their satisfaction, is the origin of all the passions,--of greed, jealousy, envy, hatred, etc. through passion, which is the exaggeration of activities that, in a normal form, are good, man is led into a struggle for false happiness, just as the concepts under which his passions arise are false. the individual against the world cannot attain happiness for himself. the greatest good, peace of soul, freedom from passion, is attained only through knowledge, by which the concepts of the individual are corrected; it is attained, not as dead incapability of emotion, but only as clear enjoyment of life after past storm. labor and education are the path to true happiness and, through true happiness, to virtue. the passions are not separate existences; the whole man is the passion of his heart; the whole man feels, just as the whole man thinks. but just for this reason, because of the identity of will and understanding, the correction of the concept is the correction of will. this is not saying that will and understanding are never in opposition to each other; the apparent opposition is, however, merely a hesitation of the will, which does not know what it really will. it is true that one passion can be conquered only by another; we cannot will an emotion that leads to a certain course of action; but we can fix our attention on the objects which produce it, and by thus reaching a clear recognition of their actual and necessary relations, affect our own action. it is true that man does as he wills; but he wills necessarily as he does. according to the doctrine of freedom, it must be exactly those who act without knowing wherefore they act, and who are thus driven by blind impulse, who are the most fully self-determined. a real freedom and conquest of necessity can, on the contrary, be attained only by obedience. just as, in the animal, the summation of impulses and desires reaches a focus in feeling, so in man, in proportion to his development, the summation is in consciousness, the focus of which is the point of concentration of the will's activity. spinoza's "will and understanding are one" means: the activity of the will is the realization of the activity of thought. every one, the more self-sacrificing, as the less self-sacrificing man, does that which is to him the pleasantest; egoism turns the scale in both cases; only in the one case the egoism has a basis of broader love. and since we act according to our conception of things, the question of our responsibility is the question of our full possession of consciousness. the necessity of nature must take away our desert, as far as a future life and its reward are concerned; but from the standpoint of a being who desires happiness and attains to it through evolution, necessity gains a new aspect. natural selection is natural necessity. yet not in the understanding, as such, but in the reason, is the reconciliation of the same with will. reason in the narrower sense is a higher development of the understanding, constitutes its completion and perfection, and presupposes a high degree of culture; though in a wider sense, as the half-unconscious modification of the impulses by adjustment to the needs of the species, it develops early in man. by it alone man becomes man in the full sense of the word. the activity of the mere understanding is an analytical, that of the reason a synthetical one, the return of cold consciousness to warm feeling, of abstract mind to concrete nature. truth lies, for the reason, in totality; hence, to it, the general alone is comprehensible. it has to do, not with abstract concepts, to which nothing in the realms of the mental or physical corresponds, but with concepts of species, concrete concepts, which we call, in distinction from abstract concepts, ideas. by ideas is not meant existences in the platonic sense, but the typical in species. the impulse to happiness which arises with consciousness as thought and will, calls itself "i." it is the individual who, with every nerve-cell and every drop of blood, attempts his own realization. but all individuals are alike in this, that they reach, at last, a point where they recognize the fact that their ego is but a miserable half which needs a thou to its completion. in the union of the thou and the i, the first i becomes a complete and perfect i. man and woman both realize that only together do they represent the whole human being. i and thou together constitute a we. the ego remains after, as before the union, the axis upon which the whole world turns. but the egoism of mere understanding is, by a broader thought, elevated to the altruism of reason. as the highest union of thought and will, the reason becomes idea in and for itself, actual, absolute idea. with the we was born the saviour who should reconcile the sharply opposed factors of awaking consciousness. the light of his gospel spread in wider and wider circles; man and woman no longer beheld, each, merely his own happiness in the other; they saw their mutual happiness in their children, and their own and their children's happiness in friends, and their own and their children's and their friends' happiness in their fellow-men. the i of the reason is the self-conscious we. the struggle for happiness has brought forth, out of the privileges and endeavors of individuals, civilization in its present form. want and the necessity for labor have been the spur to endeavor and advance. through the concepts of ends and of intention, the self-conscious will further evolved ideas, which themselves undergo a struggle in the activities to which they give rise; and this is no longer the struggle for existence, but the struggle for civilization. there are three ideas which, arising out of the extension of the i to thou and we, are the spring of all ethical conceptions; these are love, humanity, and public spirit.[ ] love is the passion of passions and is the spring of all capacity to altruistic emotion. love is life in its highest degree;[ ] and by the manner in which a human being loves one may know what manner of man he is, and what will be the nature of his feelings towards his fellow-men in other relations of life. a man's conduct towards women is the surest test of his character. that which spencer calls integration, that which has created all nature, from the first germ to the perfect human being, and, as preservative cell-labor, still continues to create,--this infinite something comes to consciousness in the human being, as love. on the lowest plane it can appear only as simple impulse; but what, developing from stage to stage, it can accomplish, the history of love shows us. to these three ideas of love, humanity (or benevolence), and public spirit correspond three outward phenomena, which bear such relation to them in the development of morality as the body bears to the soul. these are: the family, the state-form, and the representatives of great ideas. these latter, the men who have been pioneers of civilization, we do not need to pity or regard as victims, though life was to them a mighty struggle and a restless labor; in their suffering was their pleasure; and that which impelled them and compelled them to attain their end was the impulse to happiness. therein lies the wonderful secret of the clarified impulse to happiness, that it finds its highest satisfaction in itself. such representatives of great ideas are those in whom the species overcomes the individual, and out of the species "man" the species-man is developed. that which they express is the true, if only the true for, and in, mankind. in this lies their worth; as worth in science also, and in the beautiful, lies in the truth of the idea that is therein expressed. the true becomes practical in the good. the reason is thus the first condition of happiness, and freedom of the will lies in the ethical ennoblement of reason, which is nothing more nor less than obedience, as the total result of all natural causes; by it the individual is lost in the species as a whole. this ethical height does not consist in impulse, but in the self-conscious activity of will. its mental expression is an ethical sense, in distinction from the moral sense of the intuitionists. through it man is at one with himself as with his kind. the ethical sense is not the common property of the species. just as it has, however, reached expression in a few, so it is more and more realized in the many by the process of evolution, through which a common will, purpose, and good are necessarily finally evolved from all striving of individual wills after happiness. ethical ideas arise as the result of experience, and in them man gradually attains reason. for the reason to which love, public spirit, and humanity are the natural element, the general (common) as truth, is no empty conception, but a promise whose fulfilment is the good and the beautiful. the faithfulness of this reason never swerves, since it depends on no fear, but springs from the clearest conviction, and therefore is one with the love which it feels and inspires. its friendship is as strong as it is unselfish, for it does not call anything "friendship" that is based on other relations than those of mind. its generosity is always strength, its mercy never weakness. as far as its power reaches, so far and no farther do its remorse and pity extend; for all passions which reduce or dim the activity of the soul are unreasonable. the way to the attainment of the ethical spirit is pleasure, which guides, though it often misguides us; fortunately, on the wrong paths we sooner or later meet with pain, while on the right path we are ever accompanied by pleasure as "transition from less to greater perfection," to quote spinoza. the feeling of responsibility consists in the soul's recognition of all its action and omission of action as its own, and in the courage to endure the consequences of these. the ethical ideal, which the ethical imagination as "scientific" conceives, is the truly happy man, the man fully in harmony with himself. this idea is to be regarded as a star by which we are to shape our course, not as an end to be fully attained. through labor mankind approaches this ideal, attains knowledge from experience, and clarifies the concept of happiness. the "i" extends itself to an "i" of mankind, so that the individual, in making self his end, comes to make the whole of mankind his end. the ideal cannot be fully realized; the happiness of all cannot be attained; so that there is always choice between two evils, never choice of perfect good, and it is necessary to be content with the greatest good of the greatest number as principle of action. this is an ideal which is actually and necessarily evolved. benevolence has become more general, and has attained a degree not conceived of in former times. the ideal of a happy humanity has gained definite outlines, and has become an earnest aim towards which we steer with filling sails. the end is not to be reached by force, which brings in its train evil that cannot be gotten rid of for generations, but must be attained within the bounds prescribed by the state, through education and increase of intelligence. nor can the state declare and ensure happiness; the duties of the state are chiefly negative, as bentham has said. each individual sacrifices a portion of his happiness in order that the rest may be secured to him by the state; the first-named part comprises his duties, the rest constitutes his rights; the office of the state is to hold each to his duties and secure to each his rights. there is no perfect state, just as there is no perfectly good individual; but there is progress in states as in individuals. the merely useful can never furnish a full solution of the problem of ethics, any more than mathematics and mechanics or physics and physiology can do so. the perfect is much more than the merely useful. spencer finds the condition of happiness in the exercise of function. but he regards happiness as the final end of morality, while, according to our system, the latter is the product of the former. carneri again pleads, in this book, for the like right of woman with man to mental culture, and to labor which shall make her independent of the caprice of man; the good of the family alone to be regarded as the limiting factor. the extent of carneri's work on the subject of ethics makes it impossible to consider minor points of his theory, such as are included, for instance, in his criticism of hartmann, of schopenhauer, feuerbach, and others; or to define more clearly than has been done his relation to spinoza, kant, hegel, etc. his book "entwicklung und glückseligkeit," published in , is a collection of essays which first appeared separately in "kosmos," and which, as such, do not hold to each other the relation of parts of an organic whole. they are chiefly a recapitulation of the views already expressed in the "grundlegung der ethik," with some extensions and possibly some modifications;--these last, however, chiefly of an extraneous character. in these essays carneri demands a systematic moral training in the common school, to the end of the development of conscience, such training to be non-religious, though not anti-religious excepting in case the religion itself be seen to transgress the laws of right established by humane reason; he protests against the error of materialism, as likewise against that of the apriorists and the "ideologists" or idealists in the narrower sense of the word; and he reaffirms, defines, and further defends his standpoint as that of a "real-idealist"; that is, of one to whom kant is the point of departure in a farther evolution of theory. he reaffirms the oneness of the universe, so of man with nature, restates the self-identity of the individual in will and thought, limits the knowledge of man to nature as it is for us, but invests it with certainty within these bounds, and reasserts the necessity of the progress of the whole through the efforts of the many for happiness. he lays further stress upon the absence of morality, not only among the animals, in whom at least general ethical feelings, in distinction from those towards individuals, are not found, but also among savages; morality being not the incentive to, but the product of the state. from this standpoint, he combats socialism as proposing impossible ideals, since it presupposes ethically perfect men as governing and being governed by the laws, and since it disposes of the freedom of the individual. the theory of compulsion reckons without the will of man as he is and must be. man has no primordial rights (except, perhaps, the right to get and keep all he can); he has only rights that he has gained by the help of the state. there is no one commandment in which man's whole duty may be expressed, unless it be, perhaps, some such new rendering of kant's words as this: act always in such a manner that the maxims of thy will might be taken as the principle by which to render happy the greatest possible number of human beings. but this can never become a categorical imperative for all men. morality lies in the will to good, which becomes in the moral, or according to carneri's phrase, the ethical man, a second nature: his sense of duty is joy in duty, highest satisfaction of his desire for happiness. it might perhaps be claimed that carneri, in his theory of the conscience, has in this book laid more stress on feeling than in his others; however, it is to be recollected that, with him, thought and feeling are no distinct faculties, but that conscience means less an impulse unconscious of final ends than a self-conscious attitude or readiness of the will as the result of conviction. carneri's latest book, "die lebensführung des modernen menschen" ( ), is practical rather than theoretical, a consideration of general problems and rules of action. footnotes: [ ] wirklich. [ ] stofflichkeit; by this word carneri designates "das gemeinsame aller gegenständlichkeit." [ ] an sich autonom, unterwirft sich das leben den cesetzen, die aus der allgemeinen entwicklung sich ergeben. [ ] daseinstrieb. [ ] pp. , . [ ] dunkle triebe. [ ] affecte. [ ] widerspruchslosigkeit. [ ] entsprechend. [ ] gedankenloses denken. [ ] gemeinsinn oder gemeingeist, pp. , . carneri explains this word as equivalent to the english "common-sense," but defines the latter as feeling for the general, the universal. [ ] potenz. harald hÖffding "ethics" ("ethik," ) ethical judgments contain an estimate of the worth of human actions. every such estimate presupposes the existence of a need, a feeling which spurs us on to the judgment of the action, as also the existence of a standard, an ideal, according to which we judge. the motive to the ethical judgment may be called the basis of ethics. the standard involved in the ethical judgment determines the content of ethics, in that it decides which actions, which directions and modes of life, are to be called good in the ethical sense. the ethical basis is the subjective, the standard the objective, principle in ethics; the character of an ethical conception depends upon this presupposed basis, the applied standard, and the relation between the two. the feelings and impulses of the individual are not only influenced by his own experience, but bear also a character derived from the experience of the whole species; hence the ethical judgments delivered by the individual are the result of the whole experience of his kind. it is by virtue of this circumstance that the ethical system of the individual gains its power; as ethics of the species, it is a condition of the health and vitality of human life. this actual working ethics of the species and of life has been named positive morality. such positive morality manifests itself in the every-day judgments and principles of men, often in the form of proverbs, and may express either the enduring worldly wisdom of a nation, a tribe, or a religious society, or the less enduring "public opinion" of a century or an epoch. is it well to treat such positive morality to a criticism, which, arousing, as it must, doubts and questions, will interfere with the certainty and energy of action that characterize unreflecting instinct? is it well to examine the principles of such a system from a scientific standpoint? we may answer: life itself leads naturally to such questionings; only where the view is narrow and the problems simple is there full security from doubt. with the growth of experience begins a comparison of the different laws and ideals, the differing institutions of different epochs and peoples of which one learns; or new experience presents problems which cannot be solved by means of the system handed down; or the individual seeks some orderly arrangement of the great multiplicity of ethical judgments which he himself pronounces or hears others pronounce, for the purpose of distinguishing between the more and the less important ones. it is certainly a serious point in an individual's or a nation's development when reflection and criticism begin; but where life leads naturally to such questionings, we must either find some answer to them or else some reason why they shall not be answered. moreover, it is to be noticed that certainty and force of action are not absolute goods. the greatest energy may take a most disastrous direction, and must then be checked. to a new and better insight, when attained, one must endeavor to secure all the energy possible. all evolution consists in the diversion of energy from lower to higher ends. a scientific system of ethics does not, and cannot, take the place of positive morality; it only supplies the latter with a basis of reason, broadens, and develops it. such a scientific system only endeavors to discover in accordance with what principles we direct our life, and to secure for these, when ascertained, greater clearness and inner harmony. in the mental life of the human being, a continuous action and reaction of the conscious and the unconscious takes place, as well as of perception, feeling, and will. what is won in the one province may profit the others also. two tasks of scientific ethics, as historical ethics and as philosophical ethics, are to be distinguished. historical ethics has to do with the description and explanation of the development of positive morality. philosophical ethics has to decide upon the worth of the various forms assumed by the latter. philosophical ethics is a practical science, and is based upon the supposition that we set ourselves ends which may be reached through human action. every ethical judgment presupposes such an end, for feeling is set in motion by the sight or the thought of an act only when the latter promotes, or stands in the way of something, the existence and success of which are desired by us. not all that is developed as practical morality can be pronounced good. on the other hand, customs which were at first assumed from motives which must be condemned by philosophical ethics, may yet prove themselves good, and may be practised, later, from higher motives; and such customs cannot then be condemned on account of their origin. hence, philosophical ethics is both conservative and radical; it respects nothing simply because it exists; but since it endeavors to furnish guidance beyond present standards, it attempts to show how that which has been developed historically may be given new forms and thus used for further progress. it is difficult, from a broader view, to distinguish perfectly between historical and philosophical ethics; the historian has an ideal which he applies more or less in his researches; and the philosopher in ethics is more or less ruled by the prevailing opinions of his time. this necessitates a continual re-discussion of problems. yet it does not prevent the existence, in any system, of lasting principles among the less enduring ones. theological ethics is directly opposed to historical ethics as well as to philosophical ethics. it builds upon tradition, upon truth as something historically revealed. so far, it might appear as if theological ethics were related to historical ethics. but the system of the former does not recognize the method of scientific research, since the revelation on which it is based is due, according to its doctrine, to an interposition of supernatural forces not to be explained by the physical, psychological, and social laws that serve as the foundation of historical science. it demands a unique position for its historical basis, and asserts that this must be looked at in an entirely different light from that in which the rest of the history of the world is regarded. it appears to approach philosophical ethics in instituting an examination of the worth of historic acts and modes of life. but it undertakes this examination, not according to any principle that can be found in nature, but from the point of view of a supernatural revelation of an ideal. its foundation is an absolute principle of authority; its good is that which is god's will. but how is the individual to be sure as to what, in the single case, is god's will? by the inward testimony? how is he to distinguish certainly between such and his own natural thoughts and feelings; what means of distinction can be applied? in passing thus to the province of psychology, we assume a human means of distinction, and the principle of authority loses its force. or if it be said that we should receive this principle of authority because it answers to a need of our nature, we may ask how we know that the need is one that should be satisfied? its mere existence cannot guarantee that. or how, then, are we to distinguish which of other wishes and needs of our nature should, and which should not, be gratified? is the principle of authority to decide this? then we argue in a circle. a similar circle is adopted by such theologians as attempt to combine the two assertions: "the good is good because god wills it"; and "god wills it because it is good." if the good is identical with god's will, this means that he wills it because it is his will; if he, however, first recognizes something as good, and therefore wills it, then his will bows to a law and rule, and is not, in itself, the cause whereby the good is good. have we not, as a fact, already broken with the absolute principle of authority as soon as we begin to reflect, to endeavor to bring the various commandments of authority into harmony with each other, thus applying the measure of our own reason to them? but it is not these inner contradictions alone which hinder philosophical ethics from making use of theological assumptions; that which has called philosophical ethics into existence and lends it interest, is the conviction that the ultimate reason of the ethical must lie in man himself. however lofty may be the ideal, it can become man's ideal only through his own recognition of it as ideal. for this reason socrates was the founder of ethics by the command: "know thyself!" in this command is expressed the principle of free investigation, the opposite to that of blind obedience. the desire to make ethics as far as possible independent of assailable assumptions is likewise active in the establishment of a system of philosophical ethics. in the great, sometimes too great, regard paid to the distinction between the subjective and the objective worth of actions, and the contest as to the relative importance of the two factors, the fact is often overlooked, that the standard by which ethical judgment is pronounced is itself of subjective nature. the question arises as to wherefore we seek a general and objective standard. it is a fact that human beings reflect upon their own acts, pronouncing them, according to the result of this reflection, good or bad. how are such judgments as these possible? we will suppose, first, the simplest conceivable case, namely, that the acting subject pronounces judgment on his own act without consideration of the existence of other beings. such a judgment must presuppose memory; but it presupposes something more, namely pain or pleasure through memory; an end is aimed at only because the thought of a result causes pleasure. in the simple case supposed, the feeling which determines the end can be only that of the individual himself, and the latter will judge the act as good or bad according as it has affected his own life. the character and significance of the judgment will depend on whether the feeling of pain or pleasure is determined only by the single moment or has reference to the life of the individual as a whole. the lower the life of consciousness, the more isolated and independent are the single moments of time in relation to each other, and the less is the significance of the memory and the thought of the ego as a whole embracing the single moments with their content. only a half-unconscious instinct hinders the individual from losing himself in the moment; the instinct of self-preservation leads him to consider the future and to make use of the experience of the past. the more he loses himself in the moment, the less is the power of judgment, since comparison and action and reaction of the different states cannot take place. the single moment bears to all others the relation of an absolute egoist, who does not wish to relinquish any part of its satisfaction for their advantage. and here we may perceive the possibility of a standpoint upon which all judgment is dispensed with. such a standpoint is represented by aristippus of cyrene, who asserts the sovereignty of the moment. it is not without its justification. ethics itself must show cause for the relinquishment of the satisfaction of the moment in favor of other moments. if the principle of the sovereignty of the moment could be practically carried out, no reasoning could overthrow it. however, there can scarcely be a conscious individual in whom there are not instincts and impulses which reach beyond the moment. when a momentary state of feeling, as the effect of an act of the subject, comes together in consciousness with the feeling determined by the conception of the life as totality (the result of memory and comparison), a new feeling arises which is either one of harmony or one of discord. the standard by which judgment is pronounced is determined by this feeling. the capacity for such feelings is conscience, as this may manifest itself in entirely isolated individuals. conscience, in the broadest sense of the word, is a feeling of relations, and requires only a relation between central and peripheral feelings,--feelings of wider, and feelings of narrower thought-connection. the single moment and the single act are judged according to their worth as parts of the individual life as totality. and here the individual is confronted by the necessity of bringing the single parts of his life into harmony. the problem is certainly never solved by any individual involuntarily. the estimation of earlier acts according to the assistance they give in this task is, therefore, at this point, of great importance to the individual. the judgment pronounced is thus not only made possible through the central feeling which corresponds to the life as totality, but is determined by it. an acute sense for that which benefits the individual life whose single members are the moments, is a condition of the continuance and development of the life; it is a higher sort of instinct of self-preservation, and need not be confined to the continuance of physical life, but may also refer to the ideal needs. and here we come upon the standpoint of individualistic ethics. from such a standpoint, the problem is to determine, not only how much energy may be used in the single moments of time, but also in what manner it should be used in order to secure as great variety and many-sidedness as may be consistent with the interests of the life as totality. nor are the interests of the life to be summed up in physical self-preservation; the individual acquires, in the natural course of things, interests of increased ideality and complexity, through which the life gains in content. the ethical law, from the standpoint of individualism, is expressed by a formula which requires harmonious relation between the interest of the life as totality and the impulse of the moment; it consists of two chief mandates: ( ) the single instant should have no greater independence than corresponds to its significance in the life as totality; ( ) but, on the other hand, the single moments should be as richly and intensely lived as is consistent with the preservation of the life's totality. of individualism, or the principle of the sovereignty of the individual, the same is true as of the sovereignty of the moment, that no reasoning can overthrow it; if the individual recognizes no end but his own life, there is no logical way of transition to another standpoint. a change of aim can take place only through such a change in the central feelings which determine the standard of the individual that a wider circle of conceptions enter into his reflections. until this takes place, there is no use in appealing to conscience. the science of ethics has often claimed to be a science of pure reason. this claim is opposed to its character as a practical science, since action can be judged only according to the ends it had in view, and ends presuppose feelings of pain and pleasure. on the other hand, there is, in the mere capacity for pain and pleasure, no limitation of the extent of the circle of conceptions with which the feelings of pain and pleasure are connected. individualism can be carried out in practice only approximately; the individual has his origin in the species, and lives his whole life as a part of the life of his kind, with an organization in which the results of the action and passion of earlier generations are inherited, and in a mental atmosphere which has induced the development of his species. and just as the instinct of self-preservation did away with the isolation of the single moments of the individual life, becoming, thus, the basis of feelings determined by the interests of the life as totality, so the sympathetic instincts do away with the isolation of the single individuals and determine the conditions of the life of the species in the minds of its individuals. the most primitive form of the sympathetic instincts is exhibited in the family. here, however loose and variable the relation of man and wife may be, that of mother and child cannot, by its nature, be done away with or essentially changed. in this case, the sympathetic feeling springs immediately from the natural instinct, and the relation is the nucleus which makes possible the higher forms of family life. in the family circle, the sympathetic feelings are cultivated, and arrive at such strength that they come to include ever wider and wider circles of human beings. indeed, the mother-love remains forever the image and criterion of all sympathy, as well in respect to strength as to purity. when sympathy has reached full purity, it is a feeling of pain or pleasure determined by the fact that other beings feel pain or pleasure. the most important point of its development was when it so broadened as to include all mankind. the peripatetic and the stoic schools of greek philosophy led to this idea of love to all humanity and the natural union of all men in one great society. but this idea acquired greater historic importance when it became a chief commandment of a great religion,--of christianity. to this sympathetic feeling the criterion of good and evil is no longer to be found in the individual life, but is dependent on the life of the whole society of which the individual is a member. yet sympathy is not, from this standpoint, identical with the ethical feeling, conscience. conscience is here, too, a feeling of relations determined by the relation between the ruling or central feeling of the individual and the results of action. when the individual feels his own interests subordinate to the good of the whole of which, through sympathy, he regards himself as a part, the ethical feeling appears as the feeling of duty. a feeling of duty may be spoken of, likewise, from the standpoint of pure individualism, for the concept of duty expresses only the relation of a lower, narrower consideration to a higher; and this is represented, in individualism, by the relation of the single moments to the life as a whole. from another point of view, the ethical feeling appears, in its higher development, as the feeling of justice, which, while regarding the good of the whole as the chief end, considers also the peculiarities of individuals. sympathy in its active form is impulse to share. this sharing must be carried out according to fixed principles; where sympathy is universal, differences of division can be justified only by the fact that the goods divided, if otherwise divided, would not be in so high a degree goods to those to whom they reverted, or would not conduce to so great progress of the society as a whole. the ethical law upon this standpoint, the standpoint of humane ethics, can be no other as to content, than that action shall conduce to the greatest possible welfare and the greatest possible progress of the greatest possible number of conscious beings; and this law includes two chief mandates, a negative and a positive mandate: ( ) the individual may not receive more than befits the position which, in consequence of his peculiar qualities, he occupies among his kind; ( ) but, on the other hand, the capacities and impulses of every individual shall be as fully and richly developed and satisfied as is consistent with the demands of the life of the species as a whole. these two mandates follow with logical necessity from the concept of society as a multiplicity of conscious beings united into one whole. it is contrary to the unity of society, that an individual, or that individuals, should be wilfully preferred to others; every exceptional position must be justified by the demands of the general conditions of life; on the other hand, a society is the more perfect the more freely and more independently the single members move, and the larger the number of different possibilities it realizes, if, at the same time, unity is preserved and attains an ever higher character and ever increasing validity. when the ethical feeling develops, upon the basis of sympathy, to the feeling of duty and justice, the principle included in the above law becomes the standard according to which the individual judges his own actions as well as those of others, and pronounces them good or bad. the good is that which preserves and develops the welfare of conscious beings. the ethical principle now arrived at applies to the deeds of conscious beings, presupposing an end in view. unconscious nature affects man's life, but its workings have no ethical character. the ethical judgment is itself determined by the principle on which it is pronounced, and hence it serves to produce greater welfare. this is especially to be seen where the judging and the acting individual are one and the same person; in other cases, it becomes a special problem to bring the acting individual to the recognition of the principle; this is a problem of psychologic-pedagogical nature. the word "welfare" is used in preference to utility or happiness in order to prevent misunderstanding, and may be defined as including all that serves to satisfy the needs of man's nature. ethics must take into consideration all the gradations of life, and cannot, therefore, distinguish in the beginning between outer and inner, higher and lower, welfare. such a distinction is already an ethical judgment, and can be made only after determination of the ethical criterion. another mistake is the stress often laid upon momentary feelings of pain and pleasure. pain signifies, it is true, the beginning of the disintegration of life, and pleasure its normal and harmonious development; yet each must be considered in its relation to the whole consciousness, the whole character, and the whole social state. so-called utilitarianism has injured its own cause by resolving consciousness into a sum of feelings, and society into a collection of individuals. the significance of single feelings of pain and pleasure for the welfare of society cannot be determined as if the problem were a simple arithmetical one. the reasoning of philosophical ethics must not be confused with practical reflection. in the last we are led by instincts and impulses, by motives of which we are, for the most part, wholly unconscious, by thoughts and feelings the first origin of which we cannot designate. we follow the "positive morality" to which we have accustomed ourselves and which is, in part, an inheritance of our species. ethics as an art precedes ethics as a science; the aim of the latter is partly to show by what principles the former is guided, and partly to correct these principles. the ethical principle broadens out, thus, from the single moment of the individual life until it embraces the whole of mankind; but there are many points in the course of the development at which we can make a stand, and there may, therefore, be as many philosophical systems as there are larger or smaller totalities. the position of the man who holds fast consistently to a principle that determines the criterion by the family, the caste, the nation, a sect, as highest totality, is as unassailable as we have seen that of the individualist to be. the psychologic-historical evolution alone can bring us, through the changes which it produces in the feelings, beyond these criterions. in other words, every criterion has a psychologic-historical basis. he who is to recognize and carry out practically the principle of the greatest possible welfare, must be no egoist or individualist, no fanatical patriot or sectarian; this is the subjective condition necessary to the objective principle. the conscience which is to be regulated by the objective principle is always itself the condition of the recognition of this principle. a system which leaves this fact out of consideration takes on a dogmatic character. the basis of all ethical judgments is feeling. by this is not meant, however, that the standpoint of an individual cannot be influenced by argument; the feelings are always connected with concepts, and discussion of these concepts is both possible and must react upon them even if only very gradually. conscience is not infallible in its application of the objective principle; a wider experience may show it to have erred. conscience is highest authority, but still an authority which may continually perfect itself. the objective principle makes possible the mutual correction of different consciences and the self-correction of the conscience of the individual through self-judgment. the difference between subjective ethics and objective ethics, as here explained, does not coincide with the difference between individual ethics and social ethics. objective ethics includes both the latter, since it recognizes individual peculiarities. it has yet to be decided whether, within the bounds of objective ethics, individual ethics and social ethics are dependent upon each other, or whether one, and if one then which one, determines the other. it has to be decided whether, according to the principle of welfare, the free self-development of the individual is to be limited by the conditions of social life, or _vice versa_. within the limits of objective ethics, there may arise an individualism of another sort than that before mentioned, founded, not upon the sovereignty of the individual, but upon the principle of welfare, which demands as many independent and peculiar points of departure for action as possible. the like is true, also, of the question of smaller organizations within larger ones. the history of ethics shows us that the ethical judgment of actions at first regarded the outer act itself and its results, but was gradually extended to include the motive, the disposition, the character of the acting subject. it is perfectly natural that regard should first be attracted to that which is the object of sense-perception. moreover, action at an earlier stage of development is essentially reflex action, and the expression of instinct; the motives are simple and transparent, and interest does not linger long with them. the great revolutions in ethics appear as essentially progress with regard to the importance accorded, in ethical judgment, to the inner factors of action. this greater inwardness is combined with a generalization; for the rejection of a motive is the rejection of all action occasioned by it, and the ethical acceptance of a motive the acceptance of all action springing from it. hence the transference of regard to inner conditions represents a great simplification of the ethical law. examples of such a transference may be found in the rupture between christianity and judaism, and between protestantism and catholicism. in this way, too, objective ethics leads to subjective ethics. the objective judgment not only presupposes a subjective basis, but also finds some of its best objects in actions which spring from the same mental constitution which is the basis of the judgment. here, the basis of mental constitution and the motive coincide; the ethical law demands the existence of the moral disposition by which it itself exists in the species. this kant expresses in the assertion that it is a duty to possess conscience. since the recognition of duties presupposes the existence of conscience, it might seem as if here were an argument in a circle. but that this is an illusion may be seen from the fact that the basis of ethical judgment and the motive do not necessarily coincide and that it is not necessarily an imperfection when they do not coincide. it may be necessary in some cases, in accordance with the principle of welfare, that other motives than the sense of duty shall guide the action; it may be necessary and healthful, for example, that in some cases man should be led by the instinct of self-preservation, or by an immediate sympathy, to labor for the welfare of others, and that conscience should not be aroused in every single act. it may even be a sign of perfection when actions that demand exertion and sacrifice are carried out without the intervention of a sense of duty. indeed, mental drill in the end renders that which at first took place by means of a long psychological process of reflection and will, direct and without special consciousness of its reason. all ethics is practical idealism. all systems assume an end, and an end is not anything at present existing, but something which ought to be. all systems assume, therefore, strong feeling, impulse, and endeavor, combined with the image of that which is the object of the endeavor. but the ideal must have points of contact with actuality, so that at least an approach to it is practicable; it must be physically, psychologically, and historically possible. ethical ideals deviate from the actual in three ways. in the first place, there is often in actual willing and doing something directly opposed to the principle of welfare. in this case, the office of ethics is to restrain and forbid. to this function corresponds, in the practical life of the will, the hemming by which involuntary, original, or acquired impulses and inclinations are repressed. again, actual willing and doing often exhibit only a weak and imperfect realization of that which ethics demands. here there must be an increase in the degree as well as in the extent of the realization. to this corresponds, in the practical life of the will, effort and attention, the power of the will, through its influence upon conceptions and feelings, to react upon itself. and finally, there may be, in willing and doing, a lack of unity and harmony; various opposed tendencies and impulses may make themselves felt. here a process of harmonizing and concentration is necessary. and to this corresponds, in the practical life of the will, a drilling in connected action and trains of thought, and in the power to make an end of reflection by decision. in all three cases, the principle of welfare is to be followed; and the three processes are to be applied not only in the development of the individual but also in that of societies, and of the species. that which manifests itself in conscience is a species-instinct. in the feeling of judgment, the relation between central and peripheral factors finds expression, neither of which, and least of all the central factors, are developed by individual experience, but both of which are, on the contrary, the product of the experience of the species. what kant called the categorical imperative is, in fact, an instinct; and every instinct speaks unconditionally, categorically, gives no reasons and admits of no excuse. no instinct finds expression without the existence of conditions which call it forth; but all manner of individual and social circumstances may furnish such conditions. when conscience begins to be conscious of its office, it manifests itself as an impulse.[ ] the thought of actions which the instinctive judgment has recognized, or to the performance of which it has perhaps incited, is combined with pleasure, the conception of actions of the opposite nature with pain. the tendency arises to linger with the former and to repeat them, and to turn from the latter, if no stronger impulses of another sort make themselves felt. conscience may develop, without losing entirely its instinctive or impulsive character, to practical reason. this takes place through the development of the conceptions which determine the conscience as impulse, to greater clearness and distinctness. when conscience acts as instinct, the individual does not know what he does. if it acts as impulse, he has a dawning consciousness of his acts. and when it becomes practical reason, there arises a clear consciousness of ethical laws and ethical ideals. in different individuals, conscience may appear in very different forms and degrees, as instinct, impulse, practical reason, sense of duty, sense of justice. sometimes it appears as mainly negative and restraining, sometimes again as chiefly positive, partly harmonizing and partly increasing. here it appears as enthusiastic devotion, there as quiet and continuous tendency. it would be impossible to name even the principal forms in which it may manifest itself, but it is of great importance to call attention to the fact of these individual differences, since we suffer at present from a dogmatism that has but one measure for all these different manifestations. we must go a step farther still. there may be men who possess no strictly ethical feeling and who do not need it. such men do what they can with their whole heart without applying any reflective standard to their own or others' acts. they entirely absorb themselves with unflagging zeal in a work that perfectly corresponds to their capabilities and impulses, without any doubt of its rightfulness and import. they may devote themselves to art and science, to the service of society, or to their family. or they belong to the class of happy natures who spread light and joy by their mere existence. they act in accordance with the law, without being in possession of the law, and what objection can ethics have to offer to this? ethics is for the sake of life, not life for the sake of ethics. since all ethical judgments have conscience for their psychological basis, conscience is highest authority, highest law-giver, in comparison with which every other authority is subordinate and derived. to wish to go beyond one's conscience is to wish to go beyond oneself. when i yield to another human being whose judgment i trust more than my own, this can be justified only as it takes place through my conscience. conscience is infallible, if one understands by infallibility that it is, at every instant, the highest judge; this infallibility does not mean, however, that it does not err. every earnest conviction takes the form of conscience; the truth is not, however, secured by the mere form. was it not from conviction that aristotle asserted the right of slavery, and calvin, with melancthon's approval, sent servetus to the stake? not less dogmatic than fichte's assertion that conscience never deceives us, is the view which regards a system of ethics as merely the science of the forms of society and of outward acts, and thus declares conscience to be without authority in comparison with outer circumstances and their demands. the law which we obey must always express itself in the form of conscience. the light which illumines for us all other things must be within ourselves. here we perceive the possibility of a conflict between subjective ethics and objective ethics, between the two principles upon which ethics is founded. there can be no other solution to the problem than that we shall follow the command of conscience, provided it speaks clearly and after sufficient deliberation. it may be added that conscience can correct and control itself, the later and more experienced conscience criticising the earlier. as long as the individual acts according to his best conviction, he is morally healthy; hence, from an ethical point of view, a pernicious action carried out under the conviction that it is good is to be preferred to a good action performed with the conviction that it is bad. in the former case, the spring is pure; in the latter it is corrupt. only he who has courage to make mistakes can accomplish anything great. it is not the cold and narrow, but those who are zealous for the true and good, who thus err. the power of self-correction can be developed only when some definite principle or criterion may be found. such a principle is that of welfare. the problem of the application of this principle to action is, however, like that of the application of the principle of causality to actual phenomena, an endless one. in close relation to the concept of authority stands that of sanction. the authority commands or forbids, the sanction enables the command or prohibition to remain in force. the sanction consists in the pain or pleasure connected with the observation or transgression of the command, in the reward or punishment which one brings on oneself through one's action, in the heaven or hell which one approaches by the action. it is only, however, when the authority itself is an outward one that the sanction holds this outward relation to the action. in this outward form it has no immediate ethical significance. the ethical character of an action is dependent, in subjective regard, on its origin in the intention of the performer, in objective regard, on its harmony with the principle of welfare. what ethical significance could it have that here a feeling of pain or pleasure not arising from the action itself, is added to it? the outer sanction of reward and punishment is thus but an educating sanction. the inner sanction consists in a feeling of harmony and unity with one's own highest convictions, of consistency between one's ideas and one's actual willing. thus arises an inner peace that may be stronger than all contradiction and opposition from without. such an inner sanction is not only an effect of the action, but a feeling already present before the action. it was the preservation and full development of this feeling that led to the decision and made it possible. blessedness, says spinoza, is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. the manner in which the ethical is so often made dependent upon certain fixed religious or speculative assumptions must be, from an ethical point of view, matter for great solicitude. in the first place, it is easy to suppose that the man who no longer respects these dogmas may have emancipated himself also from the ethical maxims dependent upon them, and would be most consistent if he acted in accordance with the principle: "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." in the second place, action is reft of its ethical character when the attention is directed to things outside its essence and origin, and considerations of reward and punishment are declared to be a necessary motive. not even a belief in progress within the world of experience can have any absolute worth for ethics. it may be theoretically difficult to maintain such a belief; and even if the victorious direction of evolution were shown to be unfavorable to ethics, ethical principles would not be destroyed. simply the problems would be different; pity and resignation would acquire greater importance. wherever the ethical disposition were present, it would take the side of the conquered and remain upon that side though the gods themselves were with the conquerors. ethical worth does not depend upon mere might. the birth-hour of conscience is the time when, through the difference between ideal and actuality, a certain feeling arises. its death-hour would be the instant in which the difference forever disappeared. such a disappearance might occur in two ways, either through the conquest of the ideal by actuality or through that of actuality by the ideal. the objection has been made to the theory of evolution that it fulfilled the first of these possibilities, and so left no room for ethics. but the very fact of the existence of ethical impulses as the actual result of evolution would seem to belie this theory. and indeed, we see that evolution is not physical growth alone, but mental as well; and that the important feature of man's development consists in his aspiration through desires and impulses, which act as moving forces in his life. aspiration is necessary to his evolution, and indifference and lack of sensibility an obstacle to it. the theory of evolution leads directly to ethics, in that it shows that the struggle for existence becomes, in its higher forms, a common struggle for the continuance and development of human life. the theory of evolution takes us, indeed, not only to, but beyond, ethics; for, according to spencer, the ethical sense is but an intermediate condition in a development toward a state of "organic morality," where right-doing will be involuntary and natural, and a special ethical sense no longer existent or necessary. such a state would constitute the realization of the second alternative mentioned above, with which ethics would come to an end. this state is conceivable, and ethics could have no objection to offer to it. yet we are still far from such a condition, and though we may strengthen our courage and hope with the thought of a continual progress of human nature, yet the assumption of such an end to evolution cannot have an essential influence upon the method of ethics. we must, in fact, suppose that progress will bring us new problems and new ideals, that, as the ethics of the civilized man includes whole provinces unknown to the savage, so many relations will certainly present themselves in the future whose ethical significance our present thick-skinned condition, our ignorance and egoism, prevent us from comprehending. can one do more than one's duty? from the standpoint of ethical systems which are founded on authority or any outward principle, this question may be answered in the affirmative. the roman catholic church distinguishes, for instance, between that which is commanded and that which, beyond the command, is merely advised. but he who follows an inward sanction cannot but feel that he has done no more than his duty when he has done all that lies in his power for the welfare of mankind. it may be right, from a pedagogical standpoint, to give especial praise to actions that tower above the usual; he who performs them, however, only then possesses the right spirit when he feels that he has done no more than his duty, and could not have done otherwise. even from a pedagogical standpoint, the difference between duty and merely counselled action, beyond the duty commanded, can be only a relative one; that which is, upon a lower plane of development, merely advised, becomes, upon a higher plane, one of the most elementary duties; mercy to the conquered may be a high virtue in a savage, but to the civilized man it is a primary rule of morals. it is of the highest importance to keep in mind the fact that conscience itself is a cause, and that ethical judgment, arising as a feeling, takes part, by its influence upon the will, in the ethical evolution towards highest welfare. keeping this in mind, it is easy to see that ethics not only calls for no limitation of the law of causality, but that such a limitation would be pernicious, even destructive, to ethics. there are at least six different significations in which the expression "freedom of the will" may be used. it may be used to denote absence of outward constraint; but this might rather be called a freedom of action than a freedom of the will. it may be used to denote absence of inner constraint; the will which springs from pain or fear is often called unfree in distinction from the will which springs from pleasure or hope. it may refer to energy and vitality of the will. here the stress is laid upon the amount which the will can accomplish, not, however, upon its independence of causes. one can be a determinist and yet concede that the will plays an important part in the world; or one can be an indeterminist and yet assume that free will plays but a small part in the world. by freedom of the will is often meant the power of choice. this freedom is not opposed, however, to causality, but to blindness of action, subjection to momentary impulses. "free will" denotes, in this case, self-conscious will. or the word "freedom" may refer to the will as ruled by ethical motives. in this sense, only the good man is free. this significance of the word is the oldest, comes down to us from socrates, and is used by augustine, spinoza, and many others. but the sense of the word "freedom" with which the strife between determinism and indeterminism has to do is that in accordance with which a free will is not subject to the law of causality, is not, like other phenomena, a link in the chain of causes, but is, on the contrary, a cause, without being an effect. to be free in will is, according to this definition, to will without cause,--independent of all that has gone before. indeterminism destroys the bond between the individual and his kind, between the individual and the rest of existence. indeterminism is hence unable to regard existence as a totality. every deeper philosophical or religious conception becomes, thus, impossible; the only religious conception consistent with indeterminism is polytheism, since every being that can form the absolute beginning of a chain of causes is a little god, an absolute being. this fact is to be noted, for the reason that determinism is sometimes designated as a godless doctrine. the assertion that the will is without cause, and the assertion that we ourselves are the cause of our willing, are two different assertions. the last finds a cause in our nature. thoughts and feelings, tendencies, instincts, and impulses arise in us, and in these the origin of the acts of the will is to be sought. if the will, or a part of it, is not subject to the law of causality, it stands in relation to the whole personality as something isolated and accidental. the indeterminist who asserts that determinism makes man a mere machine, himself makes of him something much meaner, something incoherent and accidental. ethical judgment is based upon the assumption that my action is mine; it is, therefore, clear and certain only when motives and the decision they cause are known. the less my actions can be understood by knowledge of my character, the more easily i may be regarded as irresponsible. although law regards, by its nature, action and not motive, yet even the judge must gain an insight into the motives, the outer and inner relations from which the deed originated, both in order to determine the degree of punishment necessary, and in order even to be fully persuaded that the action really took place. many recent indeterminists designate the freedom of the will as exceedingly small. they thus extend the dissolution of the unity of existence and of the unity of personality to the act of willing itself. moreover, if responsibility depends upon freedom, it is impossible to see how reward and punishment are to be justified upon this standpoint; since the individual can say with reason that he is not guilty with respect to the whole, but only with respect to a very small part of his act. the words responsibility, guilt, accountability, are taken, like so many other ethical expressions, from jurisprudence, or rather they come to us from a time when the distinction between the province of jurisprudence and that of ethics had not yet been recognized. that i am made accountable for my action means that i stand as the one to whom reward or punishment for the deed is meted out. _for what reason_ the action is rewarded or punished is a question by itself. in relation to ethics, the feeling of guilt, of responsibility or accountability, signifies that my act is subjected to the judgment of conscience. if i find discord between my act and that which i recognize as good, remorse arises,--a feeling of inner disharmony, unworthiness, and self-contempt which may increase until it becomes the greatest psychical pain. this feeling may be defined, from a deterministic standpoint, as dissatisfaction with oneself because one has not acted otherwise, and the wish that one had done so. this wish arises in the moment of reflection, when one weighs one's act. from the present wish is not, however, to be concluded that one could just as well have acted otherwise _at the moment the act took place_. such an illusion dates the experience dearly bought with mistake and remorse back to an earlier period. according to the theory of retribution, remorse must be greatest in him who has committed the greatest crime. this is not so, however; since remorse arises from a contrast between ideal and act, which contrast can take place only when the conception of the ideal is strong; the purest and best characters often have the strongest feelings of remorse. remorse first arises when a new attitude of mind is attained different from that which ruled at the time of the action. time is necessary for this new feeling to replace the old, if it is to be more than a momentary passion, and during this interval the two feelings are both active in consciousness. this is the time of the birth-pains by which the new character comes into being. the significance of remorse lies in the fact that it urges forward, that it gives birth to impulse and endeavor after a higher plane. only because remorse is a _motive_, is it of ethical nature. if the law of causality were not active in the realm of the psychical, this ethical endeavor would be hopeless. only where order reigns can the will accomplish anything. only as we know the law of outer nature, and know what conditions must be produced in order to bring about a certain result, can we serve our own ends in this province; and the like is true in our relation to human nature. here the problem is to find motives of the right sort and of sufficient strength. of what use were all possible exertion if, under given conditions, the same motive were followed by now this, now the other entirely different decision. i am master of my future willing only in so far as a causal relation exists between my present and my future will. we find, therefore, that the reason why responsibility goes no further back in the causal chain than the will, is this: that it is the will which is to be acted on and altered. that which precedes the act of the will interests us, ethically, only in so far as it influences the will. it is a strange assertion, sometimes made, that the consistent determinist must be a mere spectator of his own and others' lives. as if one could feel no pain or pleasure and no desire to interfere, because one believes life to be subject to law. it is true that theoretical study may weaken practical interest; but indeterminism is a theory as well as determinism. what the ethically bad is follows from what has already been said. it consists of a more or less conscious isolation of the single moment in the life of the individual, or of the single individual in the life of the species, such that not only a hindrance to the welfare of individual or species arises, but also a relaxation of energy and a diminution of the coherence of individual or species. in most such cases, inertia is at work. the one moment demands to be lived without any consideration of others, the individual will not move outside the circle of his own interests. such a resistance to influence may be unconscious. it may be authorized in so far as it is a condition of the development of real willing that action shall not immediately respond to impression. in this resistance lies, therefore, the germ of the ethical as well as the non-ethical life of the will. the clearer consciousness becomes, the more this inertia takes on the character of defiance. or the discord felt through consciousness of the good may be so painful that the individual desires to free himself at any price. in this case, no remorse is felt; on the contrary, the individual seeks to dull the awakened consciousness, or to get rid of it. it is important to note that conceptions develop, in this connection, faster than feelings. and as long as the former do not find points of connection with the existing feelings, they will have no practical influence. the bad consists in the persistence, from inertia or defiance, upon a lower plane of development after the consciousness of a higher has arisen. evil is the animal in man, the remains of an earlier plane of life. from the instincts of self-preservation and self-propagation in their most primitive forms, the ethically bad is produced, and offers fierce resistance to harmonizing influences. evil is, furthermore, a sociological phenomenon; the general psychological elements take on different forms under different historical conditions; society, in its different forms and functions, is always one of the determining factors of its development. the criminal is, like the saint, the child of his time. it appears, therefore, that the term "bad" is applied from a standpoint not shared by him to whom it is applied. if the man who stands upon the lower plane of morals possessed the full and clear consciousness that the predicate of badness applied to his conduct, the corresponding feelings and impulses must arise in him, and his conduct be altered. it is psychologically impossible to act against our fixed and full conviction, if this is not blunted by other impulses. the definition of the good must be, on different ethical planes, a different one. but when a disinterested and universal sympathy determines the ethical judgment, only that can be good which preserves and adds to the welfare of conscious beings, increases their pleasure or diminishes their pain. every action which tends in this direction without producing further results of an opposite nature, is authorized; every action of which the opposite is true is to be rejected. since, in general, pleasure is connected with the healthy and natural use of the powers, with that which preserves and benefits life, and pain is connected with the opposite of this, ethics merely continues the work begun by nature, in aiming at human progress, at as rich and harmonious a development of human powers as is possible. the problems of ethics concern, therefore, the pleasures of the moment as well as those of the whole life, the pleasures of the individual as well as those of the whole species. this remains true even if we accept the pessimistic view that all life is pain; the good would consist, from this point of view, in as great alleviation of pain as possible. even the ascetic tortures himself only in order to gain greater good. the ethical end as welfare is not to be conceived as a state of continuance on the same plane. such a continuance is impossible; evolution does not stand still; every step of progress creates new needs, the satisfaction of which again demands endeavor; perfect satisfaction is impossible. even the development of sympathy makes it easier to wound us in many ways and brings us larger duties. the need of variety alone would make continuance upon one plane impossible; we labor not only in order to arrive at conscious ends, but also in order to relieve ourselves of accumulated energy. the highest end that we can conceive is a progress in which each step is felt as a good because it affords scope for action without over-exertion. activity is also welfare. but it is so only in so far as it is healthful activity; when the powers are over-exerted or dissipated in action, having no common end, or when their application in one direction is at the cost of other more important directions, progress ceases to be welfare. the evolution of civilization contains an element of blindness and heedlessness which is bound up with both its excellencies and its faults. but civilization is not an act of choice; it is the continuance of the evolution of nature. progress is necessary; it is impossible to remain upon any level attained. ethics must, therefore, accept progress as a fact. it does not feel an admiration for an order of nature in which no advance appears possible without one-sidedness and dissipation of energy. it is not so hard-hearted that it could forget, in the seeming splendor of outward results, the anxiety and pain, the sweat and blood, with which these were won. it demands, therefore, that the heavy burdens be lightened, the scattered forces united, and all capabilities that are of worth developed. on the other hand, ethics is not so sentimental and short-sighted that it could forget that progress can take place only through exertion and suffering. its chief task with regard to progress is to impress upon the mind the fact that life should not be made a mere means to the solution of impersonal problems. civilization is a means for the individual, not _vice versa_. the natural division of ethics is into individual ethics and social ethics. it has sometimes been assumed that the whole duty of man could be summed up in individual ethics. however, it is not necessarily true that that which assists the best development of the individual serves society as a whole also. when the attention is directed so excessively to oneself, the general welfare is likely to be forgotten. on the other hand, a too great subjection of individual interests makes a man a mere parasite, robbing him of all self-dependence. when ethics condemns the instinct of self-preservation, it condemns its own means. if the impulse to self-preservation, self-assertion, and self-development were evil, then our essential nature would be evil, and ethics would be impossible. the right relation of the two principles is given in the principle of welfare. mill's book "on liberty" denies the ethical significance of self-development and forgets the individual's oneness with his kind, in declaring personal vices of no importance to the general welfare. that which mill wished to defend was the freedom of the individual, the loss of which through the compulsion of society and the "moral police" he feared. but he might have accomplished this purpose without denying the ethical value of self-development. there is nothing that is a ground for greater solicitude than the mistake that public opinion and ethics are one, and that a condition of things is no longer a subject for ethical condemnation when no outer power has the right to denounce it. the first question which presents itself in individual ethics is: how is the individual to educate himself to an ethical personality? here the development and strengthening of the ethical principle as governing and determining the life of the individual is concerned. the problem is one with the determination of the chief virtue which includes all other ethical qualities. this virtue is justice, which includes in itself the two groups contained under self-assertion and self-sacrifice.[ ] in the application of this general theory of ethics, höffding maintains the radical-conservative and individual-social position already stated. the principle of welfare demands the reconciliation of the free development of the individual and the progress of society as a whole; the individual does not live to himself alone, hence the state has a right to demand sacrifices; but it must always be able to show good reason for such; the burden of proof lies with the side which would take away the most valuable possession of the individual,--the right to free self-development in the ever-shifting direction of his need. this very characteristic of change makes it impossible for the state to decide for the individual what are his needs, and how they may be satisfied; hence the best course of the state is a chiefly restrictive one. the relation between state-help and self-help must be exactly the reverse of that which socialism, in remarkable agreement with bureaucracy and absolutism, asserts. socialism presupposes not only perfection in the governed but also perfection in the persons to whom the government is entrusted. it assumes, moreover, that pleasure in activity and its resulting power of originality and invention would not be weakened if men's right of initiative were taken from them and their needs determined by others. much of the good even now accomplished by the state in its functions is due to the competition with individual undertakings. philanthropy, on the part of individuals as on that of the state, will best follow this same principle of indirect aid, in order to obtain the best results through education of character. organization is desirable on the part of individuals, but the state will achieve best results by acting through smaller organizations which afford a wider field and the possibility of more intelligent work. in its methods of punishment, also, the state must have regard, not only to prevention through fear, but also and chiefly to the bettering of the criminal character; capital punishment and life-long imprisonment cannot be justified from a higher ethical standpoint. freedom should be allowed and tolerance shown the various religious sects as corresponding to various needs. the more liberal education of woman, which will make her capable of greater independence of thought and action, is one of the chief means to the solution of the marriage-question. the ideal of marriage is free monogamy; in polygamy, the purely physical must always rule; that part of self which one can surrender to many can be only the animal; long association and sympathy alone admit to the sanctuary of love. it belongs to the nature of true love to believe in its own endlessness; it is, therefore, incompatible with its nature to arrange for a mere temporary union. yet where an unhappy union exists, divorce should be permitted. strict divorce laws have always fettered and burdened nobler natures, while light-minded people have easily found means of escape. the view that the artist occupies a peculiar position in his ideal world, must free himself from the actual world, and live only for his ideal, is ethically false; art should lend form to actual life, defining and clarifying it, broadening the view and educating sympathy. a great artist is, at the same time, half a prophet; his whole people and epoch must learn to know themselves through him. freedom is to be regarded as both means and end. a representative government is not only an education for the people, who through freedom alone can learn to use freedom, but affords the state, moreover, a firmer foundation in the consciousness of its citizens that they are responsible for the existing condition of things. the development of conscience in force and extent takes place through thought and imagination. knowledge alone is not enough; it must be fixed by exercise,--made a persistent thought, until it becomes, by means of the laws of association, such a thought as will easily come in play whenever the case requires it. footnotes: [ ] trieb. [ ] selbstbehauptung und hingebung. georg von gizycki "moral philosophy" ("moralphilosophie," ) moral philosophy has a scientific and a practical office. its scientific task is to supply the human being with a clearer, more thorough understanding, founded on ultimate reasons, of his moral life. its practical task is to answer the important question: how am i to act? how shall i order my life? it was not left to science first to direct human action. custom and law seek to order the doing and leaving undone of the members of society. ethical philosophy ascertains means of testing the actually existing ideas of morality, and thus enables us to better law and custom. a highest criterion, one only, is necessary, by which to judge of the morality of a deed. if there were more than one, the judgment might fall out differently from the different standpoints furnished by these. when i regard the qualities which i consider morally good, i perceive that they all have a direction conducive to the general welfare or happiness; and when i regard the qualities which i consider morally bad, i find that they all have an aim prejudicial to the general welfare or happiness. when i attempt to convince any one that certain conduct which he considers right is wrong, by showing him that it is opposed to the general welfare, my final appeal is to his conscience. and in the same manner, when i correct some of my own moral conceptions, it is my conscience which determines me to the proof of them, and my conscience which is the standard that determines my decision. conscience is the principle underlying my moral convictions. but i do not possess, in conscience, a moral power which never errs; hence it behooves me to judge carefully. body and mind both have their laws on which depend the welfare and happiness of society; the last results of science and human experience give us these laws. there are few things in regard to which there is so great unanimity as there is in regard to the right and good. in the fundamental questions, all the more highly civilized peoples are, for the most part, agreed. on the lowest planes of civilization, only the narrowest tribal association is taken into consideration in morals, but gradually, with the growth of experience, growth of the understanding, which permits the recognition, in a much higher degree, of the results of action and the power of sympathy, ever larger circles of human beings are regarded,--the tribe, the nation, the whole of mankind, all sentient beings. in this development of conscience and benevolence, there is nothing to cause moral uncertainty or contempt of conscience; for, in that case, the fact that there was once a time when human beings were not on the earth must be a reason for contempt of everything human. we call various different things good, of worth, others bad, evil; there must be something common to all these, on account of which we apply the common term to them. that which is thus common to them is their relation to a consciousness for which they are good or bad, and not to a merely perceiving consciousness, but to one that feels and wills. as true and false relate to the intellectual side of human nature, so do good and bad relate to the side of feeling and will. such things are good as are the mediate or immediate cause of agreeable states of consciousness or of the prevention or removal of disagreeable states; and on the other hand, such things are bad as are the cause of pain or the hindrance of pleasure. we say of these things that they are agreeable or disagreeable. or we may use, instead of "agreeable," the term "object of desire," and instead of "disagreeable," the term "object of aversion"; for all that is agreeable has an attractive influence upon the will, and all that is disagreeable or painful has a repellant one. joy is that condition of consciousness which we seek to attain and preserve, whose existence we prefer to its non-existence; and pain is that state of consciousness which we seek to avoid and destroy, whose non-existence we prefer to its existence. the good is often defined as that which conduces to some end; but an end is nothing other than something willed; that which conduces to an end is the cause of something that is willed, so that this explanation also refers back to a consciousness. whatever is existent for us must be existent in us, in our consciousness. our states of consciousness are either painful, or indifferent, or pleasant. we must turn, therefore, in the last analysis, not to things, but to the mind, if we wish to distinguish what is good and what is bad; and according to the differing constitution of different minds, the same things may be good or bad. there is good and bad with respect to our body or senses, and good and bad with respect to our mind. a moral good is one which causes conscious states of moral satisfaction. the good has often been divided into the useful and the agreeable. the agreeable is that which causes immediate, the useful that which causes mediate pleasure. a thing may be both useful and agreeable; and the like is true of the disagreeable and the harmful. the useful and the harmful in this, as it were inner, (subjective) sense, are to be distinguished from the useful and the harmful in an objective sense; in the last sense, that is useful which tends to the preservation of life. between the useful and harmful, and the pleasurable and painful, in this sense, there must exist, as the theory of evolution teaches us, a wide-reaching correspondence. living beings do that which is pleasurable to them; they avoid that which is painful; they continue alive when they do that which is conducive to life and avoid that which is harmful to life. this continuous process of exterminating those beings to whom the harmful is agreeable and the useful painful, must tend to make the harmful coincide with the painful, and the useful with the pleasurable. the agreement is, however, far from being a perfect one; and it is the less so, the more complicated are the conditions of life. it is the most imperfect in human beings. good is that which causes pleasure or prevents pain; that is better which causes more pleasure or prevents more pain. a thing may cause both joy and pain; in this case, the excess decides whether a thing is good or bad; and the greater the excess, the better or the worse is the thing. the greatest possible excess of satisfied states of consciousness in the life of a human being one may call his greatest possible happiness. the greatest possible happiness is hence the standard by which good and evil are determined. from these reflections is to be seen that a distinction is to be made between that which is _desired_ and that which is _desirable_. all that is desired is pleasurable, yet much that is pleasurable has pain for its result,--pain that is far greater than the momentary pleasure. the good is often considered as opposed to the agreeable, and the bad as opposed to the disagreeable or painful. in this case, by pain and pleasure are understood feelings of the moment, by good and bad are understood enduring, or at least long-continuing causes of lasting or oft-recurring pain or pleasure; momentary pleasure may be bought at the expense of long suffering; and short pain may be the condition of the prevention of greater evil. a thing may be good as regards one individual, bad as regards another. a thing is truly good as regards a society when its total effect has for the society lasting beneficial results, that is, accords with the happiness of the society during its whole existence; and that is for mankind truly good which is, in its total effect, beneficial to present and future humanity. in general, we may say that, when we order our conduct by the thought to serve mankind to the best of our ability, we have a satisfied consciousness, a good conscience. in so far, therefore, a noble deed is good for ourselves as well as for society. the question whether or not the performance of our duty corresponds to our greatest possible happiness, is a different one. but the good man does not allow this thought the chief role in consciousness; he is filled with the thought of doing his duty in devoting himself to the happiness of mankind, and there is but _one_ form of his own happiness which he will not forego, namely, the blessedness of a good conscience. this consciousness, this blessedness which unites the human being to mankind, he should regard as his highest good; for it is a moral good; and the dissatisfaction which lies in the consciousness of having violated his duty towards mankind he should regard as the greatest evil. it may be objected that this morally satisfied consciousness, this sort of joy, cannot be called a good. a good is the _cause_ of pleasurable states of consciousness. but it would appear strange to claim that joy, happiness, are not goods, and pain, unhappiness, not evils; the terms "good" and "evil" and "worth" refer not only to joy and suffering, but also to _desire_ and _will_; and no one doubts that happiness is an object of desire, and pain an object of aversion. from what has been said it appears that happiness cannot be defined as "satisfaction of the desires." such satisfaction may have unhappiness as its result. not all desires are to be satisfied simply because they are desires. the study of the history of moral conceptions appears to show us that most changes in this province are the result of a change of views concerning the effects of actions with regard to the welfare of society; hence, that they were the fruit of experience. this process of change takes place, however, very gradually; the rules which are the result of experience are handed down, for the most part, without statement of reasons; and only in a very limited measure do the new generations labor for a progressive development of moral conceptions. we cannot wonder that a clear consciousness of the highest reasons of moral precepts is seldom to be found. yet in civilized societies, the conviction is general that at least an average conformity to rules of morality is the indispensable condition of the safety and the good of society. the answer to the question: what would happen if every one were to act thus? has been regarded, from earliest times, as decisive with regard to the moral quality of an act. when we recognize that actions which we call good and bad are so called because of their causal relation to pain and pleasure, the belief must arise in us, that the worth of qualities of character depends on the promise they contain of future action. the most important power for the happiness or misery of humanity is the character of human beings. hence the morally good, excellence of character, is to be regarded as preëminently good. and so it appears that our instinctive judgments are justified by the deliberations of calm reason. the question: why shall i act in accordance with the general welfare? is answered by these considerations; because such action is right and reasonable, enjoined by conscience and reason, by human nature itself in its higher development. he who does not recognize this fact, who does not find in it the highest and holiest of commandments, and who yet desires to act reasonably and well, recognizing duties to all men, does not see what he himself really will. the conception of right-doing is the motive of the human being, in so far as he is good. the teacher who desires to have moral influence will endeavor to awaken this motive in his hearers or readers. for this purpose he must appeal to their actual characters. and it is as much a _petitio principii_ to assume, in ethics, the existence of moral feelings, as to assume, in optics, the existence of sight. just as there are blind persons, so there are persons without moral feelings. these are, however, comparatively few; some trace of moral feeling, of conscience, is to be found in almost every member of society. the general welfare, that is, the greatest possible true happiness of all, not the greatest happiness of the smallest number which is often the ruling principle of state laws, nor the greatest happiness of the greatest number without consideration of the minority,--is the highest ethical criterion. it may be difficult to ascertain wherein this happiness consists; bentham demands, for the determination of the worth of an action, a calculation of the intensity, duration, certainty, fecundity, and purity, of the feelings produced by it. but the happiness and misery of mankind is surely the most important object of mankind; it must be, therefore, our highest care to ascertain the results of an action _as far as we are able_. and, in fact, the most important results of any form of action are generally ascertainable. to make endeavor after one's own and others' perfection the criterion of morality is to set up a false standard, a form without a content, since "perfection" designates merely a state that accords with some preconceived concept or end. the question is: what end shall human perfection realize? the criterion of general welfare alone can define human perfection. it is such a constitution of man's bodily and spiritual characteristics as conduces in the highest degree to general happiness. too long and detailed a consideration of possible results is not desirable in every case where action is called for. there is seldom time for a consideration of the intensity, duration, etc., of resulting pain and pleasure. it is well, in most cases, to follow the general moral rules we have attained to through previous reflection. in cases of doubt, we need to appeal to our highest criterion. often such doubt may be caused by selfishness, by the hidden desire to act, after all, for our own benefit; we need, therefore, to put to ourselves the question: how would we judge the action of another in our own position? thus we arrive at the highest moral commandment, which is: so act that thy conduct, if made general, would be for the good of mankind. and the force of example is here one of the factors to be considered. it has been asked what right one has to assert the rule that each one is to count for one, and no one for more than one, in moral decisions. may not one human being's capacity for happiness be greater than another's, and his happiness, therefore, more to be considered? it may be answered that bad men have never been embarrassed for an excuse for selfishness, but that the arrogance of regarding one's own happiness as of greater worth than that of others has brought incalculable harm into the world, and that the only safe method of calculation for the purpose of furthering the general welfare, is the rule above given,--that each one shall count as one and no more. the rule that the greatest possible happiness of _all_ is to be striven for, is an assertion that the happiness of every one is to be considered, that not that of the lowest human being is to be interfered with unless such interference is _necessary_ in order to prevent still greater harm to others; and that no such interference shall be greater than is positively necessary in accordance with this aim. the highest moral law is thus nothing more than the christian commandment of love to all men. and the rule "to count each as one, no more," may receive the restrictive clause "in so far as the good of the whole of society is not diminished by so doing." some darwinians are inclined to regard the preservation of existence as the criterion by which to judge the moral quality of action. "aim for the preservation of the species" would be, from their standpoint, the moral law. but mere existence is not happiness; that is shown by the fact of suicide. however, it is true that health is one of the conditions of happiness. pessimists are generally men of an unhappy temperament, often of morbid physical constitution; medical science must, in its progress, help to prevent the development of such morose dispositions. want of love may also be a cause of pessimism; most pessimists have been lonely men. and want of employment may also lead to pessimism. if we follow rousseau's advice not to listen to those who are in exceptional abnormal positions, but appeal to those who constitute the great majority, we shall conclude that, in general, the happiness of men greatly exceeds their misery. the increase of suicide is often used as an argument that civilization has not caused an increase, but a decrease, of happiness. to this argument it may be answered that the religious scruples which formerly withheld men from this extreme step have diminished, that men have grown more self-conscious and independent in action; and that, moreover, our age is one of unrest, a transition-period such as no other period has been. when we examine the lives of tribes on a low plane of civilization, we find their existence full of uncertainty and of superstitious fear, and at the mercy of the forces of nature. without doubt, much misery exists; a great part of it, however, is caused by the disappointment of too extreme demands for happiness; the individual must not require that life shall be continuous rapture. the recognition of what right action is, is not its accomplishment. pain and pleasure determine the will,--the pain and pleasure of the person who wills, since he cannot feel with the feelings of others or will with their will any more than he can move with their limbs. he may have a conception of the welfare or suffering of others, but a mere mental image does not determine the will. only when such a conception arouses pleasure or pain in the subject himself, are will and action possible. love consists in joy in the thought of the beloved person, with joy in his joy, and pain in his pain. he who seeks to render happy one whom he loves does not, as a rule, consider the fact that he will himself have a joy in the happiness of that other; his aim is to give pleasure, not to himself, but to the other. but the thought of doing for him is combined with pleasure, the thought of not doing for him is combined with pain; and these present feelings determine the will. that which distinguishes the moral from the immoral man is that, in the former, the notions of the right and good rouse strong feelings,--feelings of pain at the thought of acting contrary to them, of pleasure at the thought of acting in accordance with them, feelings which may overpower all others; while in the immoral man these conceptions call forth no feelings or only such weak ones as offer no sufficient opposition to the influence of other feelings. both men act from feeling, but not from the same feelings. do we, by proving that the moral, as well as the immoral man is determined in his action by feelings, show that the one approximates to, or is identical with the other? by no means. in that case, the proof that both the moral man and the immoral man will with their own will, and act through their own limbs, that both possess arms, hands, senses, feelings, understanding, in short, that both are human beings, must show, in the same manner, an approximation of the moral to the immoral man. a perceptive, intellectual, objective side, and an emotional, inner, subjective side are to be distinguished in all action; and only the confusion of the two has led to the fancy that, with the proof that all action proceeds from the pain or pleasure of the person who wills, it is shown that all action, every human being, is selfish, and that unselfishness is a figment of the imagination. it is not the expected pleasure that moves the will; it is only when the conception of future happiness or misery awakens present feelings stronger than other present feelings which would move the will in another direction, that willing and action can follow in accordance with that conception. hence, there is nothing so remarkable in the sacrifice of one's own happiness. it is not morally desirable that self-love should be weak, but only that conscience and general benevolence should be stronger still. many who have recognized the reality of sympathy and benevolence have not regarded them as primary but as evolved from egoism. however, if the word egoism is to have a distinct meaning, it must be interpreted as the conscious preference of one's own good to that of others. but with self-consciousness is likewise developed the consciousness of other beings, and the latter, as the former, clothes itself with feelings--with egoistic feelings, and with sympathetic feelings as well. it is further to be remarked that the proof that an action is disinterested, is no proof of its moral worth. the worst action,--an action of pure cruelty, envy, or hatred, may be disinterested, that is, it may have for its end the pain of another without consideration of the advantage of the doer. the effects, as pain or pleasure, of conduct opposed to, or in harmony with, civil or moral law, in so far as such effects can be predicted and, as thus predicted, they influence the will, are called sanctions. one may distinguish between a physical, a political, a social, a sympathetic, and a moral sanction. doubtless the conduct recommended by self-love, as a result of these sanctions, coincides, to a very large extent, to a larger extent than egoists in the rule perceive, with that which the good of society demands; but it is just as certain that, in many cases, the way of selfish cunning and that of virtue diverge. the outer sanctions do not insure the coincidence of duty and one's own happiness; nor does the sympathetic sanction secure this, for sympathy is often on the side opposed to duty. there is but one sanction which is ever on the side of action in accordance with duty: the moral sanction, the peace and joy which accompany the knowledge of having done right. duty and self-interest coincide the more nearly, the better and more unanimous the various sanctions are, and, especially, the more strongly the moral feelings are developed in a society; one of the tasks society has to set itself is to labor for the greatest possible concord of duty and self-interest. but this harmony will never become an absolutely perfect one and self-sacrifice impossible. man needs, therefore, some end which shall depend upon himself alone, if he is to be kept from discouragement and despair. such an end is the consciousness of right-doing. he who chooses this as highest end must devote himself to the service of mankind, as well as he who makes the advancement of the good of mankind his end. the thought of this end will prevent him from being blinded by self-interest in answering the question as to what right and duty are, and will also preserve him from permitting himself one or the other pet sin under the excuse that he will atone for it by other good actions; it will compel him to the endeavor to fulfil every duty. and though he may not be perfectly happy, he will be happier than the man who makes the good of humanity his end; since he is less dependent upon outer events. benevolence and conscience are not the same. the latter constrains us to do right, that is, to perform actions the expected results of which are in harmony with the general welfare; it has attained its end when the right action is performed, and it has failed to attain its end when this aim is frustrated. man has a deep inner longing for happiness of some sort. when he does not find it upon earth, he seeks it in some other world. he has often a deep inner yearning for holiness, and a secret dissatisfaction in his own conduct. ethics satisfies this double longing in commanding him to renounce his greatest happiness and endeavor to attain moral blessedness, the happiness of holiness. perhaps some one may object that this is a selfish view of the moral life. is it selfish to renounce one's greatest happiness in order to attain only peace of conscience? that no one were without such selfishness! he who sets himself this end will act better, more in accordance with the good of humanity, than he who makes the advancement of human welfare his ultimate aim. hence the human being _should_ choose this end. therefore, the highest moral commandment, the categorical imperative, receives this form: "strive to attain peace of conscience in devoting thyself to the service of mankind." by "right" we understand what is in conformity with a standard of action which we recognize, by "wrong," what is in opposition to it. the recognition and application of the standard belong to the reason. but not to reason alone; every rule is the outcome of feelings; and this is the reason why ideas of right possess the power of motives. judgment of action may take place in two ways: immediately, through the feeling; and mediately, through moral rules, the adoption of which, however, presupposes feeling. according to the disposition, the education, the circumstances, of a man, the one or the other form of judgment prevails. the words "obligation," "commandment," "duty," "law," express the fact that something lies without the mere free pleasure of the acting individual, is withdrawn from its sphere. it has been said that a distinction is to be made between duty and the sense of duty--that an objective duty still exists, even when no corresponding inner sense of duty is present. this merely means that some one else in distinction from the acting person recognizes a moral law, by which he may blame the action. duties are actions sanctioned by one or another sort of punishment. the moral sanction is self-blame. but not the performer of an act alone, others also, pronounce judgment on his action, and in the rule there exists a greater or less harmony between his judgment and that of others. to self-condemnation is added the consciousness of having deserved the blame of others. human actions are not only an object of displeasure or of indifference, but also of praise, gratitude, love, admiration. actions which reveal a character above the average are regarded as meritorious according to the measure of their superiority; they deserve recognition, respect, praise, honor. three classes of actions to which public opinion applies its sanction may be distinguished: actions blamed; those the neglect of which is blamed; and those which are praised. the first two classes, sanctioned by a punishment, are regarded as duty; the last class, sanctioned by at least mental reward, are actions of desert. actions the omission of which is punished or blamed are not actions of desert, but of duty and obligation. the boundary-line between duty and desert is not fixed and definite; in the measure in which the moral condition of a society is perfected, the province of that which is regarded as duty is extended into that which was formerly regarded as desert. the distinction between duty and desert has, in general, only an outward significance; it has regard to the relation to others, to the social sanction. the moral human being does not inquire what entitles him to praise, but simply what is right; and he does not compare himself with others but with his moral ideal. hence he recognizes, with regard to himself, only duty, not desert. he aspires to attain, not the approbation of others, but his own, and he attains this only when he has done that which he holds to be the best possible. the moral significance of the outward sanction lies in its educating influence; it acts as counterpoise to inclination to action opposed to the moral law, and facilitates, thus, the victory of the moral motives, which increase in strength through use. if it is true that a condition of "heteronomy" always precedes that of "autonomy," then the outer sanction is the indispensable condition of the evolution of moral feelings. it has sometimes been said that the human being is under obligation to others only. but it seems that this view has proceeded from a confusion of the moral with the juridic significance of the word "duty." it is not to be doubted that the consciousness of duty would not develop in an individual who grew up in solitude,--but speech and reason likewise would not become his. the law of morality applies not only to social conduct but also to conduct having reference to self. by "moral law" is not meant a law in the sense that it is imposed on human beings from without, by another; it is exactly the peculiarity of the moral law that it is self-imposed as the voice of conscience. virtue is related to duty as the enduring characteristic to the single action, or the lasting will to obligation, to the "ought"; virtue is a disposition to act in accordance with duty. vice is a characteristic which continually determines actions opposed to duty. there may be exceptional cases where vice is innate, as is idiocy or insanity, but the records of prisons and reformatories where a moral influence has been attempted, show us that germs of good may exist even in those apparently wholly given over to vice. it is true that the capacity for moral education is narrowed with every added year of life; but it is impossible for us to say, with certainty, how great this decrease of capacity may be.[ ] the most essential influence for moral betterment is that which the personality of an earnest human being exerts by example and precept. the awakening and strengthening of good impulses is not, however, the immediate destruction of the bad; and struggle is often necessary if the good shall conquer. the more frequent the victory, the easier it becomes. every virtue can be acquired at least in some degree, if the wish to acquire it be sufficiently strong and persistent. but although such struggle as this is often necessary, exactly the sign of the attainment of virtue consists in the absence of self-compulsion; by this absence, its perfection is measured. the assertion, occasionally heard, that virtue is in proportion to struggle, amounts to the contradictory assertion that the more perfect the man is, the less is his virtue. the truths which, imperfectly comprehended, lead to this opinion, are these: we distinguish by the name of virtue that moral constitution which rises above the average. it is presupposed, however, that its possessor has, in general, the impulses and capacities belonging to human nature; he could not be called temperate in any particular direction, if he did not possess the capacity of enjoyment which leads many to intemperance. moreover, the control of strong impulses from a desire to do right presupposes a strong sense of duty; and it is on account of this sense of duty that we respect a man. but if an individual distinguished by a strong sense of duty gradually succeeds in tempering his impulses and ridding himself of his faults, his virtue is not less, but more perfect. and finally, the fact is also to be taken into consideration that, while one cannot necessarily conclude, from a man's innate love for some especial class of good actions, that he will do his duty in other directions also, this is an inference which can be drawn where actions are performed from a sense of duty. a certain degree of intelligence is a condition of virtue; a being without reason is not a moral being, as the animal is not; but morality requires only average human intelligence. there is no greater error than the opinion that virtue is not concerned with action; for virtue is excellence of character which leads to right action; action is the test of moral worth. in olden times, an attempt was often made to set up one especial form of character as universal ideal. such an attempt is injustifiable, since the nature and circumstances of individuals differ. in morality, too, there may be originality. in the judgment of an action, two questions must be distinguished: the question whether the action is right or wrong, and the question as to what inference shall be drawn from it with regard to the character of the performer. in the action, there must be distinguished the following points: the movement of the body; the results of the act; the act of the will; the intent; the presence or absence of a conviction that the action will not have evil results; the part of the intent willed, not merely as means but as end; and the incentive, or feeling from which the action springs. the chief end and the incentive together are often called the motive. the movement of the body is not an object of moral judgment, as are not, also, the outer results of the action as such. nor is a mere act of the will as such, but its nature, of moral importance. no human motive or incentive is, in itself, bad. not even anger and hatred are in themselves evil; since wrath against wrong is justifiable. yet motives are by no means morally of the same worth; while where motives directed to the good of the individual are at work, the action will be, in nine cases out of ten, in accordance with the general good; it will be, let us say, in nine cases out of ten, contrary to the general good where motives of malevolence are active. and for this reason the motive in the single case gives us a clue to the character. there exists a certain stability of character which makes it likely that the individual who acts out of good motives on one occasion will do so again. of greatest worth are the motives which spring from desire for the general good; these are moral motives. actions may be right, yet immoral, and moral yet wrong. yet the theory that the objective judgment of an action, and the judgment of the character of the doer have nothing in common is erroneous; for in both cases the highest ground of reasonable judgment is the same; namely, the general good. blame is not merely for the sake of prevention through fear; since we may blame a deed and not its doer. when a man does what we consider wrong under the impression that he is acting for the general good, we do not endeavor to frighten him from his conduct by blame, but to convince him of his error. but the significance of the motives of an action does not lie merely in our inference from them to the character of the doer; from the actual, or inferred, motives of the action spring its most important results; namely, its influence upon the morality of human beings. every moral action reacts for good upon the performer, strengthening his tendency to such conduct; and it is, besides, an inciting example. it is not necessary for morality that all actions should take place directly from desire for the general good, but only that the belief be present that they are in harmony with the general good; duty need not be the only motive, but simply the ruling one; one may act immediately from other motives. the æsthetic judgment of a character is to be distinguished from the moral judgment of it. much that pleases one æsthetically in character is morally indifferent; and much that is morally of the greatest worth has little or no æsthetic value. the talk of an identity of the beautiful and the good has caused much confusion. things have particular qualities according to which they affect us and are affected. all that i can predicate of things, all their being is their effect. and when i say that a certain thing, as long as it does not change, will, under the same circumstances, operate in the same way, i assert merely that this certain thing, as long as it remains unchanged, is this certain thing. it may often be difficult or impossible to determine whether or not the thing has changed, but if it has not changed, it must, under the same circumstances, operate in the same manner as formerly. as everything is, at each moment, a definite thing, so is also every human being; he has definite qualities, and if these do not change, neither does his action under the same circumstances; if it could change, he would act according to that which he is not. different individuals have different innate tendencies; and differing circumstances develop similar tendencies in different ways. the history of the human being is his character, if we add what he has inherited to his own history. to reflect upon human nature is to assume its conformity to law; to deny such conformity involves ceasing from thought on it; for thought means the conclusion of like from like. though the action of the human being depends, in a high degree, upon circumstances, we can often predict, from a knowledge of his character, the general nature of his action. and if our expectation should be, for once, disappointed, we do not say that his character has suddenly passed into its opposite, but that we had an insufficient knowledge of the circumstances, or that we imputed to him a character which he did not really possess. we have thus to distinguish two groups of facts in the contemplation of a particular action: the present constitution of the doer of the action, and that of the outward circumstances concerned; if a change occurs in either, the conduct will also change. criminal statistics are evidence of the effects of similar circumstances upon similar characters. those who deny the action of cause and effect in the conduct of men as contradictory of freedom, cannot refer to physical or political liberty, since the absence of these does not involve the absence of cause and effect. the free will which is said to be peculiar to the human being and not possessed by the animals, is an absence of subjection to the impressions of the moment, and this has been regarded as an activity of pure reason. but, as höffding says, the contest of the reason with the passions is really a contest between feelings combined with reflections of reason and other violent feelings that are combined with few thought-elements. this free will is the capacity of reflection gained by experience. it is not a negation of cause and effect, for the act of the will is determined by the feelings, thoughts, inclinations, which precede it; it may be determined by reflection as opposed to the impressions of the moment. the word "freedom" is also used to denote moral freedom, or the freedom from determination by immoral motives; in such case, however, moral motives determine. but it must be remembered that the natural law of cause and effect is not like a law in the sense of the political law; it is not something imposed from the outside. natural laws are rules formed by men to express the regularity of events in one sentence; things do not obey the laws, but the laws are according to things. when we say: gunpowder "must" explode when it comes in contact with a flame, the explosion is necessary; we do not mean that the gunpowder is compelled, under certain circumstances, to explode; it explodes of its own essential nature. "necessity" designates, not a state of things, but a state of the understanding regarding them. the same is true of the words "possible" and "accidental." the accidental is the unintentional. the bullet which accidentally killed a man was not sent with the intention of killing him. or "accident" is used of that with regard to which we are ignorant and cannot predict; the word does not, in this sense either, denote an absence of cause. objectively, nothing is "possible"; either it is, or it is not. great confusion is, however, caused by a want of clearness in the interpretation of the words "possible," "impossible," "necessary," etc., with regard to the will. when i say: "it is _possible_ for the good man to perform even the worst action, he _can_ perform it"; and: "it is not _possible_ for the good man to perform a bad act, he cannot do it"; i use the words "possible" and "can" in two quite different senses. the first sentence means: "even the best man can perform the worst act _if he will_"; the second: "the good man never has the will; it follows from his nature that he does not possess it; it would be a self-contradiction to say that he has it." the human being can do this or that if he wills, provided no outer force opposes his will; but whether he wills or not depends upon his character. his will is not uncaused. it has been said that "one should not allow himself to be determined, but should himself determine his act." this assertion makes self something distinct from one's thoughts and feelings. free will has also been interpreted as choice between motives. the human being does not, however, choose between motives but between acts, and his choice is free in that he can, as has been said, choose this or that act _if he will_; but his choice is not the less caused. when, in reflection on a past act, the human being says to himself: "it was possible for me to act otherwise," he means, as a rule, simply: "if i had thought as i do now, i should not have acted thus; but i did not think as i do now." the delusion that he might have acted differently under the same outer circumstances and with the same thoughts and feelings, arises from the difficulty of realizing, from his present standpoint, his position at the time of action. it may, indeed, seem to us, after we have chosen a certain course, that another was the easier; but can it be possible that one preferred the former course when he yet really preferred the latter? it is the strongest motive that determines the action. or, if it be objected to this assertion, that our only criterion of the strength of motives is their effect as overcoming other motives, the assertion that the will follows the strongest motive would still exclude accident in choice; the assertion would amount to this: that the motive which determines the will in the one instance will always, under the same outer and inner circumstances, determine it. so mill remarks that, when we say that the heavier weight will weigh down the other, we understand by "heavier weight," merely the one which will weigh down the other. nevertheless, the sentence is not senseless, since it means that there is, in many or most cases, a heavier weight, and that its action is always the same. education by others, and self-education would be useless, if the same thoughts and feelings could, under the same circumstances, produce now this, now that totally different result, and not always the same one. kant's doctrine of freedom includes practical freedom (which is not, according to his definition, opposed to causality) and transcendental freedom; he seems, however, not always to have kept the distinction between the two clearly in view. his theory of transcendental freedom is grounded upon the doctrine of the pure ideality of time. the only method of saving the doctrine of freedom is, according to kant, the theory that the law of necessity applies to things as phenomena but not to things in themselves. if phenomena are not to be regarded as things in themselves, but as mere thought-images, they must themselves have reasons which are not phenomena. such a cause for pure reason[ ] is not determined by phenomena, although its effects appear as phenomena. the causal action of reason does not have a beginning in time, but is the constant condition, outside time, of all free action of the will. kant failed, however, to prove the pure ideality of time, as riehl has sufficiently shown. moreover, were the _intelligibile_ character of reason the cause of action as phenomenon, there would be no possibility of moral improvement, since the noumenon is not affected by phenomena,--an inference which schopenhauer makes in adopting kant's theory. moreover, if space has, as kant also assumes, transcendental ideality, plurality is not conceivable; hence, the moral difference of characters, and the science of ethics itself, could have no transcendental significance. it is evident that kant argues from the standpoint of an assumption of a "soul-thing," a constant "substratum" of psychical phenomena,--a standpoint which he himself criticizes. he identifies this thing-in-itself, moreover, with the reason, although he himself declares that the concept of the thing-in-itself is but a concept limiting reason.[ ] he makes the reason a thing-in-itself outside time, although it is an activity, a process of consciousness in time. the thought of duty, of the categorical imperative, is a phenomenon, and if the will is determined thereby, it is determined by something in time. kant takes but little account, moreover, of the fact of birth. is the _intelligibile_ character born? if so, it is preceded by something in time; if not, it must be eternal, existing before birth as well as after death. and how can he assert, too, that an action might have been other than it was, if it depended upon the constitution of the _intelligibile_ character, and this is as it is, and operates as it is? schopenhauer's argument for transcendental freedom contains many self-contradictions, and is founded on the fiction of a first free choice of character. schopenhauer asserts, however, that character is innate. if so, how is it chosen? the theory assumes that one is before he is. an act of choice presupposes a chooser, and, according to his own words, "every _existentia_ presupposes an _essentia_"; that is, every existence must have a particular being, essence. accountability assumes that some one is held answerable for an action or event, and is, as answerable, amenable to punishment. the punishment may be one of law, of society, or a moral punishment. the concept of responsibility is closely allied to that of accountability; it assumes, in general, that a person is the author of a deed. responsibility may be immediate, when the author of the deed was also its performer, or mediate, when the performer was another person. remorse is pain at the recognition of the immorality of a past action. with the pain is often connected the wish that the action had not been performed. this wish is naturally unreasonable, since it is directed to the impossible. yet it is not idle, as schopenhauer asserts, since it has an effect upon future action. there is often also an egoistic regret, or one not called forth especially by the conscience, for a past action. this may or may not be moral, according as it is or is not in harmony with the general welfare. the friends of the theory of chance as regards the will have asserted that shame, remorse, would be impossible, if the human being recognized the fact that his act was necessary. they have neglected, however, to give any reasons for this remarkable assertion. if a man recognizes that the constitution of his mind was such as to lead unavoidably to vicious acts, this is the strongest motive for condemnation of his own moral constitution, for pain at it, and an endeavor to better it. but if the act had no necessary foundation in his character, if it was merely an accident that his will chose thus, then, since the act is past and there is no reason for drawing conclusions from it with regard to future action, how does it concern him? blame and punishment, as well as self-blame, have regard to character and so to the future. acts are not blameworthy and punishable if they have no cause. punishment is inflicted from two motives: as a preventive, and as an expression of the felt need of retribution. originally, mankind punished from a desire for revenge. this is not the moral motive. not the criminal alone, but the whole constitution of society, is responsible for his crime. if, then, punishment is allowable for the sake of prevention, it cannot, as an evil, be permissible further than is in accordance with this end. punishment of the insane could be justified only in case it could prevent insanity. nor is desert based upon an uncaused character of the will. we do not admire, praise, and reward great genius the less because genius is inborn; nor do we admire the moral man the less because his father before him was distinguished by deeds of philanthropy. we admire him for what he _is_. the doctrine of causality in human action is far from being what it is sometimes called, a doctrine of fatalism. fatalism assumes that, whatever a man may do, a power outside him determines the event; but the recognition of cause and effect in human action is the recognition of the fact that the actions of human beings are never without result. it is often said that morality is founded upon religion. assuming that, by religion, is meant the belief in a personal god and in the immortality of the soul, is this true? if a mighty tyrant commanded a man to do what was contrary to his conscience, if he promised rich reward for obedience and fearful torture for disobedience, would obedience therefore be moral? why is it represented as wrong to follow satan's commands and right to follow god's will? evidently not because god is mighty but because he is good, and satan is bad. but if it is, thus, a matter of duty, and not merely one of selfish cunning, to obey god's will, then his will must be directed to the good; and this presupposes the good to be something in itself, without regard to the fact that god wills it. if god is a moral being, this must be so. this is, in fact, an assumption which the moral members of society have, in general, made. they boast of the morals of their religion, comparing it, in this respect, with other religions; and thus they subject it to the test of morality. moreover, when we examine the christian gospel, we find that it in general assumes the moral laws as already existent and only urges obedience to them. the good is, as we have seen, that which conduces to the general welfare. the earliest religions had no connection with rules of morality; these have developed with the social life of human beings and have, in it, their root. as to the belief in immortality, cannot the human being do right without the thought of the reward and punishment of another life? as a matter of fact, many good men have not possessed such a belief. the distance of such an end often makes its effect a weak one, and the motive may easily become selfish. yet it is true that a loss of faith may include a loss of morality, in case the belief exist that there is no basis for morality outside religion; the responsibility of such a loss of morality lies with those who teach this latter doctrine. through love to others and the thought of the immortality of influence, the moral man gains a larger life and loses the fear of death. he who has thus faced the thought of death finds life more earnest but not less happy. each hour has not the less its own joy because there is an end, at last. nor, in spite of the deep pain the loss of friends causes us, do we lose them wholly, since the memory of all that was best in them may remain with us. our own pain may bring to us a deeper sympathy with, and love for, others. if we are able to love the good in god, we may also learn to love the good in those about us, and be incited, by it, to emulation. the love of the good in men has always had stronger effect than love for a distant god of whom but little was known. it was the thought of the man buddha which exerted an ennobling influence upon thousands, and it was the thought of another human being that moved the "christians" more strongly than did that of a father in heaven. do we love father and mother, brother or sister, wife or child, or our friends, for god's sake? why may we not love all men, as we love our friends and children, for their own sake? it has been said that there is no accountability, if not to god. but if god is the author of the world, he must himself be the cause of evil, either by direct influence or by neglect to avert. where, then, is the justice of his punishment? it does not suffice to answer that god's justice is not our justice; for in that case, what right have we to apply the word to him at all? history demonstrates the fact that morality is by no means necessarily connected with religion. in the name of religion millions upon millions of human beings, and these often the most upright and conscientious men of their nation, have been put to death, and thus the civilization of whole peoples has been retarded. slavery in america had no stronger friends than the churches. how is the forgiveness of sins by god to be justified? are the evils which they caused any the less existent because of such forgiveness, and is it well for the doer to escape, in this way, the sense of responsibility? only labor for the good of humanity is the way of atonement. we ourselves are the creators of the kingdom of righteousness. many claim that ethics is not indeed based upon theology, but that it needs a metaphysical, a teleological, foundation. for it presupposes that human life has an "end." if we wish to ascertain how our life should be conducted, we must ascertain what is the end nature has in view for us. but an end is an effect imagined beforehand and willed, which we cannot bring about immediately but only through a chain of causes. these causes we call the means to the end. they too are willed, but only indirectly and because the end is attainable only through them. these processes to an end are sometimes treated as if the causal succession in them were reversed, so that the last effect appears as the beginning, and the future determines the present; in this sense, the end has been called the end-cause, because the final link of the process causes the beginning. but this is a senseless conception, since the future, that which does not yet exist, cannot now operate. in fact, the succession of causes and effects is no more broken into in the processes leading to an end than in any other processes. when a human being imagines to himself a result and endeavors to bring it about, these mental processes are not future but present; and they are not determined by an influence of the future upon the present, but by an influence of the past upon the present; they follow from experience, that is, from that which has already occurred. they are causal processes in which the activities of understanding and will have part. hence "ends" exist in nature in so far as they exist in man and the higher animals; but outside these, ends cannot be predicated, unless nature is regarded either as gifted with imagination and will or as the creation of a being possessing these. but imagination and will require, according to all our experience, a highly developed nervous system, and to assume their existence where such a centralized system does not exist is scientifically injustifiable. moreover, the laws of thought by no means determine us to inquire after a cause of the whole world, since the concept of cause is applicable only to changes, not, however, to enduring existences and their qualities. or let us assume that we had discovered an end set by nature. then, either it would appear useless to interfere with its attainment and unnecessary to assist in it, or it would appear to us possible to oppose this end. in this latter case, cause must be shown why we should assist, or should resist, the process of nature. many philosophers have said that man should live according to his own nature. if the word "nature" here denotes the totality of his characteristics, it is evident that the worst actions are not less natural than the best. therefore, the word nature cannot, as here used, have this sense; the natural in this sense is not identical with the moral. nor can the term as here used refer to the usual, for in that case the greatest moral excellence, as unusual, must be rejected. nor can it be used to designate the more primary, for in that case, again, the later developments of benevolence and truthfulness should be rejected. the word can have but one other sense, namely, as opposed to artificial. but what is in man artificial and what is natural? it seems that the natural is understood as that which is not the work of human intention and reflection, of labor, and of education. innate impulses would be, according to this definition, natural. but it is evident that one cannot abandon himself to his blind impulses; society could not exist under such circumstances. or if it be said that, since all organs and impulses of the human being tend to preservation of the species, and that this must, therefore, be the end, then let us say "the preservation of the species," or "the good of mankind" but not "the natural life," is the end for man to attempt. nature as a whole is neither good nor bad. her cruelty in the struggle for life is continuous. yet this is not "cruelty," in so far as it is not willed. she has often selected the best men for her sacrifices. yet this is not all that is to be said of the relation of darwinism to ethics. the law of natural selection regulates not only the life of the individual but also that of peoples and nations. evil may arise and prosper in society. but it has no permanent existence. the chances that the descendants of human beings possessing evil characteristics will long survive, that they will not, sooner or later, perish as the result of conflict with the mandates of health, or the laws of the state, or the demands of society, are not great. in the life of nations, it appears more clearly than in the life of the individual, that "death is the price of sin." should in any society the opinion gain power that the struggle for existence authorizes or demands a regardless pursuit of one's own interests, an oppression and robbery of the weak by the strong, an annihilation of pain through the annihilation of the suffering individuals, an outrooting of conscience, and the natural voice of pity which raises protest against such a course; should selfishness be bred, and physical strength and refined cunning become the highest ideal; such a community would be on the verge of its own destruction; it would have labored for this result by justifying the struggle of all against all, permitting this the moment that a conflict of interests arose. let times of need and danger, times of national war, come, and we shall see what is the fate of a society in which love of country, self-sacrifice, a sense of the ideal, respect for truth and justice, are only subjects for scorn. "the world's history is its judgment-day." all positive human authorities are subject to the authority of the conditions of life. if they do not take note of the nature of things, if they disturb the foundations of social life, their endeavors must finally suffer shipwreck on the rock of this powerful impersonal authority. natural selection is therefore a power of judgment, in that it preserves the just and lets the evil perish. will this war of the good with the evil always continue? or will the perfect kingdom of righteousness one day prevail? we hope this last but we cannot know certainly. we ourselves shall decide our future, by our acts. * * * * * in an essay written for the society for ethical culture, and read october , , before the london branch of that society, gizycki reconstructs his theory of the right final end of life, advocating as such the general welfare, instead of peace of conscience in the pursuit of the same. the objections to his own former theory offered are, chiefly, that if peace of conscience is regarded as the final end, the individual is likely to take too little account of the outward effects of his action, to be too little impressed by the evil results which should teach him greater care. the good of society is regarded by the virtuous man as more important than his own happiness, as that for which he is willing to sacrifice his own peace. footnotes: [ ] the references here are to lombroso, "der verbrecher," deutsche ausgabe, s. u. f.; h. v. valentini, "das verbrecherthum im preussischen staate," s. u. f. [ ] intelligibile ursache. [ ] grenzbegriff. s. alexander "moral order and progress" ( ) the proper business of ethics is the study of moral judgments--or, if we say of human conduct, then of conduct as submitted to the praise or blame of moral judgments. but these judgments are not mere opinions; conduct is not that which is "judged" to be right in distinction from that which is right; and thus the analysis of such judgments is a systematization of both conceptions and facts. the task of ethics falls into two parts. it has ( ) to supply a _catalogue raisonné_ of the moral observances of life, the various moral judgments which make up the contents of the moral consciousness, and ( ) to discuss what it is that the moral judgment, as such, expresses. nothing is more striking at the present time than the convergence of different schools of ethics--english utilitarianism developing into evolutional ethics, on the one hand, and the idealism associated with the german philosophy derived from kant on the other. the convergence is not, of course, in mere practical precepts, but in method also. it consists in an "objectivity" or impartiality of treatment, commonly called "scientific." there is also a convergence in general results which consists in a recognition of a kind of proportion between individual and society, expressed by the phrase "organic connection." the theory of egoism, pure and simple, has been long dead; utilitarianism succeeded it and enlarged the moral end. evolution continued the process of enlarging the individual interest, and has given precision to the relation between the individual and the moral law. but in this it has added nothing new; for hegel, in the early part of the century, gave life to kant's formula by treating the law of morality as realized in the society and the state. the change in ethical conception is not due to biological research alone, but to the study of history also, and to other general changes in the practical data on which its principles are built. the social and political history of the century represents the growth of the idea of freedom, which has properly two sides--that of individual liberty of healthy development, and that of the solidarity of society and the responsibility of the individual to it. with the increasing complexity of interests and the growth of individual freedom, has come, however, a certain sense of loneliness to the individual in the midst of modern competition, and this explains, to a great extent, the increase of suicide in the present century. the convergence of dissimilar theories affords us some prospect of obtaining a satisfactory statement of the ethical truths towards which they seem to move. our inquiry falls into two parts, according as we analyze the conceptions which relate to the existence of the moral judgment or those connected with its growth, maintenance, and change--the statics or the dynamics of morality. to these two divisions is to be added a third, preliminary division, more closely allied with the statical examination of morality. these three parts are represented by the questions: ( ) what is it that is good? to what are the terms good and bad applied? ( ) why is it good? what does its goodness mean? ( ) how does goodness come into being; how is it maintained; how does it advance? moral judgments apply to voluntary action, that is, action distinguished by the presence of an idea of the end to be attained "not merely _in_ consciousness but _to_ consciousness," and the conversion of the idea into the actual reality of presentation. the terms good and bad, indeed, are applied, not only outside the realm of morals, but also, within it, to desires and thoughts; but to these only as they are the objects of volition, in that the will at present allows them to persist in consciousness or in that their present occurrence is regarded as the result of past willing. the conduct to which we apply moral judgment is a whole made up of many parts--and actions, consequences, and internal feelings have value for morality only in so far as they are its elements. external action concerns conduct only in so far as the object of volitions (which may be either internal or external) is derived from this source. voluntary external action is not external only, but has also an internal side; and not whether i succeed in performing a certain action or am prevented in the middle of it, but whether i willed it, is of importance to moral judgment. conduct is sometimes considered separately from character; but this separation results from confusing conduct with mere action. a character exists only in its conduct, and all moral actions issue from character. the consequences cannot be separated from conduct in the moral judgment, except in so far as they could not have been foreseen. the consequences of conduct are a most important part of action, in that they should be considered by the person willing, and should influence the nature of his conduct. the internal side of conduct is represented by the moral sentiments. these are to be distinguished from the mere motives, which, defined as something that has propulsive force, whether a feeling or a passion, does not enter into moral action except as absorbed into volition. no emotion is, in itself, right or wrong, but is only indirectly judged as such as it makes a difference to the action--as an aptitude of mind which tends to this or that predominating form of conduct. moral sentiments, on the other hand, as moral aptitudes effective for particular conduct, contain an additional element. moral sentiments, thus defined, being equivalent to conduct, it follows that the mere possession of sentiments cannot constitute the difference between intrinsic or internal, and customary morality; customs are themselves a matter of sentiment. thus "conduct as a concrete whole has an inward element of sentiment and an outward element of action, and these are different, on the one hand from mere given feelings, on the other from mere action." "conduct is this unity of feeling and action in which mere feeling is modified by the idea of action, and mere action becomes a mental, or, if we like, a spiritual thing." "conduct and character are the same thing facing different ways." "think of a man's conduct in relation to the mental conditions from which it proceeds, and you think of his character; think of his character as it produces results beyond these sentiments themselves, and you have conduct." there are no morally indifferent acts; when viewed in general and broader lights, all acts are either good or bad; though there are some cases of really indifferent means arising from the mechanism of action; as, for instance, that i am to go to london is not indifferent, but we may suppose that the fact that i may go by the road or by the river makes no difference to my volition. there is no distinction between virtue and prudence as regard for self, but prudence, in so far as it is compatible with social requirements, is a duty and a virtue. ethics, then, has to do with conduct as a whole in its external and its internal aspects. in distinction from psychology, it has to do with it not merely as a fact to be analyzed, but with reference to its nature, quality, or content, judged by a standard of value. it is not dependent upon metaphysics, but precedes it in order of time, whatever may be said of the order of importance; metaphysics examines, properly, the ultimate questions left over unanswered by the other sciences. from the purely physical method, ethics has advanced to a biological method; and the doctrine that pleasure is the end of right action has been replaced by the idea of social vitality as the end. statical analysis--moral order the recognition of the reference in morality to society has been implied in all ethical theories; theories of selfish pleasure themselves recognize the social element in individual gratification, even cyrenaic theories recommending selection and refinement of pleasures, and containing a reference to personal dignity which implies a conception of man as typical of a perfection that others may sympathize in and attain. individualism and universalism in morals differ only in the order in which they take their terms. "to the former, the individual comes first and is the measure of the law; to the latter, the law or society comes first, and is the measure of the worth of the individual." nevertheless, the ethical problem is very differently conceived by the two schools. but the history of philosophy shows a tendency to harmonization of the two; we find that individualism becomes more and more socialistic, while universalism becomes more and more conscious of individuality. we may trace this movement, in the case of individualism, in the development of the philosophic theory of morality as true benevolence from the theory of benevolence as merely another form of self-love. the earlier conceptions of universalism, emphasizing the good as something binding irrespective of the inclinations of the individual, issue in particular formulæ of virtue; later conceptions recognize the differences of individual cases while still insisting on the universal or authoritative character of morality. the problem receives its definite shape when the explanation of authority is sought, not in some categorical imperative, but in the very nature of society itself, which, if a whole, is yet a whole made up of individuals. ethical inquiry thus naturally breaks up into two parts, according as we consider the meaning of right and wrong for the individual, or for society as embracing many individuals. as far as morality concerns itself with the individual, the good act implies a certain adjustment of functions to one another, too much in any one direction implying a defect in others. "the good life as a whole is a system of consecutive acts, where each function has its limits prescribed for it by the demands of all the other functions." and the good character is "an order or systematic arrangement of volitions." the goodness of an act is thus a matter of equilibration or adjustment of the elements of an individual's nature. in this proportion or adjustment consists the reasonableness, rationality (ratio, [greek: logos]) of good conduct. this does not mean that the principle of morality is the result of reason, for moral adjustment is no more specially the work of reason than of any other mental faculty. this account of good character uses ideas which apply, _mutatis mutandis_, to the life of any organism, as well as to the mind of man; it merely explains, in terms of human experience, the elements involved in the conception of organization; the difference lies simply in the nature of the elements involved in the adjustment, the elements being, in the case before us, conscious acts. to the question whether such a definition of morality would not apply rather to conduct than to character, and whether, the volitions being conceived as a series in time, it does not dissolve the unity of character, may be answered that conduct and character have already been shown to be identical, and that unity can no more be denied to the series of acts involved than it can be denied to the growing plant or animal whose functions are successive. the unity conditioned by time is a unity characterized by succession, as that of space by extension. the objection, as it gathers its strength from a persuasion that the good character should be described by the feelings or sentiments of any one time, is legitimate; good conduct is built upon a man's needs or desires and is defined as satisfying every part of his nature in its proportion; so that an equilibrium of the emotions and the moral sentiments is involved in morality, and any sentiment is moral which can be equilibrated with the rest. "the good man may be described either as an equilibrated order of conduct, or as an equilibrium of moral sentiments or of the parts of his nature. nevertheless, the order of conduct is a prior conception to that of structural equilibrium." in a machine, the combination of parts is made in order to produce the motion of the engine, and the equilibrium is maintained by the motion. "in the organism, the bodily structure retains its proportion only in so far as it is in physiological action, and this physiological action subserves the conduct of the organism," while "in like manner the equilibrium of moral sentiments exists only through conduct and is determined by the requirements of conduct." the equilibrium is effected simultaneously both for conduct and the moral structure. the ideal is a plan of conduct, ideal in that it is never fully attained. the ideal is hypothetical in two senses. it supposes that every member of the order is good, whereas no life contains good acts only; and that the order itself remains permanent, whereas morality is necessarily progressive. nevertheless, it is to be observed that the ideal is a realized ideal. it is realized in every good act, since the good act is the act which has the shape it would wear in the ideal order. "though it is adjusted to imaginary elements, it realizes the whole so far as its own particular share is concerned." morality implies the existence of society. it is useless to inquire what would be moral in case the human individual were an isolated being; the fact is that he is not so, and that all moral judgment implies not only the judgment of other individuals besides the acting individual, but also the function of the acting individual as a member of a society. yet each member of a society has his special individual work, so that duty varies according to individual circumstances, and so far from its being true that morality is not a respecter of persons, it is a fact that it is always a respecter of persons. this does not deny that there are certain common bounds of morality, which allow the formation of some general propositions; nor does it mean that each individual is at liberty to construct his own moral precepts. the individuality of morality, which finds a place or vocation for each individual, involves an equilibrium between the members of society, in which consists the morality of the whole. the so-called self-regarding virtues are social as well as self-regarding; their disregard involves evil, not to the individual alone, but to others also. it may be objected that acts and thoughts which can never be known to others are condemned by conscience. in answer it must be observed:-- ( ) that the knowledge of others is a matter of degree; my friends know my actions; and in order to judge an action, it is not necessary to suppose the whole nation looking on. ( ) that as personal morality becomes more and more complex, and hence knowledge by others less and less possible, we leave the judgment of an act more to the conscience of the individual, as vicegerent of the moral law. "acts which are wrong when nobody knows them have come to be so by a process beginning with simple acts which are known, that is, known in their outward appearance." the act, known or unknown, leaves its impress upon character, raising or lowering the efficiency of the agent; and hence is judged good or bad. the study of art and science has, thus, moral value, as influencing character. good and bad acts and conduct are thus to be distinguished by their adjustment or non-adjustment to the social order. the adjustment takes place in a similar manner as in a trial of strength, and the compromise between the different individuals must be taken as measuring the actual forces which were engaged. the social organism has both its morphological, or structural, and its physiological or functional aspect; and here, once more, the order of functions is a prior conception to the structural order; in the society, conduct bears to structure the relation which physiological action in the body bears to the bodily structure. the social ideal is doubly hypothetical, implying that all members of the society are good and that society is statical. that to which moral judgment applies with regard to the individual's relation to society, is the adjustment of individual wills regarded either as directly appearing or as latent and capable of acting, the occasion being given. the moral principle in society as a whole is thus, as in the case of the individual, a rational one, and aristotle rightly gives the same name ([greek: orthos logos]) to it as to the principle of individual action. the moral individual is the reproduction in small of the social order. but "the two conditions that the individual must be a harmony within himself, and that he must possess all the powers that are required of him for the purposes of society, are not different, but identical." for the absence of such powers implies the absence of adjustment to his conditions, failing which adjustment the inner harmony is impossible, although life may be continued, just as it may be continued under diseased physical conditions. good men may thus be said to conform to a certain type or ideal; but this type is not merely something to which they are fashioned, but to which they themselves are the contributory elements. hence the social ideal is a species of which all good men are the individual instances; and the species exists, not, as in the case of natural science, as a generalization in the mind of the observer or as an identical plan upon which the members are organized, not as a mere collection of individuals, but as in itself an organism. "let it not be objected that, since no society is in perfect equilibrium, and the ideal exists only in good men, the ideal is therefore as much a creation of the observer's mind as a natural species. an ideal implies no contrast of observer and observed: conduct is something mental: the ideal is a reality of mind, existing in the minds of those who act upon it. the social ideal has thus a concrete existence in the collective action of good men." in this manner, the supposed independence of the tendencies towards individualism and universalism disappears, the harmony of the individual and his harmony with society being identical--a true independence being equivalent to true coöperation. morality implying adjustment to the ideal order, a realization of the bearings of our acts is important. but we need no special moral faculty to teach us morality; it is prompted by thoughts and feelings that, as the result of a process of compromise, are thoughts and feelings adjusted to a social order. obligation "expresses that an act is the act required." "it is that relation in which the single part of the order stands to the whole order, when it is confronted by the whole," whether we consider the single act in relation to the whole character of the individual, or the single individual in his relations to society. "duty in the abstract is the name which comprehends obligation in all its details; a duty in the concrete is any good act regarded in its relation to the whole. on the other hand, the whole has _authority_ against its parts, and every particular duty is said to have authority just so far as it is backed by the whole mass of duties," as the command of a sovereign has authority because it gives expression to the will of the whole society over which he presides. obligation "corresponds to the necessity under which an organism lies of acting in a certain manner in order to conform to its type." duty is thus not necessarily antagonistic to inclination, as kant conceived it, since, in the good man, inclinations are adjusted to the requirements of social life; and obligation is thus different from compulsion, which, as attendant on authority, applies to the bad, not the good, man. the negative side of compulsion is responsibility, which implies that, in the case of transgression, the person will be called to account. duty, though thus free from the idea of antagonism, is itself always negative, implying subjection of the individual to the larger order. it is from this negativity that duty lends itself to the legal idea of compulsion, and in general wears a legal garb. in law, rights and duties are correlative, the right of one implying duties of others, and _vice versa_; but in morals, rights and duties are not merely correlative but identical; it is a duty to insist on rights in so far as these rights are moral, not merely legal, and the individual has a right to the performance of duty. the moral judgment is a judgment on a fact, but expresses, nevertheless, a fact also; it expresses an adjustment to an ideal order, which, if ideal, is yet a fact, although never realized in its entirety. thus morality is not a mere matter of opinion. opinions may differ with regard to a fact of morality as different individuals differ in the apprehension of a physical fact. an action is not right simply because i think it is so; but the opinion of the good man represents what is really good. goodness is a mental fact; the apprehension of goodness, as the passing of judgment upon it, is different from it; but it is nevertheless, in another sense, the goodness of the good man which approves or is the approbation of the good act; and "badness exists in the mind of the good man and is known as disapprobation." the quality of an action is that which excites approbation; its goodness or adjustment is nothing but the approbation of the good man, but not of other men. in like manner, duty and the sense of duty are the same thing. when the act judged is presented to the mind only as idea, the feeling of approbation or disapprobation is that which we know as the working of the moral sense or conscience. it is this truth that goodness and approbation are identical that intuitionism builds upon. intuitionism, however, regards goodness as some new quality of action, peculiar and inexplicable; while a true analysis looks upon goodness as no new quality, the moral judgment merely placing a mark upon any action as conforming to a certain order or equilibrated system wanted. there is in the good man a vague mass of moral sentiments and emotions; and when the idea of any act comes in contact with these, a feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction arises, according as the idea fuses with this mass of sentiments or fails in adjustment to them. moral promptings are merely promptings which have been adjusted on one side and the other until they have come to be in harmony with social conditions; they grow out of the natural feelings by the process of adjustment. the word "conscience," as it is more generally used, seems to emphasize the element of reflection in a greater degree than "moral sense." the explanation of the apparent independence of conscience is merely that, in the good man, the moral order is realized, and action from moral principle takes place spontaneously. in so far as this is true, he is, in the ethical sense, free, yet not free in the sense that he is to be bound by his own conscience alone in opposition to the judgment of all other consciences; "on the contrary, the conscience sits as a tribunal on a man's acts or intentions, just because it is the representative of the moral order." in speaking of a "perverted conscience," morality condemns the isolation of a man's ideas about right conduct, from the judgment of his fellows. the conscience, by reason of the element of reflectiveness, is higher than the moral sense; and the cultivation of a refined conscience is the basis of all morality. yet this very reflectiveness involves danger, in that, attaching itself as it does to the negative side of duty, it tends to associate the latter with the idea of painfulness rather than of pleasure, and to induce fear, and also in that it tends to develop a morbid subjectivity of feeling through too much self-examination. good conduct, as good in virtue of the equilibrium it establishes between the various parts of conduct itself, should contain within itself the whole justification of morality. as such, it is the end of morality, in that it is both the object and purpose, the aim or desire; and in that it is also the standard, criterion, or result by which conduct is measured. good conduct involves a common good as part of the moral order, and so creative of a tie between all members of society. the common good is thus not to be conceived as something that might be, as it were, cut up and distributed, but as common in that it involves an adjustment of claims. the common good is thus, in a sense, objective, or objectively valid, though not objective in the sense that it exists outside the minds of men, but in the sense that it is a compromise between wills, in which each mind surrenders merely personal whims for a common agreement. since there seems a discrepancy between my own good and the good of others, how do i make the good of others my object, going beyond myself in the range of my interest? and how is self-sacrifice possible? the answer to the first question is that morality reconciles the likes and dislikes of individuals, so that self-love and love of others describe the moral relation from opposite ends; every act of respect for others is an act of self-furtherance. we are entitled to assume, as not needing proof, that the instincts of altruism are as fundamental and original as those of self-love. but if we use stricter reasoning, we can see how, in either case, we identify ourselves with others. altruism is merely a form of conduct in which the egoistic element, though present, retires into the background; while in all right egoism, we aim at the good of others as well as our own good, though our own good appears as the more prominent feature in the act of willing. we must not be understood as willing, in altruism, another's good in any mystical sense, in the sense of any identification of self with others; we will the good of others in quite a different sense from that in which we will our own good, the idea of their good being a representation in our mind from the analogy of our own experience; and the good attained by each party to the transaction is different and incommunicable. neither must egoism or altruism be interpreted in the sense that, in either, reflection on the end as distinctively the good of self or of others is involved; the moral agent in general throws his energies into this or that course of action, because it is felt to be what is wanted, without further reflectiveness. human beings, as plastic shapes, moulded by contact, adjust themselves to each other, and thus it comes about that certain personal claims are waived. self-sacrifice is a real fact, a fact attested by the existence of the bad, to whom such sacrifice involves a loss of happiness and is impossible. it means the abandonment of a real good which the individual would seize under other circumstances. it is sometimes contended that real self-sacrifice is impossible, either ( ) because the sacrifice is really pleasanter to the agent, or ( ) because he is compensated for his loss. but the evident fact that self-sacrifice is pleasanter to the agent does not involve the seeking of his own pleasure by the agent, and even if it be admitted that there is always the forecast of compensation in the mind of the agent, yet part of the forecast is the picture of happiness foregone. but here, as before, it may be said that the element of reflection, the weighing of one's own and others' happiness against each other is read into the act by the onlooker, and is not necessarily involved. that his own self-sacrifice, the compensation of his own consciousness of right-doing outweighs, to the moral man, the pleasure of lower aims, does not mean that the individual is selfish in seeking self-sacrifice. and, in fact, that any ulterior aim of self-satisfaction beyond the act itself is sought, in self-sacrifice, by the moral man, is false; the greatest acts of heroism are characterized by complete absorption in the impersonal end sought, the good of the agent thus not lying beyond, but consisting in his action. acts characterized by another spirit than this we do not term self-sacrifice. as all conduct is a matter of will, so morality is concerned not merely with the virtues, the practical dealings of men, but also with all that strengthens or weakens the will and, in general, conduces to character. in judging a man, the significance of his individual gifts, and the responsibility which attends the cultivation of these gifts must be recognized. not special virtues alone must be considered, but the whole man must be judged and the significance of his self-cultivation in this or that direction observed. this does not mean that the exceptional faults of exceptional men are to be condoned. on the contrary, there is no reason to suppose that special gifts confer a special privilege rather than a special responsibility. judged in the entirety of their character, such men may not be worse than others, and this fact should be regarded; but we should not defend their sins as such. the neglect of self-cultivation in one direction may be necessary to action in another direction; but the moral criterion of such self-cultivation or action is to be found in morality as an equilibrium of powers. perfection is not itself sufficient to define the end. perfect is that which is the best possible; perfection as a perfect activity rather than a perfect state (as we must conceive it) is equivalent to the best possible conduct. but the moral end can be understood as perfection only when by the best possible conduct is understood that which is the best possible under circumstances determined by morality itself. the fullest development as demanded by morality is not necessarily the perfection of development in any particular case, that is, with regard to any particular gift or individual. or, in other words, perfection in both its absolute and its comparative meaning, is a conception which belongs, not to morality as such, but to the materials out of which morality is constituted. take "perfect" as equivalent to "best," then perfection is equally involved in every good action. the good is always the best; what is right is perfect; morality discards degrees of comparison. but the degree of perfection to which any power or individual is to be developed is determined, morally, by the principle of equilibrium. moreover, we may recognize degrees of perfection in individuals who are, nevertheless, not to be classified as of less or greater moral value. there are two different conceptions of merit, the one as applied to magnitude of actual achievement, the other to magnitude of effort. the apparent discrepancy vanishes on reflection, since both conceptions apply to what passes beyond the average and measures the distance between the two. against the hedonistic doctrine, it has been urged by green that pleasure as such is not the end of action, for even where the single pleasure is desired there is always the thought of a permanent self whose good is supposed to lie in the direction of this pleasure; while a sum of pleasures cannot, as such, be an object of desire, since pleasures, as separate and transitory in contradistinction from the permanent self, cannot be added together in fact, but only in thought; and with regard to a greatest sum of pleasures the difficulty is still greater, since pleasures admit of indefinite increase, and their sum can never be the greatest possible. in so far as desire is supposed to be for pleasures and nothing else, the argument that a sum of pleasures cannot be desired must be admitted. the transiency of the pleasures has, however, nothing to do with the question; the reason why a sum of pleasures cannot form a single pleasure is that they are pleasures with a higher idea--that of a series involving a plan. this does not prove that a sum of pleasures might not be the criterion of conduct. it must be admitted that "sum" is an unfortunate word, since it seems to imply that the pleasures must be combined in one total result; but such an interpretation of the word is not necessary. a series of pleasures is properly nothing more than an aggregate or combination of pleasures, partly successive, partly coëxistent. nor does the greatest possible happiness mean a happiness than which no greater is possible, but the greatest possible under the given conditions. the polemic is directed against the individualistic psychology, which regards mental states as a mere succession of events. so far the arguments enforce a great principle; a mere succession of feelings or sensations could never yield a conception of a sum apprehended as a sum. but this is irrelevant. for such an idea we require much more than sensation: we require memory, perception, the idea of a self. but this is only saying that morality requires more than mere sensation, and the argument assumes the standpoint it is fighting, treating mental states as mere events. it, moreover, introduces the idea of a permanent self as something superior to mere sensations, whereas perhaps this self is elaborated from sensational elements. furthermore, if the proposition means that a mind which had only sensations could not have a sum of sensations, this may be denied. a sum is possible from three positions--that of the conception of a spectator, that of a reflecting consciousness, and that of a feeling consciousness which feels its states continuously, though it may not feel them as continuous, for such a feeling would argue comparison and reflection. the polemic, therefore, while in so far right as it is directed against individualistic psychology, seems to assign wrong reasons for a rejection of hedonism; utilitarians, while speaking of pleasures in the language of psychology, treat them really as something more than mere events--treat them as we really combine them by processes much higher than sensation. a refutation of hedonism must consist in showing that pleasures really differ in kind, and cannot, therefore, be compared in intensity. "pleasure" is often used as equivalent to a pleasant sensation; such pleasures differ in kind, as in the case of gratified hunger, ambition, and the like, and cannot be actually added, either in thought or in enjoyment, because incommensurable. "pleasure" is often used, also, to refer, not to the sensation itself, but to its pleasantness, and here the same thing is true; if we distinguish the quality and the tone of feeling, as usual in psychology, the classification of tones as pleasurable and painful is insufficient. "the tones of colors and sounds, for instance, are more naturally represented by the mood of mind they suggest: red has a warm tone, black a sad, gray a sober, the organ a solemn tone."[ ] the tone of some feelings is too indefinite for description,--a vague comfort or discomfort,--while the tone may rise to a condition to be described only by "bliss" or "rapture." pleasure and pain depend, moreover, not only on the quality and quantity of the feeling, but on the whole condition of the mind, pleasure indicating agreement with the mind, pain non-agreement. every pleasure being a function of the sensation in which it is an element, the supposed sum of pleasures must be made up of pleasures every one of which is qualified as that which is produced by a certain activity. "the sum of pleasures, therefore, re-introduces the distinctions and contents of the moral order, and, though an expression of the criterion of conduct, is therefore, like perfection, not an independent criterion." the element of quality in pleasure may be _verified_ more easily as what may be called _preferability_. the term preferability does not mean that there is an inherent moral value in every pleasure, in virtue of which pleasures may be distinguished as higher or lower--obviously an erroneous view, for higher and lower is an antithesis established by morality itself; the value depends on the kind of pleasure, and the preferability is that in the good man's mind. it might be objected that even though pleasures differ in kind, a comparison and summation of them might be possible, just as comparison and summation of weights is possible, although weight depends not on bulk alone but also on specific gravity. it cannot be denied that some numerical expression for qualities of pleasure may yet be found, by which they may be compared. but it is to be noted that, the higher we go in the scale of existence, the more distinct becomes the growth of a principle of selection or distribution which the members of a combination must follow in order to produce a given quantitative result. in chemistry we may obtain the atomic equivalent of sulphuric acid ( ) in many ways, but we can obtain the acid itself only by specific combinations in specific proportions. in determining what food to give an animal, we must consider not bulk alone but the nutritiousness of various sorts. we might express the nutritiousness of various foods by numbers, but the numerical equivalent would tell us nothing, unless we knew the kinds of food to be combined. and in the same way we might express the sum of pleasures as end numerically, but until we know the kinds of activities and so of pleasures to be combined to this sum, the formula is useless to inform us as to the end or method of attaining it. the popular conception of happiness avoids all the difficulties and perplexities caused by setting up pleasure as the end, because in that conception pleasures and pains are never considered apart from conduct and character. thus, though the end involves pleasure, the criterion is good conduct. the good conduct necessarily involves pleasure, for conduct which only outwardly conforms to the moral rule, and in which the agent does not take pleasure, is not really good. the pleasure-formula thus represented as the standard of conduct is to be distinguished, as actual ethical pleasure in the act, from the pleasures attendant on the act as results, and which may be termed pathological in a kantian sense. the ethical pleasure need not be unmixed, for the act which satisfies one part of a man's nature does not necessarily satisfy all the other parts. but the ethical pleasure must be present as the total reaction of character considered apart from the incidentals of result. pleasures and pains may be divided into two classes, active and passive; active pleasures being those attendant on an act, as gratification of an impulse, passive pleasures those which come to us as enjoyments, not as the gratification of the impulse producing an act, though perhaps resulting from our act. active pains are those of want, passive those of suffering. the pleasures accompanying an act as pleasures of attainment are always pleasures of gratification, but not of gratification merely, for they gratify a sentiment directed towards an object previously present to the mind in idea; and it is because the volition realizes the idea that the pleasures are called pleasures of attainment, and in this fact lies also their ethical value. the ethical pleasure in the action itself is not to be confused with the mere pleasure in the explicit consciousness of right-doing, which argues special reflectiveness. the ethical pleasure meant is identical with the feeling of approbation, not as a reflection on the act as idea, but as present in the act itself. but the ethical pleasures are not independent of the incidental pleasures, but depend upon them, the latter themselves being considered in determining what acts are to be performed. the pleasure-formula of the end represents the end in terms of all the ethical pleasures secured by good action; and now we can see how morality can be expressed in terms of all the pleasures and pains involved in action, the purely ethical pleasures being reckoned among the rest. every pleasure is an inducement to persistence, every pain an inducement to change; hence, since the society of good persons, or the kingdom of powers within a man's own mind acquiesce in the moral order as the equilibrium in which all their claims are gratified as far as may be, it follows that the order of good conduct represents the maximum of happiness. the end thus _involves_ the greatest happiness of the greatest number. if pleasure is but a part of the standard of morality, is it, then, the object of conduct? if the idea before the mind to be realized in action is called the object of the action, then in the same sense the pleasure connected with the idea, which must be pleasant, is the object of conduct. the difficulty in agreeing that the pleasure of the idea is part of the object of desire arises from two causes: ( ) confusion of the object of desire with the character or criterion of the object; ( ) a misunderstanding of how the ideal object is related to the result. as to the latter cause, it may be said that the idea is only in this sense an idea of the result, that the result is the idea as it is realized; the elements of the idea are derived from the past, and the desire is not for the prospective pleasure of the end. as to the first cause, though it is false that the prospective pleasure must necessarily be part of the idea, the opposite conclusion is not necessarily legitimate that desire is not for pleasure at all. it is true that, in order to distinguish one object from another, we need to know what kind of an object it is; but to conclude that, therefore, the desire is not for pleasure, is to confuse the actual idea before the mind in desire with its quality. that we do not make pleasure an object in the sense that the pleasantness of the object itself is what we have before us in desire, is obvious. such a desire would argue a reflectiveness which has been shown not to be necessarily characteristic of action. nor is it the pleasure of an act which is the cause of the desire, even if we suppose this not in the sense that reflection apprehends it as cause. to suppose this is to confuse the cause with its sign. the pleasure is a function of the quality of the object. the element of reflectiveness _may_ enter into a consideration of the object, and the prospective pleasure thus become an element of the object of desire. but it is only a part; the pleasure alone cannot be the object of desire. the pleasure which is thus a part of the object is not a future pleasure, but that which is actually present in our minds, belonging to the ideal object as part of it--the represented pleasure of attainment. to call the pleasure desired the prospective pleasure is to confound the reflection of the spectator with the actual fact in the mind of the agent to an act. the pleasure is, moreover, not pleasure in general, but the pleasure of the agent; but this is not stating that the act is necessarily selfish. since every object of desire and will includes pleasure, the so-called "paradox of hedonism"--that pleasure is lost by seeking after it--cannot be explained by holding that pleasure is not itself the object of desire, and that consequently pleasure is never, in enjoyment, what it is in idea. this last is true, for no idea is in reality what it is as idea. but the explanation lies rather in pointing out how foolish it is to seek for what is a sign or effect rather than for its cause. in the good man, the pleasure of attainment is the ethical sense of approbation, and this is also goodness. it may, however, be asserted that it is not this ethical pleasure, this goodness as such, that is desired by the good man; again, it is only in exceptional cases of reflectiveness that goodness or the right action as such is distinctively desired; and herein lies kant's mistake in asserting that a moral act must be done from a sense of duty. active pains, as wants, are what prompt to action, and are, so, the conditions of conduct. though in themselves evil, as pain, they cannot be considered by themselves apart from the action to which they lead. as for passive pains, in so far as they are the result of evil action on the part of others, they ought not to have occurred, and we try to prevent their repetition by punishment. those sufferings incidental to right conduct are to be borne, in so far as they are inevitable, as a necessary evil in that which, considered as a whole, is good. as soon as they cease to be inevitable, they are to be removed. we do not imagine, however, that pain may ever be wholly removed. but the statement that pain is inevitable to right conduct is not to be interpreted as an assertion that it is for the sake of goodness, as a discipline,--a metaphysical conception depending on the idea of a divine purpose. morality is thus a kind of optimism, not ignoring the reality of pains in right conduct, but treating them as part of the given conditions which it has to turn to the best account, by the creation of a conduct and character involving ethical pleasures. pessimistic theories do not ignore this optimism of morality; but in such theories the fact of pain is emphasized and dwelt upon, and morality is regarded only as a means of lessening pain, or, as in the case of von hartmann, finally getting rid of it altogether by a universal suicide. it is impossible to determine whether existence represents an excess of pain or of pleasure, since the answer to the problem is a matter of individual temperament; and, moreover, pleasures and pains cannot be (as yet) merely quantitatively compared. another error of pessimism consists in comparing pleasures and pains in detail and supposing the result to hold good in the general sum; but even in cases where pleasures are greatly outweighed by pains, the pains may sink in value considered in connection with the rest of life. the desirability of non-existence could be maintained only as a race should be developed desiring it; but the whole course of history is in the opposite direction. the question, is life worth living? involves two: ( ) is it actually preferable to the creature who lives it? ( ) can any life be said to have a real value; is any life subjectively, is any objectively, preferable? the answer to the first question is the fact of life, for the mysterious instinct of self-preservation called in to account for the continuance of existence is one of the elements to be considered in the problem, cannot be excluded. it is true that only certain kinds of life are preferable, but the very meaning of the principle of selection is the securing of the life that is worth living. having arrived at this answer, we can no longer compare existence and non-existence in respect to preferability, and the second problem presents itself to us as the question as to what existence is of value. the answer is the moral life, goodness, as including all the activities of character. the moral end has sometimes been defined as social vitality. vitality is, in strictness, the energy to live, and has two aspects. it is ( ) the force which keeps a creature alive, or ( ) the force which keeps it well. as implying the keeping up of vital functions, the notion of continued existence represents the end, but represents it in its lowest aspect, its least and poorest significance, and is an insufficient description; for not existence can be the end, but existence of a certain sort. "existence, in fact, is an abstraction to which nothing corresponds in experience: nothing exists except upon certain terms. given the type, the end of the creature is to continue the existence of that type; but continuance of existence is nothing more nor less than the performance of those functions which constitute the type of life in question: it is not separated from those functions as something which they subserve." if the functions in man or animal are said to be determined by the need of maintaining his existence, it may be answered that his existence is these functions. in this sense of continued existence as the repetition of vital functions in their order, it is true, but only secondarily true, that the end is to preserve life. but the doctrine of evolution implies much more than such preservation. it means the victorious continuance of life. but because a type is victorious, we cannot infer that the end of the type is to maintain its victorious existence in the sense of aiming at victory. to do this is to read into the end a theory of how the type came into existence. the end of a type is to act according to the type; the victory over rivals affords the opportunity of this. the preservation of existence is a condition of the end, not the end itself; to regard it as such is to confuse cause with effect. vitality as health, on the other hand, implies the equilibrium which constitutes good conduct good. it must, however, "be observed that health is not a further specification or a limitation of continued life, but is coëxtensive with it." but health, as applied to morals, is a metaphorical term. morality does not consist in mere physical vitality; on the contrary, some sacrifice of such vitality may be necessary, the perfect physical vitality may be inconsistent with the development of higher and finer mental functions. "with this proviso, vitality as health is simply another name for the character of good conduct which wins it the title of good." there is often a distinction made between virtue and duty, the former word seeming to include the latter and go beyond it. however, it is not only virtuous to do one's duty, but it is also the duty of the individual to do his best. in fact, the two, virtue and duty, are coëxtensive, the term "virtue" describing conduct by the quality of the agent's mind, the term "duty" by the nature of the act performed. nevertheless, there are actions to which it is more natural to apply the term "virtue," "duty" being colored by legal implications. in the legal sense, duty fixes, not the highest line of conduct, but the lowest limit, beneath which conduct must not fall. virtue, as contrasted with duty in the legal sense, seems to be coëxtensive with merit. negative merit, however, where a man is good in spite of some great disadvantage, does not make an act virtuous in distinction from dutiful conduct. it is the duty of a man with a passion for drink to repress it; but we do not term his performance virtuous, though it may be meritorious. merit, that is, implies a scale within the range of good acts themselves. virtue and duty coincide, however, only so long as the moral value of actions are considered. for we distinguish two different classes of virtues, or two senses of the word "virtue," corresponding to the distinction of ethical and pathological, the pathological virtues being certain gifts of emotion or sentiment, which are sometimes thought to make action more virtuous, but do not alter its real character. "thus, for example, the virtue of benevolence may be thought imperfect without kindly feeling, though a man may be benevolent without any such spontaneous movement. chastity, again, may in some natures be accompanied by, and flow from, a delicacy of feeling which makes all unlawful suggestions impossible. now, if these emotions were necessary to their respective virtues, we should have to admit that duty was less than virtue. but we must maintain that they are excellences which do not alter the moral character of conduct, and may be absent altogether and leave the agent as virtuous as if they were present. some persons, indeed, would say that there was less virtue in characters which possessed these emotional endowments.... in themselves, they are not virtues in the ethical sense, but only 'add a lustre' to habits of will. they may even be ineffectual, as often happens with very good-natured persons, or they may be positively bad. courage, for instance, we admire even in a villain. we may conclude, then, that these excellences of disposition are only valuable in so far as they are helps to virtue, and we praise the brave villain on account of a quality which is of the utmost importance for actual goodness. they enter into our ideal of the perfect or complete character, though, if we estimate our ideal of perfection, we shall find, i think, that we attach less value to them when they are native than when they have been produced by a constant discipline." it might seem, then, that we could classify duties under virtues. to a considerable extent such a classification is possible. but it must be imperfect, because there are duties--for example, filial duty, or the duty of casting one's vote in a political contest--which do not correspond to any general head of virtue, or may be ranked under several heads: and again, we may rank along with virtues which stand for duties qualities of conduct which do not correspond to duties in the same sense; as, for instance, in a list of heads of duties, wisdom and self-control. the enumeration mixes up two classifications, in the one of which we group observances together under certain heads, in the other of which we enumerate certain elements of good action in general, certain aspects which every good action presents, and we exhibit them as qualities in the agent's mind. the two classifications are combined in the ancient description of morality under the heads of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. the better classification is by moral institutions, where the moral life is already mapped out for us into its different parts. such a scheme of classification will consider (_a_) the individual, (_b_) the family, (_c_) the society, (_d_) the state; the fourth division including international duties, the third not being necessarily limited to a particular society, but extending to all mankind. dynamical analysis--moral growth and progress the previous description of morality supposes it to be stationary, and is like a section taken across the path of morality at any one time. it gives us no idea of the process and progress of morality. we have yet to show how the moral order is produced, and to examine the meaning and the law of moral progress. as the moral organism may be compared to a species of which the various moral individuals are the members, so the moral ideal may be regarded as a species of which the various ideals in the minds of good men are the different individuals. we should thus expect to find the origin and growth of morality analogous to or, more strictly speaking, identical with, the growth of natural species. "if an ultimate ideal were admissible, it would be impossible to assert that morality is essentially progressive." morality, in the sense of an equilibrium, has at every stage a certain finality, in the sense that it is, for that stage, the ideal adjustment. but we cannot conceive of any ideal as final in the sense of stationary. the good is always ultimate but always in motion. "moral progress admits of only two degrees of comparison, the superlative being identical with the positive." by "best" we do not imply a greater rightness in the ultimate condition, but only a highest development. spencer's conception of the distinction between absolute and relative ethics involves the conception of an ultimate "ideal congruity," or complete adaptation of man to his conditions, a mobile equilibrium including perfection as well as goodness, present choice being never between wrong and an absolute right, but always between two wrongs, the lesser of which is to have the preference. the picture is, in itself, perfectly legitimate; and in so far as spencer "conceives that the only ideal is the absolutely right conduct, his conception is not only legitimate, but true." there is always, however, an absolute right that may be chosen; and "using the conception of a mobile equilibrium, we found it to be, not a goal of progress, but the meaning of goodness at any time." "the distinction of good and bad (right and wrong) arises within the limited range of conditions that are to be met by good action." that, as sidgwick asserts, there is always some course of conduct which is right, the moral consciousness declares with certainty, and is thus against the relativity of morality. mr. spencer holds that any concomitant of pain makes an action wrong, therefore it is natural for him to regard all present morality as only relative. but to the good man the pleasure of doing right exceeds the possible attendant pains of an action; and except upon the understanding that, in a society of good men, every one will adjust himself with equanimity to the needs of others, not even the acts which are declared to be typical of absolutely right conduct can be free from concomitant pain. "will the ideal state exhibit no competitions, such as rivalry in love, which can be ended indeed with the contentment of all persons, but assuredly not without attendant pain?" the general error in theory on this subject lies in a misconception of the idea of "adjustment" to environment, the fact not being noted that the environment is not itself fixed and permanent. what the environment is depends upon the nature and faculties of the individual, the same environment being a different one for amoeba and human being, for the blind man and the man possessing sight; and what environment is and what the individual does are settled at one and the same time, the process of selection being one from both sides, and the variation of both. the adaptation "wherever it exists and so far as it exists" is, hence, perfect adaptation; if the lower organism is adapted to its environment, its adaptation is as perfect as that of the higher organism to its environment. every successful life means adaptation. "every animal which can maintain its life is in adaptation to its environment." the bare formula of adaptation means nothing more than the fact of existence. "adaptation to the conditions as such teaches us nothing as to the nature of the organism; for all functions are reactions upon the conditions, and therefore, so far, adaptations. but it points to something behind. it means that _all_ the functions of the animal are adapted to the conditions, and this means that its functions are adapted or adjusted to one another under the conditions." "the moral ideal consists in a certain equilibrium established on the basis of certain conditions--wants and sentiments in moral agents." it involves advance just for this reason, because the act of adjustment implied in good conduct itself alters the sentiments of the agent, and creates new needs demanding a new satisfaction. the change is not always in the same direction, however; for cultivation in one direction may cause the individual to become aware of capacities or wants in quite another direction, or the advocacy of one side of a question, persevered in, may so open up the other side as to end in complete change of view. in any case, however, there is an enlargement of experience, and the old facts are themselves changed by it as well as are the individuals subject to it. this change or adjustment leads to a maladjustment requiring a new adjustment. this maladjustment is to be distinguished from the reärrangements which are contemplated by the statical ideal and due to the mere rotation of wants in society; the latter are within the moral system as a system of mobile equilibrium. the maladjustment is of another sort. "the good act ceases to be good by its performance. the moral ideal ceases to satisfy." the two forms of change may be compared respectively to a shifting of position on the same locus, and to such a shifting of position as involves a shifting of locus. thus, by change after change of this sort, a new variety replaces its parent, and this variety in time producing a fresh variety, there is finally reached a new species. progress thus becomes a necessary fact, and the difference of so-called stationary societies from progressive ones can lie only in the comparative slowness of change. "as there is a difference between different societies in rate of change, so there is a similar difference as between different parts of conduct." law, a part of morality, lags behind in moral progress. however, there is nevertheless always advancement, otherwise legislators would be unnecessary. and the direct outward change of form is preceded by other change, laws which fall into disfavor by means of moral progress being modified, in application, within the possible limits of interpretation, and less and less rigidly enforced. there is good reason why law should have a certain permanence. the moral standard appears to have a similar more or less fixed character, while morality itself is in continuous change. there are two reasons for this appearance: ( ) the changes in the moral order are infinitesimal and not perceived by us except as accumulated through some period of time; and, moreover, what is commonly called the moral standard is only a kind of generalization from the extremely various opinions of different persons as to what is right, and differs from the real standard which "registers the conduct constituting equilibrium, and is possessed by the good man. perfectly good men are impossible. the standard current is therefore nothing more than a common understanding, which every one, even every good man, expresses differently; it is no more an exact expression of the truth than is, let us say, a great scientific conception (like development) which regulates all knowledge, but is amongst the educated little more than the name of a general way of thinking, while the thing itself is becoming, at the hands of men of science, modified or even transformed." ( ) the mistake is often made of describing morality, not by institutions, but in terms of virtues, and while the name applied to different virtues remains the same, their content changes from age to age. this idea of variability affects the statical conception of order with regard to habit--the moral requirement being that the fixed habits of morality should not be so fixed as to be incapable of advancement; and with regard to conscience, of which it might be said that, instead of representing the moral order, it was more occupied in changing than in maintaining it, but which in reality thus represents the moral order, to which the ideal is a changing one. two difficulties or objections may arise with regard to this idea of a changing ideal. the progress has been represented by personifying the ideal and supposing the person to change with each new ideal. again, "goodness consists, we saw, of a system of conduct in the individual himself or in society, and this system forms a series in time. it would seem to follow that, if goodness is always progressive, no second act would be performed under the same law, although the very idea of the law means a series of acts." but we are not to suppose that, if fifty good men in a society act rightly, fifty new ideals are established, for the ideal represents the equilibrium of the members of the society, and it depends on whether the new ideals of the fifty men represent the new equilibrium whether we shall call the persons good or bad. again, the ideal at any moment would be in fact realized in a series, supposing the conditions did not alter meanwhile; and while the system of conduct is serial, it is realized at any one moment in the mind of the man whose sentiments correspond to its requirements. "in this process we see exhibited the interplay of the element of goodness or rightness with that of perfection. in all actual goodness, we have perfection attained as well; but in the statical notion of goodness perfection is subordinate--only that exercise is perfect which is legitimate. but in the notion of progressive goodness, perfection regains its rights. for goodness, having secured perfection, creates new materials which destroy the old equilibrium and call for a new one. goodness determines perfection, but change in perfection determines, therefore, changes in goodness." morality is the creation of a better; this better is change from a lower to a higher development, not the growth of a greater rightness. all good conduct is _absolutely_ good, and the good man of former days was as good as the good man of to-day, although he performed acts not allowable by the higher moral standard attained as highest development. accordingly, there is no such thing as an absolute morality, in comparison with which other conduct is variable and relative. the relativity of good conduct, instead of being a reproach, is in reality its highest praise, for it implies that the conduct takes account of exactly those conditions to which it is meant to apply. this conception of morality as absolute runs into that of morality as an eternal and identical law: eternal, for the morality of given conditions remains eternally true for those conditions; identical, for although it cannot be called identical in the sense that virtues do not change with institutions, it is identical in form,--as an equilibrium of social forces in an order of conduct. the more important conception of the moral law is its unity in which, as the stages of one continuous law, its identity consists. "progress is not mere destruction of the lower, but fulfilment." in considering how morality arises, it would be erroneous to suppose that it comes into existence by an actual compromise. it arises through a process of continuous change, parts of which may be an insensible growth, parts the self-conscious adoption of a proposed new scheme. in the latter case, a slight reform may be adopted with but little opposition from members of the society other than the proposer, as meeting a recognized, common want; or, in the case of a more extended reform, the idea as first proposed may be long contended against, and only finally adopted after much alteration by reason of contact with such opposition. in its acceptance innumerable forces are combined, innumerable different motives determine its acceptation by different persons. whatever the motive, however, the conduct of the person accepting it alters in accordance with its acceptation. the chief importance of pleasure and pain lies in the part they take in such choice. they are "the tests of the act being suitable or the reverse to the character (in the widest sense) of the agent." if a reform does not suit the character, it will cause pain and urge to removal of the pain by resistance; and on the other hand, when the reform is accepted, it must be that it gives pleasure to the persons concerned. but in saying this we have to remember the distinction between ethical (or effective) and pathological (or incidental) pleasures and pains. the total reaction of character on a stimulus may be pleasurable, but this pleasure results from a mixture of pleasures and pains weighed against one another. this balancing of pleasures and pains is not reflective, but takes place by a kind of intuitive act in which only subsequent reflection may be able to distinguish the elements. the pleasure or pain involved in acceptance or rejection is not the ground of acceptance or rejection. the cause of the acceptance or rejection is the nature of the reform itself, its congruity or incongruity with the natures of the persons accepting or rejecting it. "when the new ideal is definitely established, those who do not obey it are bad, those who do are good." those who were good under the old may thus be bad under the new ideal, and _vice versa_. the gradual reform through the choice of individuals who act upon their feelings without knowing the whole aim or bearing of their conduct is similar to that where a definite reform is the end in view. it is a gradual adjustment of wills under new conditions and represents the position of equilibrium which would be completely realized if all the society were good. the new ideal is not to be defined as merely the will of the majority, the possession of a majority being nothing but the fact of its prevalence. the ground of prevalence is that it represents the equilibrium. "there is no virtue in mere preponderance; it is not that reforms follow the majority, but that a majority is attracted by a suitable reform." a new ideal arises by a struggle of varieties analogous to that in the organic world,--the word "struggle" being metaphorical in both cases, since actual conflict is not necessary to either. "the distinction of good and bad corresponds to the domination of one variety... which has come to prevail in virtue of its being a social equilibrium," and thus representing suitability to all the conditions of life. evil is simply that which has been rejected and defeated in the struggle with the good. the reformer, as not representing the predominating ideal and so the social equilibrium, and the man who turns out to be bad by the new ideal, thus stand originally upon the same level. "each is an instance of a variety of the original species, but the former is the successful variety"; his ideal "represents the real forces of society and can be adopted by the whole." the struggle is one of character and conduct, and results not necessarily in the extinction of life, but in the extinction of unsuitable ideals. "the distinction of the _formally_ bad from the _materially_ good rests upon the transition from the old ideal to the new, though sometimes we use those terms as describing what is only legally wrong though morally approved. a reformer, until his reform is established, is formally wrong. he can be considered materially right only prospectively;... time only can prove whether he had really forecast the movement of his society." "sometimes a society may be so divided, as in our civil war, that neither variety is predominant. in such a case we must say, not that there was no rule of right, but that there was a different rule for each of the two halves of the nation." "there does not arise any need for the distinction of formally and materially right conduct, until the limits have been overstepped, within which it is in any age considered right for a man to act upon his own conviction. these limits are placed very differently in different ages." does good action, then, depend on the bad man as well as on the good? "good and evil arise together, and good is therefore always relative to evil, but we do not therefore take our morality from the bad. we cannot, in fact, know who is bad until the standard is created, but once created, we maintain it against bad men by punishment. but, on the other hand, the moral standard does depend upon the forces which, when allowed free play, are distinguished as bad.... a large part of conduct consists of precautions which it is not only legitimate but incumbent to take, but which we should dispense with under happier conditions.... and in a second way, morality depends on 'badness,' for when a habit of action which we dislike and call bad comes to be strong enough to make itself felt, we seek to satisfy its claims as reasonable. there is... no external standard by which we can settle once and for all what claims are legitimate and what are not. we derive our conception of the reasonableness of things from our experience of their vitality and effective powers. a wise man who thinks the feelings and beliefs of his neighbors ridiculous will, by persuasion or force, resist them with all his energies, but when he finds them persist in spite of all his efforts, he will recognize that there are more things in human nature than stir within the narrow limits of his own breast. if what we now call bad conduct, murder, adultery, theft, could be conceived to become predominant under greatly changed and of course impossible conditions, it would cease to be bad and would be the ideal of life." from the view that morality depends upon victory, misconceptions may arise. the question may be asked: should one, in case of doubt, follow one's own conviction, or join the side it is thought will prevail? but that good is created by predominance is a theory of the means by which ideals come into existence, not a statement of the motive of those who participate in the struggle. the struggle is between characters and their forces, and not victory is the end, but the assertion of certain principles. "interest or good in general is a different conception from the right or the morally good. interest means what is good for an individual considered from his own point of view, and without regard to similar claims of other individuals. it is the maximum of happiness or satisfaction which he can secure under his conditions. by 'maximum happiness' is meant that distribution of satisfactions or of the energies which produce them, any deviation from which on either side implies a less fulness of life." it refers, however, to his good as a social, not as an isolated individual. as a general rule, interest is in agreement with goodness; misdeeds are unprofitable. but there are instances where goodness and interest do not coincide, though not in the case of the good man. that virtue and interest are in general identical means, statically, that morality is a reconciliation of interests by which wants are satisfied, and is established by the creation of a new type of character, which has wants of only certain kinds; and, dynamically, it represents the fact that forces are arrayed on the side of the good which are too powerful for the bad. "good is the victorious ideal"; and though we may say that it would really be to the bad man's interest to be bad, if circumstances were such that his variety could maintain itself, we may add that such hypothetical interests cannot be secured. however, interest does not coincide with morality-- ( ) where the individual does not care for punishments and social censures. ( ) where a man, by reason of certain superiorities of force over others with whom he is more directly in contact, is able to obtain power and suppress their resistance, or where the moral weakness of others leaves him unpunished. in these exceptional cases, we have the contradictory phenomenon that an ideal which can maintain its existence is yet declared to be bad. "such cases mark a stage of transition in the process by which the distinction of good or bad is established." in the struggle of animal species, the same phenomenon may be found; an exceptional individual of a vanishing variety maintains his existence for a time by reason of his exceptional endowment or of coming in contact merely with the weaker members of the successful variety. there are two ways in which the moral ideal is maintained,--by education and by punishment. punishment is the condemnation of wrong-doing by censure or by legal penalties. the unpleasant consequences of neglect of the self-regarding virtues are not punishment; but the reaction of the good forces of society against wrong-doing is as natural as the unpleasant physical effects of imprudence. "if the question as to what moral sanction is means, 'what reason is there why morality exists?' the answer lies not in enumerating the penalties of wrong-doing, but in tracing the origin of morality as an equilibrium of the forces of society.... but the question, 'why should i be moral?' means, most naturally and usually, what inducements are there to me to do right?" the answer is that motives differ for different individuals. with some, outer social inducements, with others, the approbation and disapprobation of conscience are stronger. these latter ethical pains and pleasures which are felt at the idea of an action stand on a different footing from feelings having regard to external rewards and punishments and also the prospective pleasures and pains of conscience. the man who does right because he shrinks from prospective pains of conscience is not a good man, but intermediate morally between the bad man who seeks only to escape legal punishment and the good man whose pains of conscience felt at the idea of a wrong act prevent his performing it. punishment wears different shapes according to the point of view from which it is regarded, but, in the distinctively moral view, is reformatory. all punishment is retribution, but not in the sense that it is personal vengeance. the value of this idea of retribution lies in the fact that it places punishment on a line with the process of self-assertion by which species maintain their life; it is a part of the reaction of the organism against anything which impedes its vitality. if, however, punishment avenges the evil deed, it is a confusion to say that it is for the sake of vengeance. the purpose in the mind of those punishing is not necessarily vengeance, and the idea of mere retribution is repugnant to the good man. from the juridic point of view, the object of punishment is prevention; from the moral point of view, reformation. the reformation seeks to destroy a bad ideal, and does not necessarily destroy the individual in whom it is found; but in some cases the wrong-doer's mind is so perverted that only death, it is judged, will suffice. "here, too, paradoxical as it may seem, though perhaps the chief object of our punishment is the indirect one of bettering others, we punish with death in order to make him a good man and to bring him within the ideal of society.... the penalty of death is thought necessary to bring home to him the enormity of his guilt." the object of punishment is not always achieved, but this matters not for its moral character, which lies in its conscious object. the idea of punishment as reconciling the criminal with society includes the aspect of retribution or expiation, under which punishment may be viewed from without; but it is only when the suffering is attended by reformation that it can be considered in a proper sense expiation or atonement. responsibility differs from obligation by introduction of the element of punishment. obligation is the necessity of good conduct which arises out of the relation of the act to the order of which it forms a part. "responsibility is the negative aspect of this relation. when i think of conduct as required of me, i think of it as my duty; when i think of it as conduct which if i do not perform, i shall be rightly punished, i have the sense of responsibility." the sense of responsibility is thus a knowledge of the requirements of the law, and it is only as we have law-abiding instincts that we feel it; and we feel it differently according as we think of the authority of the law as derived from its mere enactment or as founded upon the social good, or as established in our own conscience and self-respect, which represent the social good. as including recognition of certain conduct as right, the sense of responsibility is more than the mere knowledge and fear of punishment. "it is only those who can appreciate that punishment will be deserved to whom the idea of responsibility applies. there is, therefore, no difference between the fact of responsibility and the sense of responsibility, any more than there is between goodness and the feeling of approbation, or duty and the sense of duty. when we declare a bad man responsible, we mean that the good man holds him to be justly punished." responsibility depends, then, on two things,--that a man is capable of being influenced by what is right, and that whatever he does is determined by his character. this capacity depends on his being aware of the meaning of his acts, and so of their connection with other acts, and contains thus an element not present in the relations of animals. "except for the authority of one or two great names, there seems to be a general agreement that the will is determined by character." if character means the principle of volition, as it is regarded in our analyses, the assertion is a truism. it is no less true if character is defined as disposition; all our dealings with our fellow-men reckon on their acting in accordance with their character. the distinction made by green that the mind acts from its own nature (the motive and the whole process of willing being within the mind) is no more and no less true of the action of other bodies. the emergence of new sentiments in character might be urged as an argument for free will; but this is of no more significance than the budding of trees in springtime. the sense of freedom is the sense of choice between two motives; but this merely depends upon the intellectual property that the object willed is present to consciousness,--in case of choice two objects being present to the mind. "so far is the consciousness of freedom from being a ground for assuming an arbitrary or undetermined power of volition that it is exactly what would be expected to accompany the process of determination when the object concerned was a conscious mind. pull a body to the right with a force of twelve pounds and to the left with a force of eight; it moves to the right. imagine that body a mind aware of the forces which act upon it; it will move in the direction of that which, for whatever reason, appeals to it most; and in doing so it will, just because it is conscious, act of itself, and will have the consciousness of freedom." but which motive is chosen is fixed and dependent upon character, that cannot choose otherwise than it does; and the sense of freedom is a sheer delusion. the feeling that one ought to have acted otherwise implies another sort of freedom, according to which he only is truly free who chooses the right; in such choice it is, however, the character which acts, and though a man is free, in this sense, _if he chooses_, his choice is determined. the argument of free will in regard to punishment does not explain punishment, but renders it inexplicable. it would be senseless to punish except as, by so doing, we can influence a man's character. determinism does not make punishment wrong; it is not cruelty, but kindness to punish: it saves a man from worse, from degradation of character, enabling him to change his ideal, and thus bringing himself into equilibrium with his kind. the reason of certain doubts which are beginning to be felt to-day with regard to punishment is the larger knowledge of the dependence of men on their surroundings, hence of the culpability of society as a whole; it is not an objection to responsibility as such, but to the distribution of responsibility. education, the second means by which the moral ideal is defended, is not identical with social progress, by which the moral ideal is itself changed, but is the individual progress included within each definite moral ideal. education and progress are, however, inseparably bound together, in that education goes hand in hand with punishment, and in that it leads to the discovery of new ideals. if we take only the irregular line which includes the good, and discard the ideals which are exterminated or left behind, the movement of ideals is continuous with education, and progress may therefore be described as an education of society. the education of children has to put them in possession of the present moral achievement, and to make them independent individuals,--so to penetrate them with the moral order that it shall appear in them as spontaneous character. it is an evolving of an ideal already present; for, to be capable of education, a person must have already set foot on the right path. as in the physical world, so in the moral, we have the survival of many different genera and species,--various ideals of conduct or institutions of life, some of which may be grouped together by strong resemblances, others of which stand to each other in the relation of lower to higher organisms; the survival of archaic institutions in the higher as well as their history of progress showing their affinities with the lower. "history is the palæontology of moral ideals," and provides us with a better means of studying the growth of morality than exists for the study of the growth of species. as in the organic world, varieties develop from species by a gradual and continuous movement of sentiment, each successful variation forming the basis of a new variation, and the differences of the varieties from each other and from the original species increasing with their distance from the original species, until the difference amounts to a difference of species. we may call these modifications "accidental," but, as in the physical world, they are so only as we regard them from the position occupied by a person before the event; they have their causes if we can find them. these causes are to be found in the contact of different minds. variability depends to a considerable extent on the size of a genus, but only in so far as greater size involves greater complexity and variety of interests; the vast but homogeneous societies of the east being less progressive than the smaller but more complex ones of the west. "where freer scope is left to individual inclinations or aptitudes, there the friction of mind against mind is more intense. new ideas are generated in the more vivid consciousness of the people, and life becomes more inventive." species developed from a common genus will show some common traits and some rules of mutual observance, savage peoples which have divided into tribes being an exception to the latter part of the statement, for the reason that lower societies have very little moral cohesion; they may be compared to lower organisms which reproduce themselves by fission, or to homogeneous colonies of animals, like sponges. under the generic institutions we must not include those which arise merely as the result of similar circumstances. ideals once formed advance at very different rates, though the tendency to divergence is always being corrected by the diffusion of ideas. but where one nation takes ideas from another, these ideas are not borrowed, in the sense that they come wholly from the other nation; there must have been, in the borrowing nation, a development of ideas up to the point that makes the borrowing possible,--a similar development to that of the nation from which the borrowing takes place, due to similar circumstances. the communication of moral ideas does not depend upon race-community, as is shown by the ready adoption of western ideas by such nations as the hindoos and japanese. in general language, we identify development and progress; and this is true also in the case of morality. goodness means progress; wickedness, retrogression or else stagnation, which, compared with advance, is retrogression. "in changing from one form to another, morality changes from what is right under one set of conditions to what is right under another set, and such change from good to good is what we mean by becoming better. to deny this is to find some other standard of advance than in the actual movement which has taken place, to put an _a priori_ conception of development in place of the facts." "the moral ideal is always, therefore, a progress, for either the society is single, and goodness represents the law of its advance, or if the society is part of a larger one, its ideal can be retrogressive only because the society is so far bad." "and since goodness and badness exhaust the field of moral possibilities, if the propositions that goodness means progress, and badness regress, are both true, we must be able to convert them, and maintain that all progress is due to goodness and all regress to badness." to do this, we must distinguish between degradation and a mere degeneration which involves a return to simpler conditions as an adaptation to changed environment. such degeneration as adaptation to circumstances, in an individual or a society as a whole, is progress. fish who become blind by living in the dark become thus better fitted to their circumstances, and the like is true of moral degeneration under simpler conditions. old age and death are characteristic of the higher type of organism, in distinction from the lower types which, multiplying by fission, are practically eternal; they are conditions of the advantage of type, in which the individual is partaker. so a good society under simpler conditions is on the side of progress, though it may lie outside the main line of advance. it is true that bad persons often help on progress, but the good they do lies in their representation of the will of society for progress, the evil lies in their use of this will as means to their own ends. it may be objected, too, that the good man is sometimes a hindrance to progress through stupidity; but to this is to be answered that intellect itself becomes morally characterized in action. all events and institutions are thus determined by their conditions; but there is a movement forward distinguishable from the delay of stragglers and the resistance of enemies, and this distinction is enforced by the moral predicates of good and bad. our theory does not imply that whatever is, is right; such a statement involves the use of the word right in the sense of "correct," or "intelligible," "accountable by reflection." nor is the doctrine fatalistic. fatalism implies that men act at the impulse of some force which they do not understand; "but the history of mankind is the history of beings who, through their own gift of consciousness, subdue circumstances to their own characters." in judging a nation's development, we must not interpret it according to our own likings, as progression or retrogression; nor must we imagine retrogression from relaxation of duties in some certain directions, but must regard the society and its institutions as a whole. the test of higher organization usually given is that of increasing differentiation of parts with corresponding specialization of function. but the main course of progress is not linear, or in one continuous direction; apparent reversions to former types are only apparent; the new type stands higher than the old. in other words, history moves in cycles. it follows, from this, that mere differentiation is insufficient for definition. while the differentiation advances, its significance alters, or, let us say, the relative places of specialization and of unity alter. along with differentiation goes a process of integration. great revolutions simplify. the result of greater and greater heterogeneity is to produce a new principle, which combines the warring elements. the definition of progress by increased differentiation is lacking in two ways: it tells us nothing of the forces by which progress is produced, and it gives no connected view of the actual facts of historical development. a general statement of progress in its formal sense is found in the conception of a struggle of ideals. but as in this struggle the survival of the fittest does not necessarily mean the destruction of those who represented the defeated ideal, but the supplanting of their ideal by another, the movement is one of comprehension, and we should expect to find, and do find, the history of morality exhibit the gradual development of a universal moral order, good not for one group of men but for all. it would be a misapprehension to regard this change as merely quantitative, as if the virtues were the same whether they applied on a larger or a smaller scale. "the quantitative extension is parallel with, and in reality proceeds from, a change in the conception of the human person himself." in primitive communities, the individual is so limited that he can hardly be called an individual at all. first among the greeks do we find the person the embodiment of the social order, but in a limited sense. "when this limitation breaks down, and the individual stands forth as independent and self-conscious, the author of the laws he obeys, we have at the same time the extension of the area of persons with whom he is in moral relation." "it matters little that the western ideal of a society of humanity is realized to so slight an extent. the ideal exists and implies the inclusion of mankind." the principle of democracy, which we are engaged in working out, "continues, or perhaps supersedes, under much more complex conditions and over a wider range of institutions, the same principle as christianity introduced." it is not merely an identical element in many individual states, but a comprehensive ideal. the power of naturalization, extradition laws, international action among the working classes, etc., imply this. this "comprehension" is not merely one of breadth, but of depth as well: the ideal includes not only the present of mankind, but its whole future also. duties have always been recognized to posterity, but the range of generations to whom they applied was small, and the interests which it was believed could be secured were limited also. _après moi le déluge_ describes a form of selfishness of all ages, but different ages have understood the _après moi_ quite differently. at the present day, the range of responsibility is extending indefinitely. a common political ideal does not mean a universal peace. coarser forms of dispute disappear, but, on the other hand, as nations grow more refined in their ideals, they grow more susceptible. what a political humanity, or a political community of europe, would mean, is the substitution of international punishment for the self-willed conflicts of irresponsible nations. we cannot say what the future of society and of morality may be,--whether mankind will be able to take mechanical means against a period of ice, or whether human society may not, as a whole, be destroyed, to be replaced by a higher type of existence, which may arise on the earth from the development of humanity, or may, on some other planet, take up the tale of human civilization as we take up that of the civilization of greece and rome. two things follow from the progressive character of the moral ideal: ( ) that the classification and description of duties will vary with each age; ( ) that, as the ideal changes from age to age, the highest moral principle or sentiment will change with it. at the present time, a belief has gained great authority, that the sense of duty is transitory and will finally disappear; but whether we, with spencer, identify obligation with coercion, or understand it as the relation of a part of conduct to the rest, in neither sense is the proposition true as it stands. if duty means constraint, it by no means follows that constraint will cease with progress; for constraint arises from confronting one inclination with a higher idea, and its disappearance would mean that inclinations had become constant; this is, however, impossible. the fiction of a final stage of mobile equilibrium is an unwarranted conclusion from the fact that all morality involves a cycle of conduct in mobile equilibrium. but the theory represents a truth,--the truth that morality at no time implies in itself the sense of duty. the sense of duty, as involving the hard feeling of compulsion, of subjection to authority, and bound up with the sense of sin, a sense stronger in proportion to merit or the interval between first inclination and final moral willing, may and is giving place to a higher conception. in the family, this may already be found, where self-sacrifice and aid are matters of affection and rendered freely. in the higher ideal, we have that love of man for a higher and larger order than himself which morality represents as solidarity with society, a continually progressive society of free individuals; which religion represents as the love for and of god. and at the last two questions may be asked: ( ) whether the difficulties in which christianity is placed at the present day do not arise from absorption of its highest idea into the conceptions and the practice of morality, so that the religious sentiment is starved; and ( ) whether the ideal of a free coöperation in the progress of humanity may not be used to interpret the belief in immortality, putting in the place of individual immortality the continuance of life in the persons whom the individual may affect. in "the international journal of ethics" july, , alexander combats some misinterpretations of "natural selection in morals," which he says are partly due to spencer's individualism. natural selection in social life does not mean necessarily destruction of individuals, but is a struggle of ideals, such as that between individualism and collectivism,--in which selection seems to favor collectivism. footnotes: [ ] the reference is here to wundt, "phys. psych.," i. p. (ed. ii.). appendix to part i paul ree dr. paul ree's "source of the moral feelings" ("ursprung der moralischen empfindungen," ), is written from a pessimistic and mechanical standpoint. the connection of thought and feeling in the region of morals is, according to ree, a purely, or very nearly a purely, outward one, moral judgments not being the result of sympathy or antipathy, or related to these feelings in more than an external manner, but arising from associations of ideas engendered by education; the sense of justice being, in this manner, the effect of punishment. a definite distinction is likewise made by ree, between vice, which affects the individual only, and badness, which affects society, the profligate who satisfies his lust in the most unrestrained manner being regarded as perhaps unwise, but not bad, as long as he does not seduce the pure. the author fails, however, to show us how vice can be practised without social injury, and necessarily fails also--since his position takes into account no organic relations of characteristics--to notice the significance of profligacy as an inherent feature of character. he touches at one or two points, only, on habit, and at one point alone on heredity, where he raises the question of the hereditary character of vanity, but arrives at no conclusion. he also makes the division of egoism from non-egoism a definite one, fully identifying the good with the non-egoistic, the bad with the egoistic. the non-egoistic really exists; a man may relieve another's suffering in order to free himself from the sight of it; or he may relieve it for the other's sake. nevertheless, non-egoistic action is rare; men are much more egoistic than the apes, who are rivals only with regard to food and sexual desire, while men are rivals not only with respect to these primitive wants, but with respect to many others besides, especially since they not only regard the present but provide for the future also. vanity, according to ree, gives rise to envy, hatred, and malignity. but, the action of these passions being opposed to the safety of society, some persons[ ] introduced punishment for its protection, and fear of punishment, and exchange of labor united men in peace. deeds and never motives were at first considered in the infliction of punishment, but, outer compulsion not securing safety, the ideal of an inner condition of character which should secure it arose. "good" and "useful" are synonyms, but men of later generations, receiving laws without explanation of their origin, fail to understand that the good was, in its origin, simply the useful, that the bad was, in like manner, the harmful, and that punishment is for the purpose of prevention and not in the nature of a return for things done. the knowledge of this truth takes from life some of its grandeur; but the truth remains the truth, nevertheless. the will is not free; the mistake of regarding it as free is the result of the failure to perceive that punishment looks to the future, not to the past,--is a means of prevention, not a requital. the right to punish does not rest, therefore, upon the sense of justice; but punishment is justifiable as a means of prevention. its choice, like that of other evils as the alternatives of greater ones, is the practice of the principle, the end justifies the means. those who repudiate this principle have not generally looked deeply into its meaning; moreover, it has been misused. in putting it in practice, several things must be observed:-- . the end to be served must be a good one; . the choice of means causing pain is permissible only when no other means are possible; . the pain must be reduced to the least possible; . the pain must be less than would be involved in the omission of this particular choice. * * * * * the doctrine of eternal punishment is untenable, because:-- . it presupposes the existence of a god. . supposing a god to be existent, we cannot name him either good or bad. "god is good" means "he does good to the world and its inhabitants"; but of the world we know only the little earth, and of god we know nothing. . if we will, nevertheless, predicate goodness or badness of god, we must call him bad, since all beings known to us suffer much pain and have little pleasure. the gods of the savages, who are not yet led away by theological hair-splitting, are evil. . but if we still persist in naming god good, then we cannot suppose him to be also cruel, and even more cruel than the hardest-hearted of mortals. . the doctrine of eternal punishment assumes the existence of a soul; but the difference between human beings and the higher animals is not so great that one can ascribe an especial soul to men. . but if a soul exists, it cannot be tortured, since it is immaterial. . and the deeds which god will thus punish deserve, on the theory of punishment as prevention, no requital. * * * * * it is not immaterial to us whether men have a good or an evil opinion of us. . because we hope for advantages from a good opinion. . because we are vain. vanity arose, in the first place, because admiration was useful to men, just as it is useful to the birds at pairing-time, and habit rendered it agreeable in itself. men therefore desire it, even when it has no especial use, because "they know that all admiration is followed by a strong feeling of pleasure."[ ] the difference between man and the peacock in respect to vanity is merely that he desires to be admired for other things than outer appearance alone,--for courage, strength, cleverness, the tools of battle, and many other things. since, among human beings, men and not women choose their mates, endeavoring to obtain one or more of the most beautiful women possible, women endeavor to render themselves beautiful, expending greater efforts as the stake is greater in their case than in that of the peacock. they endeavor to supplement their outward attractiveness by amiability, cleverness, household industry, and, in our days, wealth; but beauty always makes the strongest impression upon the man. men desire to be admired rather for other things than outward appearance, though for this, too, to some extent. but vanity may be objected to ( ) on the ground that it is a desire to create envy, and envy is pain and gives rise to hatred; ( ) on the hedonistic ground that the vain man more often suffers pain from not being admired than experiences pleasure from admiration; ( ) on the intellectual ground that vanity renders a man incapable of impersonal interest in nature, art, philosophy, and science. entire freedom from vanity could, however, be attained only by a life of complete isolation. because of these reasons for blame, men do not confess that they act from vanity, but give other reasons for deeds prompted by this feeling.[ ] ambition may be blamed on grounds similar to those on which vanity is blamed. however, this feeling urges to many useful acts, and without it few would find interest for great effort. and since, because of its usefulness, ambition is less blamed than vanity, men are more ready to acknowledge that they possess it. we desire to appear well in the eyes of others, therefore we conceal our envy and hatred, and affect high courage, great honesty, and charity. such hypocrisy is bad; but it is necessary. for if men were to show themselves as they are, with hearts full of hostility, they could not at all associate. in order to make frankness and peace both possible, men must become what they now pretend to be; but this does not lie in their power. malignant pleasure in others' pain arises from a comparison with our own more agreeable situation, or from the pleasure in our own superiority in any respect. when a woman is seduced, it is in the interest of other women to ostracise her, since, if marriage were to be abolished, women would lose in position; the man who seduces her is blamed for bringing shame on her, but not for unchastity, for men have no interest in maintaining chastity in their own sex. caprice arises, not from change of mood, but from the pleasure of power experienced in now charming by amiability, now causing gloom by coldness, and again inspiring fear through anger. if one desires anything from another, one should not say, "it is a little thing," but "it is very much that i ask"; since he who is asked gives more readily when he thinks he will appear very kind. natural selection does not prefer the individual as far as morals are concerned, but only nations. moral rules are variable, but not steadily progressive. man is by nature selfish; simply habit tames men and makes them, by change in nerves and muscle, more amenable to rule. the good man is probably worse off than the bad man. pain exceeds pleasure in all beings. everything, love included, becomes worthless when attained, and labor begins again for new attainment. man is, moreover, the most unhappy of all beings, for he feels most strongly, and in his complicated organism there is almost always something out of order. for this reason, sympathy[ ] brings more pain than pleasure. the bad man has only pangs of conscience to disturb him, and, if he is superstitious, the fear of punishment after death. it is difficult to say whether the bad man or the good man is happier. in fact, happiness depends rather on temperament, power of self-control, and health. possibly these truths may seem harmful; and if the good man is higher than the bad man, and goodness should be sought, only so much of the truth should be revealed as is not antagonistic to this end. but the good man is not the higher, although, because goodness is useful, our education has attempted to make us believe this. the animals may be unselfish as well as man; on the other hand, the disinterested search for truth is not found among the animals. the attainment of truth is, moreover, pleasurable to the searcher, turning painful desire for truth to pleasurable fulfilment. dr. ree's later book, "the origin of conscience" ("die entstehung des gewissens," ), does not add anything distinctly new in theory to this first book; it is rather noticeable for what it omits of the pessimism of the earlier book, for a more moderate, thoughtful, and less assertive tone, than for additional theories or even much further elaboration of the old theories, except as regards the derivation of the sense of justice. it traces the savage custom of the revenge of death through its displacement by the payment of blood-money, up to the final substitution of state punishment. punishment does not grow out of revenge, but succeeds it. it is not revenge, though the desire that the guilty may be punished and the desire for revenge may be mixed, in some cases. pain, not the sense of justice, drives the savage to revenge. punishment does not grow out of the sense of justice, but the latter out of the former. the interference of the state with the revenge of the individual is at first a mediation between the two parties for the maintenance of peace in the interest of the community; later, the state arrives at a method of punishment for the purpose of prevention. hume's theory of the origin of religion has been confirmed by anthropology. the savage sees in natural phenomena the action of living beings endowed with mental faculties like his own, and he gradually comes to transfer this action to beings not in, but, according to his new idea, behind, phenomena. the gods of primitive religions are moral only as the peoples whose gods they are, are moral. as society progresses, religion falls behind, and a new interpretation of old doctrines must be introduced in order to bring it up to the later standard. then the gods, as moral with the morality of this later date, are imagined as commanding the later standard, and to the fear of punishment by the state is added, as a preventive force, that of the punishment of the gods. the gods command what men command, forbid what men forbid. the god of the old testament, jahveh, was, like zeus, a nature-god, and took revenge as men did. when a later date demanded a standard of greater humanity, christ came, and he represented the god of the old testament, no longer as revengeful and passionate, but as possessing the attributes of sympathy which he felt in himself. the later standard of the new testament takes into consideration motives as well as deeds, and commands positively as well as forbids. but the god of the new testament is not wholly love; if his love is unreturned, he becomes angry, like men. the categoric imperative in the individual is merely the result of his individual education. conscience alone accomplishes little; other motives than the desire to do right--fear of punishment, etc.--are stronger. nothing is, in itself, good or bad, but only so far as it is useful or harmful. sympathy is to some degree innate,--how it arose we cannot say; but it has been preserved by natural selection. footnotes: [ ] p. . [ ] p. . [ ] see, in contradistinction to ree's theory of vanity, sigwart's admirable essay on this subject, contained in his "kleine schriften." [ ] dr. ree appears to depart from his general theory here and identify sympathy with morality. a review of evolutional ethics part ii introduction twenty years ago, any one about to deal with moral science from the standpoint of the theory of evolution, might have deemed it necessary to preface his work with a statement of cogent reasons for the assumption of such a standpoint. at a time when theology saw in darwinism only a weapon of the anti-theological party, and when even many scientists were not yet decided as to the worth of the new ideas, the right of the student to make use of them in psychological and ethical investigations might have been a subject for dispute. yet even in the beginning the attitude of apology was assumed oftener without, than within, english-speaking countries, for the very reason that exactly among the race from which darwin sprang, the warfare of his conception of animate nature with older systems was fiercest. at the present date, the attitude of opinion is changed in all countries. the theory of evolution has few, if it can be said to have any, enemies among the students of science. "with louis agassiz died the last opponent of darwinism deserving scientific notice," says haeckel.[ ] theology itself has ceased from extreme hostilities, and many theologians have even found in the idea of evolution an argument with which to defend teleological doctrine. the present opponents of darwinism as applied to psychology and ethics rather contest its special worth for these provinces than deny its validity in them. nevertheless, a universal acceptance cannot be claimed for the theory; and since ethics is, above all other sciences, the one that should most desire to persuade rather than to alienate,--and this the more, the stronger its conviction of its own truth,--it may be well to state or restate some of the reasons which justify, from almost all modern standpoints, at least a tentative application of the ideas of evolution to ethical theory. such a statement, or restatement, must be an attempt to demonstrate the validity of the theory in this province, and to give some good reasons for supposing, _a priori_, that a survey of ethical questions from the point of view it furnishes may be of ethical utility. the proof of such utility can be found, ultimately, only in the results of the investigation itself. there is but one phase of the theological doctrine of creation with which the mere idea of an evolution of life, by itself considered, is directly at variance; this is the doctrine of creation as taught by the older theology, which accepted the opening chapters of genesis as literal history, not as, by any possibility, an oriental allegory. between the theory of evolution and the idea of creation as a primal formation of matter with force or motion in accordance with fixed laws, between it and the idea of an initial application of force from without,--an impulsion which set the universe in motion,--between it and the conception of a transcendental guidance through natural law or of a pantheistic order of development, there is no such necessary contradiction as could justify the denial of evolution from the standpoint of any of these theories. it is, therefore, with the defenders of the older theological doctrine of creation only that an _a priori_ defence of evolution has to deal. the argument which this doctrine has always regarded as one of its strongest defences is that of the universality of the notion of a creating spirit. but this defence is no longer available; modern research has proved the idea to be by no means universal. sir john lubbock says, "the lower races have no idea of a creation; and among those somewhat more advanced it is, at first, very incomplete." "the lower savages regard their gods as scarcely more powerful than themselves;... they are not creators; they are neither omniscient nor all-powerful; far from conferring immortality on man, they are not even in all cases immortal themselves."[ ] "stuhr, who was, as müller says, a good observer of such matters, reports that the siberians had no idea of a creator. when burchill suggested the idea of creation to the bachapin kaffirs, these 'asserted that everything made itself,' and that trees and herbage grew by their own will."[ ] "as regards tahiti, williams observes that the 'origin of the gods and their priority of existence in comparison with the formation of the earth, being a matter of uncertainty even among the native priests, involves the whole in the greatest obscurity.'"[ ] "when the capuchin missionary, merolla, asked the queen of singa in western africa who made the world, she, 'without the least hesitation, readily answered, "my ancestors."'"[ ] "the bongos of sudan had no conception of there being a creator,"[ ] the adipones, the californian indians, before they came in contact with white men, the crees, the zulu kaffirs, the hottentots, had no idea of a creation. "even in sanscrit, there is no word for creation, nor does any such appear in the rigveda, the zendavesta, or in homer."[ ] the idea of a creation in any sense is not, then, universal, and cannot be asserted to be innate, _a priori_, primordial, or essential to human nature. nor, assuming the standpoint of belief in a creator, is there any ground for supposing that he would have chosen the one rather than any other method of creation. the internal as well as the external difficulties in the way of a too literal exegesis of the old testament are rapidly causing the abandonment of dogmatism with respect to this point; and any other interpretation than a literal one cannot, as has been said, logically object to a theory of becoming based on scientific grounds. it is in the nature of many of our greatest scientific theories that their simplicity and naturalness in the explanation of facts fill us with a sense of wonder that they had not long before suggested themselves to scientists. if, for instance, we were to attempt, in a cartesian spirit, to free ourselves from all the prejudice of previous dogma and regard only the general course of nature, we could not logically avoid the conclusion, even from a superficial view, that a theory of the gradual development of existing forms has far more probability on its side than that of a creation from without which broke in upon natural process, and placed ready-made suns and planets in the heavens, and finished beasts and men upon the earth. everywhere in the organic world we behold the process of growth, the development of germs, the passage of the inorganic into the organic, and of the organic into the inorganic again,--change and transformation under natural law. the difficulty which difference of form and function in the various species offers to a theory of evolution is by no means so large as has often been claimed; as great difference exists between the oak and the acorn, from which we know it, nevertheless, to spring; as much contrast is exhibited between the brown twigs of the trees and shrubs in winter and the brilliant foliage and flowers which they put forth under the warmer sun of spring; quite as great contrasts may be found, in the life of every human being, between the single cell and the individual completeness attained at birth, between infancy and morally characterized manhood and womanhood, between the vigor of full maturity and the deterioration of age. even the chasm between the organic and the inorganic is not logically impassable. the necessity of nourishment is the natural bridge between the two, and the equivalence of conditions and result, the indestructibility of matter and motion, establish at once the necessity of the inference that the organic can exist only at the ultimate expense of the inorganic, from which it is continually renewed. were our senses such that, having before been closed, they were suddenly opened to the perception of the daily observable facts of growth, these would probably appear to us very nearly as strange, anomalous, and impossible as the changes which, according to the darwinian theory, have resulted in the existence of different species; and it is obvious that the public mind, becoming gradually accustomed to the conception of the latter changes, does not now regard them as so wonderful and anomalous as they appeared to it in the beginning. processes involving complete change of form may be observed, at the present time, everywhere in nature; but they are observable, everywhere in the organic, as growth without breaches; even a primitive science has always recognized the gradual character of motion, the absence of gaps in the causal chain, at least outside of the initiative action of human will. such a natural hypothesis of creation as we have above supposed, formed upon crude and superficial, but as far as it goes, logical reasoning from facts of observation, could not regard the process as other than a gradual one, in which simpler forms and conditions must be supposed to have preceded more complex ones; in other words, it could not logically conceive the process as other than an evolution. traces of an idea of evolution may be found in various crude forms in nearly all the earlier greek philosophers, especially in anaximander, heraclitus, democritus, empedocles, and later in aristotle. such traces may even be found in many heathen mythologies in contradistinction from the judaic. the progress of investigation, establishing the universality of natural law and, in every province, the gradual character of change was, before darwin, as it has been since his work, in the direction of such a theory, as was shown by the ready acceptance with which darwinism met, if not by the world at large, at least by the majority of scientists. in england, france, and germany, there were others at work under the influence of thoughts similar to if not identical with those that inspired the researches and experiments of darwin; and the nebular theory of kant had already claimed in astronomy what the darwinian claimed in biology. "when kant, in his natural history of the heavens, which has become the fundament of modern astronomy, says, 'give me matter and i will make you a world,' what he intended to express was that the natural laws of matter are perfectly competent to render comprehensible to us the development of our well-known solar system."[ ] in the very beginning, the theory of evolution may be said to have had three distinct branches, represented by the nebular theory in astronomy, haeckel's ontogeny, and the biology of lamarck, darwin, wallace, and huxley; and to these should properly be added the sociological ethics of spencer, which was not, however, worked out to a complete system. but du prel says of later research: "in the progress of modern science, no principle has proved so fruitful as that of evolution. all branches compete with one another in its use, and have brought about by its aid the most gratifying results. geology interprets the significance of superimposed, hardened strata of the earth's crust in the sense of a history of the earth's development; biology, in union with the study of fossils, arranges the living and petrified specimens of plants and animals in their order, and constructs a history of the evolution of organic life; philology prepares a genealogical tree of languages, and finds in it signs which throw light on prehistoric times, and reveal facts forgotten for thousands of years; anthropology discovers in the form and expression of human beings rudimentary signs that point to a theory of development from lower forms; and, finally, history reveals the evolution of civilization in far-distant historic times; and in all these branches it becomes apparent that we only then understand phenomena when we have comprehended their becoming."[ ] it is due to the gradual perception of the fact that some such theory as that of evolution is implied in the very conception of the constancy of nature that there has been a continual decrease of that negative form of criticism which has made much of the gaps in the direct proof. modern science has so grown to, and by, the theory of evolution that the overthrow of the latter means nothing more nor less than the destruction of science itself in its highest results. even those who reject the conclusions of evolution are found to make use of its methods, and must do so perforce. as the breadth and depth and height of the theory come to be perceived, it is seen that the demand for complete proof is nothing more nor less than a demand for the perfection of all branches of knowledge, the refusal of credit without such proof a refusal to place any confidence in the first principles of scientific theory until it has fully explored the universe and left nothing further to be discovered. but science would have less ground for complaint, if the opponents of darwinism consistently refused, on the ground of the incompleteness of our knowledge, to form any theory whatever on the subject of man's nature and development, permitting the worth of the evolutional theory to be determined by its future results in application as hypothesis. but the peculiar spectacle is afforded us of a party rejecting a theory supported by numberless facts in all branches, and whose very breaches the direction of discovery continually tends to bridge, in favor of a dogma which cannot point to one scientific fact in its support,--a party demanding absolute perfection of proof as the condition of its acceptance of one theory, while it at the same time fiercely defends a conception of nature of which it cannot furnish the most imperfect proof. it is true that mankind has not beheld the evolution of the whole vegetable and animal kingdom. but neither had any human eye ever yet beheld the planet neptune when le verrier prophesied its existence and calculated its size and position. the theory of evolution is a reasoning from the constancy of nature, as was that of le verrier, only, in the case of the former, we have the observation and calculations of not one scientist alone, but of thousands, on which to rely. to demand of the scientist that he shall produce the organic from the inorganic, and practically demonstrate the change of form and function, and the process of separation of species, before the possibility of such development is conceded, is on a par with demanding of him an actual reproduction of the glacial period before the theory of its previous existence shall be accepted. there is no reason for supposing that, if spontaneous generation once took place, the peculiar complication of conditions which produced it will ever again recur or can be artificially constructed. but science has no desire to be dogmatic. it readily acknowledges the total absence of direct and established proof at this particular juncture of the beginning of life. it can only point to the indirect testimony of physiological chemistry and crystallogeny, to the simplicity of structure and movement in certain forms of life, and finally to the observed constancy of nature. but an exaggerated significance has been given to this chief flaw in the theory of evolution, by those who, starting with the intention of defending theology or the dignity of the human, have been driven back, step by step, to this point, and fail to perceive that, arrived here, they have already abandoned the ground on which contest was possible. what significance a primal creation merely of lowest organisms can have, for either a defence of human dignity or for christian theology, it is difficult to perceive. as a matter of choice, it would seem to be more consistent with the omnipotence and dignity of a creator to suppose that these very simple organisms arose, like other forms, under the action of natural law than that special interference was necessary in just their case. but, supposing such a special creation, the following questions immediately present themselves from the theological standpoint: are these special creations endowed with soul? if so, they must be immortal; if not, then soul arises in the process of evolution; if it arises as do all other things, qualities, functions, by growth,--that is, by the addition of infinitesimal increments (as we must, indeed, suppose it to arise if we regard it as "evolved")--then whence come these increments? if they come direct from a creator, then surely no special favor towards man in the bestowment of soul can be alleged; and if they arise by natural causes, out of nature, then why may not their first beginning, their first infinitesimal appearance, also be supposed to be due to such causes? the proof of an increase, a growth, of what have been called distinctively the mental faculties, throughout the animal kingdom, is every day stronger. no one believes, at the present date, with descartes, that the animals are automata. differences of mental power would seem to be but differences of degree; the facts all point to such a theory. the more scientific theologians have, indeed, abandoned this with the other minor points of contest above discussed, and devoted their efforts to argument from the moral nature of man. philology, anthropology, and geology testify to mental progress, even in the human species; and if such a progress is a fact, it cannot have been without influence upon the moral nature of man, even supposing the latter to be god-given. indeed, a merely physical progress or change cannot have been without such influence; for the most conservative theologians admit the strong action of the body upon the mind. it would seem, then, for all reasons, that an investigation of the process of mental evolution, or of evolution in general, ought not to be without results significant for any system of morality. if it is true that we learn wisdom and morality from human history, this can be so only because history gives us increased knowledge of the constancy of nature in those of its manifestations which specially concern the human, and thus enables us better to judge the present and predict the future. we should suppose that a still wider knowledge of our mental and physical evolution must be of yet greater worth to us in the same manner,--that the disclosure of more extended fields of nature to our vision must afford us new and valuable lessons with regard to ourselves; just as the telescope makes no discovery in the most distant regions of space that does not prove to have, in the end, its peculiar significance for our own planet. if our investigations should prove fruitless, as all such investigations have been said by some to be, the fact, established _a posteriori_, could not be disputed. but, considering all the points above noticed, such a result could not but astonish us; and we should even be inclined, after all that has been said, to suspect that the fault lay rather in the particular method than in the direction of our research. footnotes: [ ] "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," th ed., p. . [ ] "origin of civilization," p. . [ ] "origin of civilization." [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid. [ ] du prel: "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls." [ ] "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls." chapter i the concepts of evolution the preceding considerations have made it evident that the idea of evolution has undergone a broadening process since darwin first brought it before the world. it is necessary to glance briefly at some of the chief phases and the general significance of this process in order to define the extent and intent of the concept as far as science has made such definition possible. to darwin himself the struggle for existence was always between the unities represented by complete organisms whether as isolated individuals, or in family, tribal, or national groups. everywhere in his calculations, appearing unchanged in his results, is found the unknown quantity of variation from ancestral type, the known factors being heredity, and natural and sexual selection in the struggle for existence. wallace's ideas as to color in birds deprive the theory of sexual selection of one of its most important points of application in darwin's work. it is, in fact, easy to see that sexual selection cannot neutralize natural selection, that any particular form of sexual selection can arise and finally survive only by a harmony with the direction of natural selection, and that the two must therefore appear, even from any standpoint of freedom of the will, as continually attaining coincidence. it has been said, above, that the struggle for existence was, for darwin, between the organisms as unities. this consistent position of the specialist has been criticised, from a more general point of view, by lewes in his essay on the nature of life,[ ] in which he asserts that we must logically "extend our conception of the struggle for existence beyond that of the competition and antagonism of organisms--the external struggle; and include under it the competition and antagonism of tissues and organs--the internal struggle." "mr. darwin," he says, "has so patiently and profoundly meditated on the whole subject, that we must be very slow in presuming him to have overlooked any important point. i know that he has not altogether overlooked this which we are now considering; but he is so preoccupied with the tracing out of his splendid discovery in all its bearings, that he has thrown the emphasis mainly on the external struggle, neglecting the internal struggle; and has thus, in many passages, employed language which implies a radical distinction where--as i conceive--no such distinction can be recognized. 'natural selection,' he says, 'depends on the survival, under various and complex circumstances, of the best-fitted individuals, but has no relation whatever to the primary cause of any modification of structure.'[ ] on this we may remark, first, that selection does not _depend_ on the survival, but _is_ that survival; secondly, that the best-fitted individual survives because of that modification of its structure which has given it the superiority; therefore, if the primary cause of this modification is not due to selection, the selection cannot be the cause of species. the facts which are relied on in support of the idea of 'fixity of species' show, at any rate, that a given superiority will remain stationary for thousands of years; and no one supposes that the progeny of an organism will vary unless some external or internal cause of variation accompanies the inheritance. mr. darwin agrees with mr. spencer in admitting the difficulty of distinguishing between the effects of some definite action of external conditions, and the accumulation through natural selection of inherited variations serviceable to the organism. but even in cases where the distinction could be clearly established, i think we should only see an _historical_ distinction, that is to say, one between effects produced by particular causes now in operation and effects produced by very complex and obscure causes in operation during ancestral development.... natural selection is only the expression of the results of obscure physiological processes." the last statement is one to which darwin himself would certainly not have objected. it is an extension of the principle implicitly involved in all his work and explicitly stated in his later work, although the chief emphasis is laid on outer conditions. the extension of the idea of competition from the outer condition of organisms to the more ultimate physiological unities of organ and tissue is a philosophic gain. it is evident, however, that that for which darwin is seeking is not a philosophical generalization which shall include outer and inner change under one highest law, but, first of all, the particular causes of particular variation interesting to the specialist in biology. it is made too clear for mistake in "the variation of animals and plants under domestication" that the uncertainty with regard to such particular forms of cause is the spring of his declaration of our ignorance as to variation. the possibility of an inclusion of lower in higher generalizations he would not deny; though the special laws first occupy his attention. doubtless, his work is not, as is no man's, wholly free from inconsistencies and contradictions,--which are due, in part, to the fact that every scientific theory is, even in the thought of the individual, an evolution. but the declaration of mystery in the question of variation is not equivalent to a theory of accident, of transcendental mystery, or of some special organic or vital force, such as claude bernard especially opposed; it is merely and simply a statement of the mystery of present ignorance. this fact is expressly stated in darwin's later work. we find, for instance, in the introduction to a letter to the editor of "nature," written in , the origin of many instincts referred to "modifications or variations in the brain, which we, in our ignorance, most improperly call spontaneous or accidental;" and we have, in "the variation of animals and plants under domestication,"[ ] such passages as the following: "when we reflect on the individual differences between organic beings in a state of nature, as shown by every wild animal knowing its mate; and when we reflect on the infinite diversity of many varieties of our domesticated productions, we may well be inclined to exclaim, though falsely, as i believe, that variability must be looked at as an ultimate fact, necessarily contingent on reproduction. those authors who adopt this latter view would probably deny that each separate variation has its own proper exciting cause. although we can seldom trace the precise relation between cause and effect, yet the considerations presently to be given lead to the conclusion that each modification must have its own distinct cause." it is "probable that variability of every kind is directly or indirectly caused by changed conditions of life. or, to put the case under another point of view, if it were possible to expose all the individuals of a species during many generations to absolutely uniform conditions of life, there would be no variability.... the causes which induce variability act on the mature organism, on the embryo, and, as we have good reason to believe, on both sexual elements before impregnation has been effected." darwin further considers, in this same book, some of the probable particular causes of variation, as given in climate and food. and it may be remarked, in this connection, that rolph's criticism of the impossibility of progress under conditions of want is irrelevant as applied to darwin, since the latter himself says expressly: "of all causes which induce variability, excess of food, whether or not changed in nature, is probably the most powerful";[ ] again: "we have reason to suspect that an habitual excess of highly nutritive food, or an excess relatively to the wear and tear of the organization from exercise, is a powerful exciting cause of variability."[ ] rolph's criticism is probably due to forgetfulness of the fact that darwin limited the struggle for existence to that of complete organisms with one another, and that, under such a limitation of the conception to external struggle, a condition of want cannot be conceived as necessarily precluding a monopoly of abundance by best-fitted individuals. theories with regard to the special outer causes and resulting physiological conditions of variation have been gradually added to, as facts on this score have accumulated. but, as investigation advances, the question is seen to involve all the problems of the intricate chemical and mechanical nature of physiological structure in its manifold forms and degrees of organization. the field stretches out in this direction, under our contemplation, to an indefinite distance; and science appears as yet to have passed only the outer limits of its territory. it is certain that the comparatively recent science of physiological chemistry will have many of the decisive words to say on this score, in the future. "when we see the symmetrical and complex outgrowths caused by a single atom of the poison of a gall-insect, we may believe that slight changes in the chemical nature of the sap or blood would lead to extraordinary modifications of structure," says the great seer of evolution himself.[ ] among special theories of evolution, a distinction may be made between: ( ) such special theories as aim at biological simplification by reduction of all organic variation to one primary form of cellular process; ( ) such theories as are content with less ultimate laws, by which the various ascertained forms of change are included in one general statement not involving special physiological or physical theory but applicable to all forms of life; ( ) such theories as aim to give distinctive philosophic expression to a generalization like the last named, including in this statement both psychical and physiological phenomena; and ( ) such theories as aim at an ultimate expression of the direction of evolution that shall include the phenomena of life, both physiological and psychical, under one head with all other natural phenomena. to the first class belong only "provisional" hypotheses, among the best known of which are those of pangenesis, perigenesis, and the continuity of the germ-plasm. to the second, which are not merely tentative but have a broad foundation in known fact, belongs haeckel's theory of inheritance and adaptation, a theory restated in substance, from independent research, by eimer, whose ultimate general factors of analysis are the same with haeckel's, though he deals, beyond these, with special facts and special theories of his own. phases of the second class often entitle them to inclusion in the third. an example of the third class is found in spencer's definition, "life is the continual adjustment of inner relations to outer relations." the fourth and last class includes fechner's "tendency to stability" and spencer's theory of the rhythm of motion (see his "first principles"), similar to which are certain ideas of zöllner, du prel, and others; and similar elements to which are to be found in haeckel's "plastidule-theory." in connection with this class, reference may be made to an article by dr. j. petzoldt in the "vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche philosophie" under the title "maxima, minima, und oekonomie," in which, among others, fechner's views especially are discussed with reference to an ultimate principle of evolution. the first pages on the "tendency to stability" in fechner's "ideas concerning the evolution of the organic" ("einige ideen zur schöpfungs- und entwicklungsgeschichte der organismen") are as follows:-- "for the sake of brevity i call relations of position and motions recurring at regular periods, that is after like intervals, in the particles forming a material system or in the centres of whole masses conceived as forming a larger system, 'stable relations.' among such relations is to be reckoned the condition of rest of the particles or masses in relation to each other, as the extreme case, which we may call the state of 'absolute stability'; while a dissipation of the particles or masses, to infinity, in different directions, constitutes the other extreme of absolute instability. "we do not speak of 'absolute stability,' but of 'full stability,' in cases where motion still takes place, but this brings continually, in exactly the same periods of time, the same relations of particles or masses, not only as regards position, but also as regards velocity and direction of the motion and change of velocity and direction.... "to absolute and full stability may be added, as third case, that of greater or less approach to full stability, which we may term briefly 'aproximate stability'... and of which we have an example in the chief bodies of our solar system. "it may serve as a simplification of the consideration of stable relations of motion to remark... that, in an isolated system or one under constant outer conditions, exactly or very nearly the same relations of velocity and direction recur when exactly or very nearly the same relations in the position of the particles or masses return. as regards the velocity, this follows directly from the principle of the conservation of energy; as regards the direction, it is indisputably possible to assume the connection of its recurrence with that of the other relations, although i cannot remember that a direct general proof of this has been found. "with these introductory specifications in mind, let us assume any number of material particles to be restricted, by forces of some sort, to motion within limited space, and the system either withdrawn from outer influences or under such as are constant; let us, moreover, suppose the system undisturbed by the interference of psychic freedom, or the latter impossible. in such case, certain initial positions, velocities, and directions of the parts of the system being assumed, all following states will be determined by these. and now, if there are among these conditions, either present at the beginning, or attained in the course of the motion, any such as have for their result a return of the same states after a given time, then the motion, and so also the positions of the parts conceived as at first undergoing alteration in form and velocity, will, unless they contain the immediate condition of periodic recurrence, continue altering until those of all the possible states are reached which contain the condition of recurrence; until this point is attained, the system will, so to speak, know no rest. has the recurrence once taken place within a given time, then it must always take place anew within the same time, because the same conditions are there to determine it. and since these conditions are determinative of the whole course of motion from one recurrence to the next, the same course must be repeated; that is, in every like phase of the period a like state of motion will exist. but this gives us full stability of the system, a change, a deviation from the attained stability being possible only through changes in outer influences, the assumed constancy of which rendered the attainment of stability possible. "this principle appears at first purely _a priori_; but the assumption should not be overlooked that there are among the conditions determining the motion such as lead to their own recurrence, and this is to be taken for granted, since it is necessary to assume that a system must continue to change until, but only until, the conditions of full stability are attained, in case it is attainable; and that this full stability, when once reached, cannot be again destroyed by the action of the system itself. the question presents itself as to how far calculation and experience permit us to lay down a more general principle. "in a system in which only two particles or masses, withdrawn from outer influences, are determined to motion by mutual attraction and the influence of a primary impulse in another direction, calculation shows us that, motion to infinity being excluded, the attainment, and indeed the immediate attainment, of full stability is a necessity; and for swinging pendula and vibrating strings it may be calculated, from the nature of the moving forces, that they would remain in a condition of fully stable motion if outer resistance were removed; for, such obstacles present, they pass through an approximately stable condition to one of absolute stability. the power of purely mathematical calculation does not go beyond such comparatively simple cases.... "but if we call experience to our aid, it may be asserted, in accordance with very general facts, that, in a system left to itself or under constant outer conditions, and starting from any conceivable state, if not full stability at least a greater or less approximation to it is reached as final condition, from which no retrogression takes place through the inner workings of the system itself. the tendency to approximately stable conditions appears, or the actual state is attained, according to the measure in which variable outer influences are withdrawn. so that so little is lacking to our hypothesis, that, although it has at this point to make up for the impossibility of perfect demonstration, we are nevertheless justified in laying down the following law or principle:-- "in every system of material parts left to itself or under constant outer influences, so, then, in the material system of the universe, in so far as we regard it as isolated, there takes place, motion to infinity being excluded, a continuous progress from more unstable to more stable conditions, up to the attainment of a final condition of full or approximate stability." from the union of the principle thus stated and that of the conservation of energy "it follows that no unlimited progress of the universe to absolute stability, which consists in perfect rest of the parts, can take place.... the energy manifested in the universe cannot be altered, in general, in its amount, but only in the form in which it manifests itself." "it cannot be asserted that the attainment of full stability in the universe would be the attainment of an eternal rest, but only of the most perfectly adjusted motions, and therefore such motions as would give rise to no variations.... but a condition which brings with it eternal repetition cannot be reached in finite time." "to elucidation of this principle of the tendency to stability," says dr. petzoldt analyzing fechner's work, "we have only to call to remembrance a number of natural phenomena, such as the ebb and flow of the tide, the circulation of moisture, periodic changes of temperature, and so forth, which exhibit great periods of approximate stability and in which we notice in general no retrogression. "not less does the constitution of organisms which are, 'so to speak, constituted dependent upon periodicity of their functions, and so upon stable relations of their life,' serve to confirm the theory. only the concept of stability must be extended in their case, since not always the same, but only substitutive parts of the organic systems tend towards stability. "experience never gives us an example of an isolated system; on the contrary, every system is a part of higher systems. the inner relations of its stability are not conditioned by its own parts only, but also, more or less, by those of other systems, so that the destruction of one part-system is always only in the direction towards the stability of a higher, ultimately of the highest, system; that is, of the system of the universe." "thus the teleological principle coincides with the principle of the tendency to stability, and at the same time the latter constitutes the link between the former and the law of causality. though, in truth, this manner of looking at the matter signifies a generalization of the concept of 'end,' since it defines _all_ stable conditions as ends. the view is justified, however, by the fact that the greatest possible physical satisfaction--for us, the criterion of teleology--is always bound up with the longest possible preservation or slow change of a stable organic condition. the _physical_ tendency to stability 'bears with it a _psychical_ tendency to the attainment and conservation of just those conditions' towards which the physical tendency is directed." of the fact that lange "feels the lack of the proof of this 'tendency to stability,'" dr. petzoldt says: "but how is there a need of proof here? to prove is to refer back to known facts. but what is there in fechner's remarks that stands in need of such a reference? they simply draw our attention to the result of evolution as a state which bears, in itself, the guarantee of some continuance. can any one contest this? is there anything further to prove? it is said that gauss once remarked that lagrange's equations of motion are not proved, but only historically stated. the case is exactly the same here. the fact is attested, merely, that evolution ends in a stable condition; and herein lies the pith and the great merit of the theory of the tendency to stability." dr. petzoldt criticises, among other things, especially fechner's concept of approximate stability, in that no distinction is made by the author between three different cases. the first case comprises forms of motion in which periodicity is only approximate, but in which, nevertheless, no retrogression in stability takes place; this case is illustrated by our solar system. the second case comprises forms of motion in which the stability increases up to a certain point, but beyond this, despite relative constancy in outer conditions, decreases again until complete destruction of the system supervenes; an illustration of this form of motion is found in all organisms. the third case comprises forms of motion which we cannot concede to be stable. "for, if we ascribe periodic motion to pendula and musical strings which vibrate in a resisting medium, this is nevertheless a periodicity, which continually changes _in the same sense_, and we certainly cannot say that pendula and strings approach, in a resisting medium, a condition of absolute, through a condition of approximate, stability. we recognize in these vibrations, decreasing in amplitude, merely unstable changes which tend toward a final stable condition,--namely that of rest." the author finds a further ground of criticism in fechner's assertion that organisms are entirely dependent upon the periodicity of their functions. only a part of such functions are periodic. periodicity is not conceivable without stability, but stability is conceivable without periodicity. in the process of evolution towards a stable form of movement, dr. petzoldt recognizes briefly two factors, "tendency and competition."[ ] tendency is defined, in general, as the direction, actual or potential, of material parts or of mental or physical function; competition, as the conflict of tendencies, from which a tendency of a higher order results. "the concept of competition is, like that of tendency, to be taken in a general significance. a number of forces which act upon a single point compete. different mental images, observations, concepts, laws, come into competition, from which result concepts and laws of lower and higher orders. the struggle for existence is only a special case of competition. though this often ends with the immediate or gradual destruction of systems entering upon it, nevertheless only a middle worth between all the competing tendencies can be ascribed to the resultant. even the conqueror is, after the struggle, other than what he was before it; a part of the tendency destroyed by him lives on in him, has combined with his original tendency to a resultant. tendencies can as little disappear without compensation as can forces, whether the compensation consists in a strengthening or in a weakening of others, and the _conservation of competing tendencies_ might be regarded as a further qualitative addition to the law of the conservation of force. hence, in the examination of the effects of the struggle for existence, the like claim of all tendencies taking part in it is not to be left out of consideration. each makes its full force felt. but not all attain to competition; of the numerous tendencies bound up in one organism, only a few unite, in the single case, to a resultant, which has a direction towards a definite issue." the less the opposition of competing tendencies of concepts or laws, the less the deviation of the resultant from its components, and the less the change these have to undergo. the higher concepts and laws are, the less are the number of distinguishing marks which they take from all single conceptions; for they are the resultants of very strongly opposed components.[ ] fechner's views are related to, and, to some extent, dependent upon, certain ones of zöllner adduced in connection with a consideration of sun-spots.[ ] du prel, who also acknowledges special indebtedness to zöllner, attempted in his "struggle for existence in the heavens" ("der kampf ums dasein am himmel") to demonstrate the fact of a struggle and selection among the heavenly bodies analogous to that claimed for life upon the earth. the title of the book was afterwards changed to "the history of the evolution of the universe,"[ ] its scope having "grown far beyond the limit of the former title." du prel finds one of the chief advantages of an application of darwinian ideas to astronomy in the fact that, unlike our earth, the heavens in their immensity afford us existing, or to our eye existing, examples of the various stages of their evolution, in nebular mist, comets, suns, fixed stars, planets, rings, and moons,--all subject to processes of development, which we may to some extent observe. in the first chapter of this book, du prel says: "the existing condition of the cosmos with respect to all forms of the purposeful[ ]--whether we regard the realm of the organic or the inorganic--can be looked upon only as an attained, moving equilibrium of forces. immanent in nature lies the capacity to develop from chaotic conditions to teleologic forms; for, in the ceaseless play of forces, all other than such combinations are by their nature given over to destruction, while it lies, on the contrary, in the essence of all purposeful combinations to be preserved. in every system of mechanical forces an adjustment of the same must finally be arrived at through the removal of all immanent oppositions." "_it is impossible_ for nature to remain in chaotic conditions." "every system of forces tends to a state of equilibrium. this is as true of the conflict of images in a human brain, from whose mutual accommodation the resultant of a unified theory of the universe arises, as of oppositions in the social organism, of the conditions of power and civilization of neighboring peoples, of the meteorologic states of the earth, of the mechanical forces of a solar system, or the atoms of a cosmic mist. every war of the elements ends with an adjustment of ideal justice, for every 'moment' of force has influence proportioned to its power and the duration of its activity."[ ] there is one portion of fechner's theory as above stated (its metaphysical phases being beyond the scope of the present chapter have not been touched upon) that raises a question which may perhaps appear to have in itself no special significance, but which nevertheless opens up, by its implications, new fields of inquiry, and may possibly lead to further theory. the condition of stability which evolution in the universe as a whole gradually approaches but can never attain to in finite time is declared, namely, to be one not of rest, but of motion. a question might be raised, here, as to the definition of the "infinite time" asserted to be necessary to the attainment of such full stability,--whether the phrase be used in the mathematical or the philosophic sense; and the question would be found, i believe, to involve the unanswerable problem of the finite or infinite character of the universe in space. of a universe conceived under the philosophic concept of spatial infinitude, obviously no final state as the result of evolution can be predicated, the evolution supposing a progress which, as involving infinite matter, cannot be accomplished in finite time. if we, however, conceive the universe as occupying finite space and undergoing continual evolution as a whole in the direction of equilibrium, it is a question whether the end must not be attained in finite time. for a universe conceived as finite, however immense, there must be a finite number, however great, representing the changes necessary to the attainment of final equilibrium; and if progress in the direction of such equilibrium is of necessity continual, the final equilibrium must be attainable in finite time. the question of the nature of such a state of final, universal stability is bound up with the problem of motion through a perfect void, and of the possibility of the formation of such a void through the concentration of matter. leaving out of consideration the problem in its metaphysical form, which concerns the possibility of conceiving inter-material space, it may be said that it is not now supposed that the heavenly bodies move through an absolute void; and the existence of any medium opposing resistance, however slight, is a condition rendering impossible the attainment of absolute stability of motion or a full stability which suffers no diminution and is, therefore, in effect, an absolute stability. it may be questioned whether the very nature of motion is not coincident with change, and this with action and reaction, or competition. such a view would reduce evolution to a single ultimate principle, in place of darwin's variation and selection through struggle, or petzoldt's tendency and competition. we should have left, instead of these, only the final principle involved in moving matter considered in its ultimate parts. the metaphysical problem of the infinite divisibility of matter need not here concern us; the ultimate parts of an organism could not be, however, its organs as lewes defined them, but rather, from a positive standpoint, the ultimate units recognized by science in cell and cell-parts. we may, indeed, since we know no beginning of motion, legitimately regard all tendency as itself resultant. just as we cannot separate matter and motion, except by abstraction from reality, so, too, we cannot conceive of motion except as having definite direction; and thus we arrive, by a final analysis, at the ultimate philosophic principles of matter and its motion. i use these terms in no metaphysical sense, but merely as generic terms including under one head specific forms of material combination and the specific forms of motion of their wholes or parts. the question of the character of a conceived state of final equilibrium may be approached from a somewhat different side, though the emphasis falls, as before, on the solidarity of the universe and the nature of motion as change. we may, for instance, regard the earth as an isolated system whose isolation makes possible the continual progress of the evolution taking place on its surface. but this whole evolution is, on the other hand, dependent upon the light and heat of the sun. again, the sun is undergoing an evolution whose continuous progress may be regarded as in a certain sense dependent upon isolation; but we see, on reflection, that this very process is the result of the cooling nature of the sun's surroundings, and that it is sending its motion in every direction through space. the moon, which has passed through both the evolution that the sun is undergoing and that which is in progress upon the earth, is now passing through another stage which the earth must reach in time by diffusion of its atmosphere, in case its destruction is not accomplished by some catastrophic event before the arrival of that distant period. suns and planets, all the heavenly bodies, are sending their influence in every direction through the unfathomable depths of space; and just as the capacity of the earth to be warmed by the influence of the sun involves its reciprocal capacity to act as a cooling medium for that body, so the conditions throughout the universe must be regarded as everywhere interdependent and mutually implying one another. thus we again arrive finally at a universal action and reaction among the parts of the universe, all motion implying change of the direction of motion. or, since we may and are, in fact, obliged to regard every direction or form of motion as a resultant,--for of motion as of matter we know no absolute beginning,--even this simple assumption may supply us with the conclusion which we have reached in a more roundabout way. we may regard motion in any direction as counterbalanced by a resistance in every other direction sufficient to produce it in this one; in other words, motion takes place at every instant, in the direction of least resistance, even though this direction may represent, in the next instant, through the action of new "moments" of force, the greatest resistance. any direction as well as any change of direction implies, then, resistance; resistance is equivalent to the interference of force, or, in other words, to competition; and competition may, at any moment, become catastrophe. the difference between competition and catastrophe is one merely of degree, or rather it is a subjective difference depending upon the point of view of the observer. in other words, all that we can testify to is a certain periodicity of motion, all motion meeting with resistance, the accumulation of which finally induces motion in another sense. larger periodicities are made up of smaller periodicities, and, according to the point of view taken, any period of such motion may be regarded as an evolution, that which fechner terms "full" stability being only the maximum towards which motion during that period tends. absolute stability can be conceived only as perfect rest, whether we conceive it as merely an abstraction, its realization as rendered impossible by the conservation of energy, or whether we conceive it as possible in a universe regarded as finite; an absolute stability of motion is a self-contradiction, and a full stability which knows no retrogression is equally a self-contradiction. periodicity is, then, all into which the tendency to stability resolves itself for nature as we know it. we perceive, in the actual universe, the fact of a certain imperfect periodicity. this wave form of movement in great and little plays, as spencer has shown far more elaborately than fechner, a large part in the universe. but the evident fact of a present periodicity of imperfect form suggests another possible conception. we are under no necessity to regard the universe as finite either in space or time. on the contrary. we tend naturally to conceive of it as finite after the analogy of particular things which we perceive continually to arise and perish; but as concerns space, we have no knowledge of any limit, and, as concerns time, the conception of any actual beginning or end to the universe as a whole is only the ancient naïve idea which science has disproved in showing that neither matter nor motion ever perish. an infinite universe is conceivable, in which not exactly the same but very similar forms, or forms of which the successive ones closely resemble each other though those widely separated may be very dissimilar, continue to arise and be destroyed to all eternity. the conception of a primal nebular mist is not a necessary inference from astronomic phenomena; it is as easy and as logical to regard the various phases of planetary development revealed to us by the telescope as so many phases of an evolution and dissolution continually recurring in different parts of the universe, one extreme of which is represented by the nebular mist, the other by the cold and lifeless remains of planets gradually suffering dissolution as they revolve through space. the greater the immensity of the universe is conceived to be, the nearer our conception of it must approach to this type. but the term tendency to stability is misapplied when applied to such infinite and imperfect periodicity--to the motion, thus conceived, of the universe as a whole. the periodicity in the life of organic species may be compared to the wave-motions of light and heat as distinguished from those of water, the individual representing the single wave-length. the analogy is not, however, intended--to speak with bacon--as one of nature, but merely as one of mind. and just here it may be questioned whether fechner may not have been right, after all, in his assertion of the dependency of the organism upon periodicity of function, whether the periodic character of the individual life, dependent, as it must be supposed to be, on adaptation to a medium to some degree resisting, does not sacrifice its stability in so far as the increments of resistance lack uniformity. this is evidently the case in large relations; is it not logically necessary to suppose it so in minute relations, though the fact may not be so evident to the coarse measurement of the senses? experience seems to prove that an approximate periodicity in larger relations, is most consistent with health; and it must be remembered that the non-periodic relations are subordinated to periodic ones, that not only in the case of waking and sleeping, working and eating, but also in those of rest and labor, a certain uniformity is necessary to the best mental and physical condition. a close observation will, i think, reveal a greater periodicity than was at first suspected; since much of it is of so-called "automatic," "unconscious," or "half-conscious" nature. it is to be noticed, here, that the termination of individual lives is often in the nature of a catastrophe, and a uniform periodicity of individual development and decay cannot be assigned, except in the form of an average that falls much below the figure attained by the thoroughly healthy individual. there is every reason to believe that if we could sleep, rise, eat, bathe, exercise, work, and rest with the regularity of a clock, we should be the better for it physically. but the irregularities outside the province of our will-power render it impossible for us to order our lives in this manner. nor do we desire to do so. for these very irregularities, as representing greater or less change to which adaptation is necessary, are, in many cases and within certain lines, the conditions and signs of progress; though they may constitute in other cases and beyond these lines--that is, where they are of too great intensity or duration--conditions of retrogression, the imperfection in periodicity becoming catastrophe, which may extend beyond the individual to his offspring. we may thus infer that the final destruction of the individual organism is conditioned by its own progress and the progress of its species, but that on the other hand, when the destruction of the individual is too abrupt, it may mean catastrophe to the species also, or at least to a part of it, through heredity. our considerations so far have been of a nature to convince us that not isolation, but a constancy in the continual action of like relatively small increments of force in the same directions, is the condition of steady evolution. the less constant and the larger the increments, the nearer the changes involved resemble catastrophe, though the catastrophes themselves may be regarded in another light as forming part of an evolution of a higher order. the changes the sun is undergoing may be regarded as evolution in so far as the influence of the cooling medium is a constant one. the earth as a whole and in its parts may be regarded as passing through a process of evolution towards full stability in so far as the sun's heat is a constant quantity, the periodic changes of seasons and of day and night the same. the relation would seem, therefore, to be one of time--the time-relation involved in the duration of outer conditions as constant with reference to the period required for the attainment of stability. thus the sun's influence upon the earth might appear approximately constant to the human individual, but might represent a rapid change in relation to some stupendous and long-continued evolution in some other part of the universe. considerations which we have already noticed forbid our regarding any conditions of "full" as distinguished from absolute stability as anything other than peculiar states single in the system and thus unenduring maxima succeeded by decrease, although the process may be, with reference to any other particular process, so slow, the retrogression from the culminating point so gradual, as to be, with respect to this other process, inappreciable. and while we are busied with matters which involve the whole multiplicity of relations in the universe, just a word with reference to cause and effect. which one of these myriad material parts interacting at any moment shall we single out as the cause of the succeeding state? the solidarity of the universe as far as the complete interdependence of all its parts is concerned is clear to us. it is true we cannot reckon with all factors of the universe at once; and the concept of cause and effect is therefore a useful one. but the cause of anything must be, from a positive point of view, just what the methods prescribed for its discovery in any particular case shows it to be: namely, a factor, merely, in the manifold conditions determining a following state, the removal of which means the prevention of the succession of exactly that state. which, for instance, shall we regard as the cause of an evil act--the character of a man or the temptation offered by circumstances? the change or removal of either means the change or removal of the act. neither is complete without the other, and both are involved in the whole complexity of the universe, through heredity on the one hand and the action of nature external to life on the other. and just here we may glance at spencer's definition of life as "the continual adjustment of inner relations to outer relations." though emphasizing an important side of evolution, it is evidently incomplete. evolution is not only the adjustment of inner relations to outer relations, it is also the adjustment of outer relations to inner relations as well as of inner relations among themselves; or it is a process of mutual adjustment of all the parts engaged in it. our analysis, though crude and imperfect, may now be regarded as complete. our scope will not allow of a more elaborate one. it is fitting, therefore, that we proceed to synthesis. the first matter which presents itself to us, in this connection, is the theory of heredity and adaptation mentioned above. the theory is not a new one, wholly outside darwin's conception of evolution. the concept of adaptation represents simply the generalization of all those special causes with which darwin more particularly occupied himself, and is, in essence, only a proclamation of that universal subjection to natural law which darwin himself plainly asserted. as such a. generalization it is, however, a useful one; it furnishes us with an expression, for the organic world, of that universal action and reaction through which opposing forces move towards stability by mutual adjustment. the law of heredity, again, may be regarded as an organic expression of the more general principle according to which motion that, in the sense defined above, suffers only a minimum of interference, that is, motion which, by a certain equilibrium of mutual relations, is "approximately" or "fully" stable, tends to continue to take place in nearly the same directions, or nearly to repeat itself. it is thus apparent, also, that heredity is closely related to the more special principle of habit, or also of use and disuse, if only we remember that, whatever the metaphysical truths of freedom or determination, the psychical is always accompanied by what may be called equivalents of the physical under natural law. the special laws of heredity are still enveloped in mystery; i refer, not to that mystery which may be regarded as surrounding all ultimate facts, if we choose to conceive them as expressing or concealing something further unknowable, but to the scientific mystery of ignorance, which time may dissolve. biologists disagree on this question, the ultimate decision of which must be left to them. still some general criticism on the results of research in this direction may be allowable from a philosophic standpoint. the chief point at issue between various theories of heredity seems to be the degree of importance to be attached to adaptation: however we may express the question, this is the ultimate form to which it is reducible. now it is obvious, from the foregoing analysis, that the form of theory which would be most useful to us, if such were attainable, would be one in which the degree of tendency to inheritance as well as the strength of inherited tendency is expressed in terms of the intensity and duration of exercise, use, function, habit, or form of motion or action (however we may choose to term it); and variation is regarded as the resultant of such tendency and change in the environment, or, in other words, deviation from constancy of influence. it may be useful to inquire to what extent such a general theory is authorized by special ones. we have the testimony of two of the acknowledged greatest authorities--darwin and haeckel--as well as that of a score of other biologists, and specialists in related branches, to the inheritance of peculiarities acquired during the life of the individual.[ ] eimer lays especial stress on the fact, long witnessed to by one class of specialists, of the hereditary character of brain-diseases, among which may be reckoned some that are without doubt due to direct influence of the environment.[ ] haeckel and eimer even instance cases in which mutilation has been inherited.[ ] one such instance would be sufficient, in overthrowing the general denial of the inheritance of individual adaptation, to make probable the direct influence of the environment in other cases, the uniformity discoverable in the workings of natural law leading us to suppose that the one instance would not be isolated. it must have weight, too, as an argument, in the judgment of many doubtful cases. not one such case alone is furnished us, however, but many well-authenticated ones. and it is to be remarked that even weismann has gradually parted from his original theory, recognizing more and more clearly the element of adaptation in inheritance. it seems open to question, indeed, whether weismann's theory, in withdrawing the germ-plasm from the direct influence of the environment with which the parent individual is in contact does not exempt it from the universal law of action and reaction. eimer designates such an opposition as weismann postulates of the germ-plasm to the rest of the organism as a "physiological miracle," and the artificial line thus drawn between the germ-cells before and after the beginning of development as "opposed to that conformity to law shown in the morphological and physiological unity of living beings."[ ] ancient ideas seldom conceived of a universality of action and reaction; and ancient belief, isolating phenomena, invested each with some special guiding power. this belief was maintained as the conception of a special vital force long after the increasing knowledge of nature had caused it to be abandoned with regard to inorganic phenomena; and the theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm seems to be a survival, with regard to the comparatively unexplored province of embryology, of the idea of such a force. the elements of which the organism is composed are not strange essences or entities peculiar to the organic; they are the same with those of inorganic matter, though their combinations differ somewhat from these, both in chemical composition and in the morphological arrangement of the composites. we can easily conceive these differences as coördinate with differences of general form and function; but it is inconceivable that the continual assimilation of matter in growth should be at any time without result in function, however comparatively small this result may be in higher forms representing an accumulation of energy from previous conditions. the separation of form and function is an abstraction, as is that of matter and motion; we cannot suppose the connection of particular functions with particular forms,--particular organization,--to be accidental, any more than we can suppose the particular properties of particular inorganic composites and elements to be accidental or these particular properties to be without result in the organic matter into which the particular composites and elements are taken up. the environment must contain complementary conditions of function in order that the individual may even come into existence and survive at all. the great question is, then, how much is to be allowed for original tendency in primal organisms and how much is to be reckoned to the account of the action of the environment in the course of evolution. even if we go back beyond the organic, assuming a development of the organic from the inorganic, we must come, in the last analysis, to irresolvable elements whose motion, as distinct and particular action and reaction, must have definite form. if we begin with a supposititious simple organism conceived as lowest,--the primal form to which the name "organism" may be applied,--we must likewise conceive of this as embodying motion distinctive as its form, which may be regarded as concomitant and coördinate with that form,--or, that is, as function. the ultimate elements of this organism represent positive factors and the primal organism itself must be regarded as a positive factor (or positive composite) without which the evolution of highest organisms would be impossible. we may, therefore, regard it as in this sense embracing the potentialities of evolution. but are we to regard it as representing potentiality in a further sense--in the sense that, beyond the particular life-motion coördinate with its particular composition and form, it represents an independent force that prefigures the whole animate evolution? to such an assumption the analogy--which is something far more than a mere analogy--of embryology logically reduces us, on weismann's theory, unless we assume a fixity of species that practically does away with the whole theory of evolution and returns to the original darkness that on which darwin threw light. or, if we leave out of account this analogy and begin with sexual propagation, the problem, on weismann's theory, is very nearly as difficult. are we to look upon the conditions involved in the environment as mere negatives and simply developing the positive potentialities of the germ-plasm? if we resolve the environment into its elements, even the ultimate analysis must show it composed of positive factors of matter and motion, each one of which has its full worth in any resultant of incidence. the positivity of these elements takes from the primal germ-plasm any superiority of potentiality; the potentiality lies also in the environment. that the organism is in constant contact with the environment is evident; and that this contact, involving incidence of force, cannot be without result, and result representing a full equivalent of all the factors, is also evident. it may seem as if we could understand human progress, or progress in other species, in the limited province open to direct observation, on weismann's theory; but evolution as a whole becomes, on this theory, a mystery, and indeed, as eimer terms it, a miracle. logical consistency thus tells against the theory; and undeniable exceptions to its fundamental conception, furnished by such authorities as darwin and haeckel, raise a further presumption against it, that, taken in connection with the logical inconsistencies noticed, constitutes the strongest probability against its truth. the general experience of mankind has recognized, in a thousand ways, that the individual is "a creature of habit." the strength of the muscle, the cunning of hand or eye or ear, mental acuteness, and even liability to temptation in any direction, or, on the other hand, moral strength, all are coincident with exercise within the bounds set by the normal of the organ,--that is, within its ability to repair its waste in labor, an ability defined by the food-supply and its power of assimilation; for even the moral struggle that is so great as to exhaust physically ends in a weakness which may represent the very condition of conquest by the temptation opposed, if this present itself again before the system has had time to repair its loss. we may regard this weakness as a lessening of force in one particular direction, the resultant of action deviating in favor of the other of the opposing forces or tendencies manifested in the struggle. in this connection i cannot do better than refer to the "kritik der reinen erfahrung" already mentioned, in which the influence of the environment on the individual is minutely traced. the special feature of the work is its entire freedom from the thousand metaphysical implications which have gradually gathered about our philosophical vocabulary and which render it well-nigh impossible to write from any new standpoint without danger of misunderstanding. this perspicuity and exactness are secured by a new vocabulary which may seem at first glance, on account of its unfamiliarity, elaborate and incomprehensible, but which is, when mastered, the greatest possible aid to understanding. nevertheless, the terminology of the book and the exceeding closeness of its analysis, while rendering it peculiarly valuable to the expert in philosophy, place it beyond the grasp of the average reader; and ethics is a science which concerns, not the specialist in philosophy alone, but all thinking minds. the influence of exercise even beyond the individual has long been recognized. lamarck advanced the theory that the development of organs and their force of action is in ratio to their employment. darwin also laid stress, particularly in his later works, on use and disuse, but he often defined the term more specifically than many other authors, lamarck among them, seem to have done. the very mass and magnitude of darwin's knowledge made it, as huxley has said, somewhat unwieldy, and, in diverting the attention to minute features, sometimes prevented distinctness in broad generalizations; the very virtue of darwin's work conditioned also its defect. if we begin with the general theory of use and disuse, we may regard each present form of organic action or function, whether conscious or unconscious, as in some manner the result of exercise, the processes of food-taking, digestion, repair of waste, being classed, not as, in any case, mere negative reactions, but as positive organic functions. if we apply the term "habit" to all these, it is evident that we must, in so doing, extend the significance of the word beyond its ordinary interpretation. from our present point of view, such an extension of meaning might be claimed to be legitimate; the question here is, in reality, only one of expediency, namely, whether it is not better to retain the more specific significance of the word. it may be useful, at least, to indicate the relations of habit to use and disuse. in its ordinary interpretation, the term "habit" refers more particularly to a form of action acquired during the life of the individual, and may be used to imply the action of the will in its formation, or may simply have in view the organic concomitants of whatever mental action is included in such formation. since our present standpoint supposes a certain equivalence of the mental and physical, that is, uniformity in their connection (without entering into the question of their dependence or independence, or considering which, in case of dependence, is to be regarded as dependent, which as fundamental and independent), we may leave for the moment the mental side of function out of account, to take it up later. darwin's definition of habit was, as we have seen, no distinct and invariable one, and while he speaks of "inherited habit," referring both to forms of action acquired during the life of the individual and to such acquired through use favored by constancy of environment during several generations, it is not always plain whether he has in mind the action of the will, or only its organic equivalents. he inclines, like many other authors, to give prominence to the physical side of action in lower species, to the mental side in higher. if we use the term "habit" in the sense of tendency to function acquired by use, we employ what is certainly a useful terminology, yet we are in danger, if we do not carefully define our terms, of elevating to the position of a reality an abstraction that has none. function and tendency to function are not separable; the distinction is not an inner, but an outer one, of favorable or unfavorable environment by which tendency to function becomes function or _vice versa_. to habit, then, we can attach, from our present standpoint, no distinctive implication beyond that of individual acquirement,--an implication obviously not fundamental in a theory of organic function. use and disuse are rather the fundamental concepts with which, in a consideration of function under heredity and adaptation, we have to do. but, in this connection, it is also obvious that, when we, from our point of view, distinguish between the organism as acted on by the environment and the environment as acting, we make a distinction that may be both useful and necessary for many purposes, but that is yet an arbitrary one. the organism is not the dependent, passive, the environment the independent, formative factor in the process of development, the organism is not purely reactive, the environment active, but the two are interactive; and from their interaction arises change, as resultant, in both organism and environment. so, too, if we return to fechner's conception, the separation of function as effect from use and disuse as cause is an arbitrary one. every function, as representing a state of more or less perfect, moving equilibrium, may be regarded either as the final form issuing from a long process of action and reaction or, as determined at present, by such a comparative constancy of all its conditions as makes the line followed by the resultant approximately a repetition of that which it has followed before; and we may lay stress upon either the inferior resistance in this line or the continual application of superior force, the accumulation of energy, in its direction. use or exercise is function; long continuance of the same or approximately the same form of function may be regarded as concomitant with a certain constancy of environment, sufficient to furnish the complementary condition always necessary. the present form of function may be regarded as the result of an evolution of function in the sense that it is the end-form assumed by the same, but not in a sense that separates it from previous forms of function by a distinction of kind; since each of these may be regarded, in like manner, as the result of the preceding evolution. as in the definition of habit, so in that of use, the element of animal will or of a distinct vital principle is likely to be consciously or unconsciously included, lending it thus a superior significance to that of mere organic function regarded as its result. again it must be said, however, that, whatever the metaphysical truth of freedom, will does not interfere with the equivalence of physical conditions and results or prevent perfect uniformity of relation between the physical and the psychical, and that a special vital force cannot be demonstrated. disuse may be defined either as the mere discontinuance of use or as use in a sense opposed to the form of function particularly under consideration. the idea of some special vital principle doubtless has its origin in the mysterious tendency of every organic form to develop along certain lines. the mystery involved is here, again, besides that of ultimate fact on which the metaphysician lays stress, the lack of the ability of present science to furnish such a description of the process as shall resolve it into its elements and demonstrate the uniformities of relation among these elements in this last analysis. but it is to be remarked that the metaphysician is apt to confuse these two meanings of the word "mystery," and regard the mystery of the organism as a greater metaphysical one than that of simpler processes whose elements are better known; and this in spite of the fact that he himself does not at all deny the uniformity in natural process which we term law, or expect to find it less in an ultimate analysis than in a more superficial one. we understand the simple parallelogram by which the physicist represents to us the action of two forces at incidence, we may represent to ourselves the motion of any one of the heavenly bodies as the resultant of the centrifugal and centripetal forces, but when we come to consider the formation of a crystal, and watch the regularity of shape and grouping, this very uniformity which had been before an explanation now seems all at once to represent an insoluble mystery separating the process forever from those others. the more complicated the process becomes, the more the mystery appears to increase, until we build up, out of a negative ignorance, some positive new entity to baffle us. and yet neither do we deny, as has been said, the constancy of nature in its most final elements, nor can it at all be shown or supposed that those simpler processes we seemed to understand were less along fixed lines than the more complicated ones. if we grant, then, the insoluble mystery of the transcendental meaning of things claimed by the metaphysician, we cannot admit the presence of this mystery in the organic more than in the inorganic, nor discover in the science of the former any further element lacking than in that of the latter, except a remediable ignorance which, when remedied, can only reveal in new particulars the workings of natural law. it may be remarked, in this connection, that those who are so ready to claim the workings of some special force or power in the development of the organism make no assertion of such in the so analogous growth of the crystal. the passage of the inorganic into the organic and back into the inorganic is, in fact, no more (if the metaphysician will, no less) mysterious than the evaporation of water and its recondensation, the propagation of animal form no greater mystery than the continued flowing of a stream in spite of evaporation, or the growth of a crystal to the form of its kind. the propagation of species is, in one sense, an isolated fact; but so, in like sense, is the evaporation of water or the formation of the crystal of a particular chemical: but none of these phenomena are isolated in any other sense, as less or more than a part of a universal whole. we carry our notion of human importance into all our science, and so invest with greater weight and mystery ignorance that concerns our own life and that of allied forms. as we have seen, a connection of use, or of duration and intensity of function, with its strength is evident in the individual, and we are compelled to suppose the connection a constant one even where such constancy cannot be directly demonstrated. there is evidently a relation likewise between degree, or duration and intensity, of use or exercise of function, and strength of tendency in the species, which we must also suppose to be constant. darwin distinctly recognizes this, everywhere in his work, in asserting that such function as is favored by the environment for several generations is more likely to be transmitted. but though the separation of organism and environment into cause and effect may be useful in the solution of some problems, it is yet to be kept in mind that the distinction is an arbitrary selection of some factors as dependent, others as independent variables, while all are, in fact, interdependent. function may be regarded as at every moment determined by the factors given in environment and organism, in which either may seem the more important, according to the particular case or the point of view from which it is regarded. the tendency of the organism may represent such an accumulation of potential energy that a slight favorable element in the environment may be like a spark in a magazine of gunpowder, followed by results seemingly most disproportionate to its own significance; yet the accumulation of energy in the organism can have taken place only under previous favorable circumstances of the environment; and if we regard the organism in its relation to the whole environment, that is, to the universal conditions outside it, the primary importance may seem to attach to these. but yet, which is, in the last analysis, the more important to the explosion of the magazine--spark or powder? either is insufficient without the other; the two are simply complementary and both indispensable to the result. so too habit, use, or exercise of function and influence of the environment cannot be held distinct; exercise of function is impossible without a sufficient complementary factor in the environment, but this is evidently sufficient only with the existence of that tendency in the organism of which it is the complement. regarding strong tendency as the result of a long process of evolution in which the environment has presented sufficient complementary elements to condition its development, the strength of tendency being coördinate with the duration and intensity of the process of evolution, we can understand that any such change in the environment as shall prevent such function may be of so much significance, the suppression of the function represent so great departure from what was previous resultant, that even the destruction of the organism may supervene in cases where longest exercised and strongest functions are prevented; and we can understand, from the same standpoint, the slight comparative importance of the experience of individuals as influencing their descendants, except under especially favorable conditions of the organism. all biologists make much of the mixture of types in sexual propagation; and rolph, perhaps, lays especial stress on it in connection with progressive heredity. he calls attention to the intricacy of interaction of forces at once introduced by it in its action and reaction with the environment, and shows, in this connection, the extreme similarity of the younger generation to the parent where propagation is non-sexual, that is, does not involve such mixture of types. it may be said that every new factor in development introduces a complexity greater as the complexity of the conditions already attained by the organism is greater, since its influence on the different elements and combinations of elements varies; or (if we choose to put it thus) since the possible chemical compounds and especially the possible combinations and permutations of elements and parts increase enormously with the increase of the latter in number. but the importance of the presence of any particular new element in these complexities depends, further, on its particular nature. the final decision of the principal question of progressive heredity which our argument concerns must be left to biology; but biologists themselves have as yet discussed these questions chiefly from a philosophical standpoint,--on general, as distinguished from specific, grounds. all theory is at this point tentative. but if only for this reason we have a right, in assuming a working theory, to select that which seems best to accord with philosophic principles of universal application as well as with general biological fact. for the rest, it has at least been made evident, by all that has been said above concerning the constant contact and interaction of organism and environment, that the selection of one of these two factors as the positive and one as the negative, one as the formative the other as the formed, one as the active the other as the passive factor, one as independent the other as dependent, one as invariable the other as alone variable, is an arbitrary one. in dealing with the complexity of the universe, whether mathematically or logically, we cannot grasp all factors at once, and so are obliged to regard some sides to the exclusion of others, to disregard the variable and dependent nature of some factors in the consideration of that of others. the method is useful as well as necessary, useful because necessary; but we are too apt to forget that we are dealing with half-truths, devices of reason, and come to regard them as whole truths. thus the abstraction of natural selection is too often elevated to a separate entity, a particular power residing in the environment as such. it is, on the contrary, a mere fiction, a device for assisting our comprehension of complex action and reaction. not only does the action of the environment alter the organism, the action of the organism also alters the environment; or, to put it more plainly, the state of organism and environment at any moment is the result of the interaction of preceding states of organism and environment. material combinations, whether organic or inorganic, when fitted to their environment, survive; those best fitted, where perfect fitness does not exist, thrive best; this is only another method of saying that absence of resistance is coördinate with the preservation of form and its inherent motion to the extent of the non-interference. as organic forms survive only to the extent to which they are in harmony with each other and with inorganic conditions, so inorganic forms or combinations survive unaltered only when they are in harmony with other inorganic conditions and uninterfered with by organic forms. matter and motion in some form must survive, both being indestructible. natural selection in this sense, as at each moment regulating inorganic combinations and motions and organic form and function, is either ultimately the origin of variation, or else it is not its preserver. it is to be remembered that the organism is, from the physical point of view, simply form (that is, organization) and function; when we have subtracted these, we have subtracted the organism. the inability of the reason to grasp all sides of the complexity of natural processes at once, even where these are known, is a thing to be kept in mind in our future investigations; we are apt to take our analyses for the syntheses of nature. in the preceding considerations, an "equivalence of the physical and the psychical" has been assumed, which, though already in a measure defined, should have been, perhaps, more fully explained. it may be repeated that, in such equivalence, no materialistic assumption is made of the dependence of the psychical on the physical; nor is the intention to assert that the psychical can be measured by the weights and measures of the physical. the assertion is intended in the sense that there is always a physical function connected with the psychical, and that the relation of the two is not an accidental or variable, but a constant one. all that is claimed is, in other words, that, whatever the metaphysical truth as to the freedom of the will, such freedom cannot interfere with the constancy of nature. but, in fact, all that is postulated by physical science in the assertion of the equivalence of physical forces is such a uniformity or constancy of relation as we postulate of the psychical and physical; for the different forms of physical force can no more be measured by the same standards than can thought and brain-process. it may be added, further, that by "force" as used in the above arguments, no metaphysical entity is implied; the word simply serves as the generic term embracing different forms of motion and the equivalent of motion in resistance, and enables us to deal with motion regarded as potential as well as with motion actually existent. footnotes: [ ] "problems of life and mind," second series, chap. on evolution. [ ] "the variation of plants and animals under domestication," , ii. . [ ] vol. ii. chap. xxii. [ ] "variation of animals and plants under domestication," ii. p. . see also "origin of species," th ed., i. pp. - , etc. [ ] "variation of animals and plants under domestication," ii. p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] for elaboration of definition and theory, _vide_ the article in question, "vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche philosophie," . [ ] as confirming this analysis of evolution, reference is made to mach: "die mechanik in ihrer entwicklungen," p. , and "beitrage zur analyse der empfindungen," pp. , ; also avenarius: "kritik der reinen erfahrung." [ ] see above essay by petzoldt. [ ] "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls," . [ ] "gestaltungen des zweckmässigen." [ ] "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls," chap. i. [ ] see especially darwin: "the variation of animals and plants under domestication"; haeckel: "natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte," th ed., , p. _et seq._ [ ] "die entstehung der arten auf grund von vererben erworbener eigenschaften," p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. _et seq._ [ ] "entstehung der arten," p. . chapter ii intelligence and "end" it is interesting to notice the opinions of different scientists and philosophers as to the extent to which reason is diffused in the universe, where the point lies at which the boundary line is to be drawn between reason and an automatism of instinct or organic action, or whether any such point can be found at all, whether reason, at least as consciousness and will, is not inherent in all life, or at least in all animal life, or whether it is not, indeed, to be regarded as the cause of motion even outside life, in the inorganic as well as the organic. there is no need to remind ourselves of the philosophic conception of the world as will, the philosophy of the unconscious, or the theory of monads. the theories that specialists in physical science have arrived at, through the results of wide-reaching investigations in their own peculiar branch, are as various as those of philosophers. darwin carefully avoids drawing any distinct limit-line between reason and instinct, but remarks that "a little dose of judgment or reason, as pierre huber expresses it, often comes into play, even with animals low in the scale of nature."[ ] haeckel says: "unbiassed comparison and unprejudiced test and observation place it beyond doubt that so-called 'instinct' is nothing else than a sum of soul-activities which, originally acquired by adaptation, have been fixed by habit and carried down from generation to generation by inheritance. originally performed with consciousness and reflection, many instinctive actions of the animals have become, in the course of time, unconscious, exactly as is the case with the habitual activities of human reason. these, too, may, with like justice, be looked upon as the workings of innate instinct, as, indeed, the impulse to self-preservation, maternal love, and the social instinct often are regarded. again, instinct is neither distinctively an attribute of the brain of the animal, nor is the reason an especial endowment of human beings. on the contrary, an impartial doctrine of soul recognizes a long, long, descending scale of gradual evolution in the life of the soul, which leads from higher to lower human beings, from more perfect to more imperfect animals, step by step, down to those forms whose simple nerve-ganglion furnishes the starting-point of all the cell-less brain-forms of this scale."[ ] the lecture in which this passage occurs not only argues further that the soul is composed of soul-activities as the brain is composed of cells, but finds in all living cells, "all protoplasm, the first element of all soul life, sensation in the simple forms of pain and pleasure, movement in the simple forms of attraction and repulsion. only the degrees of development and combination of soul are different in different beings." du prel, impressed with the evolution of order from disorder in the heavens as on the earth, ascribes this to universal sensation as a fundamental quality of all matter, which makes it continually tend towards a state of equilibrium in which collision is reduced to a minimum.[ ] some biologists ascribe sensation, or consciousness, to animal life alone; some ascribe consciousness to such animals only as possess a nervous system; some philosophers make a distinction between sensation, consciousness, and self-consciousness, as shown in the scale of animal life; some, again, approaching the problem from another side, lay emphasis on the difference between automatic and organic action, instinct, "blind impulse," and will. carneri, as we have seen,[ ] holds that even the action of an animal so high in the scale as the butterfly may be pure automatism, its fluttering when impaled merely the motion of a continued attempt at flight. these differences in opinion seem to depend, in great measure, upon the end of the scale of being chosen as the starting-point in the development of theory. if we begin with man and assume intelligence to be the cause of design,--of the purposeful, the self-preserving,--in his action, we shall be likely to infer intelligence as the cause of self-preserving function in all animals, and we shall find great difficulty in drawing any distinct line between intelligence and automatism. if we are not students of inorganic nature, the evolution to be found also in it, up to the attainment of preservative forms of motion, may escape our observation, preoccupation with man and the self- or rather human-interested bias of observation blinding us to it; but if we carry our considerations, in an unprejudiced spirit, on beyond the province of life, we may, like du prel and others, arrive at a theory of intelligence as a universal property of matter. on the other hand, if we begin with inorganic matter and assume automatism to be the cause of its motion, we are likely, ascending the scale of organic existence, to interpret much of its function as due to material action and reaction, and may again, from this side, find so great difficulty in drawing the line where intelligence begins, that we may fall, as carneri has done, into the opposite extreme to that last noticed, and interpret nearly all animal action as unintelligent or even insentient. let us look at the dilemma a little more closely. might it not seem, from one point of view, as if the harmonious movements of the stars, by which they avoid their own destruction, must be referred to desire and will to avoid it? if all systems of material parts, without exception or distinction, tend, as fechner, du prel, and petzoldt assert, towards harmony of the parts such that the motion of these parts will become self-preservative, does it not seem logically necessary to assume that this self-preservation, arising in inorganic matter in the same manner as in organic matter, must be due to the same causes as those to which we ascribe action towards an end, action that involves self-preservation, in the broadest sense of the word, in man? may not the heavenly bodies, learning from experience in some way, as man does, gradually come to choose, though still in accordance with natural laws (as man also invariably chooses) that orbit which preserves them from collision? true, they must finally suffer destruction, but so, also, must the human individual, and the race of human beings. the difference of evolution and dissolution in the two cases is only one of time. among different species of nervously organized beings, the duration of life also differs. or, if we deny the existence of intelligence in inorganic nature, can we, at least, descending the scale of organic being, find any point of which we can say, "here intelligence ends and automatism begins"? shall we deny the existence of intelligence in plants, and if so, how shall we find that dividing line between the plant and animal kingdoms which the advancement of science in many directions is rendering, not more distinct, but less and less so? g. th. schneider says, in his book on "the human will": "the movements of touch and locomotion in the search for food are the first movements in which the specific animal-life may be recognized. in no plant is the groping caused by hunger to be observed."[ ] but is this true? the insectivorous plants, for instance, open their leaves when their prey is digested, waiting for fresh prey; and they close them again when prey has again entered, thus practically grasping their victim and holding him fast. although the nature of the plant prevents its moving from the spot where it grows, are these movements less a search for and capture of food than those of the animal? to say that the closing of the leaves depends upon the beginning of some chemical process in the plant furnishes us with no mark of distinction between the two, for it is equally true that chemical processes underlie animal motion; and to object that the reopening of the leaves is the result of the completion of assimilation gives us, also, no distinctive mark, since the animal's search for food is likewise the result of hunger and so connected with a particular state of the digestive organs. the action of insectivorous plants draws our attention because the process of assimilation involved so resembles animal digestion; but, as a point of fact, the opening of petals to receive the air and sun is as much a search for food as the opening of leaves to receive insect prey. schneider adds to the passage above quoted, "a further difference between psychical and physiological movements is this, that the latter always remain the same, however the excitation changes, while the former have, now the character of attraction, now that of repulsion." it may be questioned whether this difference either can be demonstrated to be a distinctive mark. we have only to go into a dark cellar where the potatoes have begun to sprout, in order to see how plants that ordinarily grow upward will take every curve and angle in order to reach towards the light of some distant window. and if we turn one of the tubers about, we may watch the pallid sprout again turn to grow towards the far-away sunlight. thomas a. knight relates experiments in which plants of the virginia creeper (_ampelopsis quinquefolia_) were removed from one side of the house to the other, being, in each case, screened from perpendicular rays of the sun, and records that, in all cases, the tendrils turned in a few hours in a direction pointing to the centre of the house. one plant after being thus experimented with, was "removed to the centre of the house and fully exposed to the perpendicular light of the sun; and a piece of dark-colored paper was placed upon one side of it, just within reach of its tendrils; and to this substance they soon appeared to be strongly attracted. the paper was then placed upon the opposite side, under similar circumstances, and a piece of plate glass was substituted; but to this substance the tendrils did not indicate any disposition to approach. the position of the glass was then changed, and care was taken to adjust its surface to the varying position of the sun, so that the light reflected might continue to strike the tendrils; which then receded from the glass, and appeared to be strongly repulsed by it."[ ] darwin writes of the insectivorous _drosera rotundifolia_: "if young and active leaves are selected, inorganic particles not larger than the head of a small pin, placed on the central glands, sometimes cause the outer tentacles to bend inwards. but this follows much more surely and quickly, if the object contains nitrogenous matter which can be dissolved by the secretion. on one occasion, i observed the following unusual circumstance. small bits of raw meat (which acts more energetically than any other substance), of paper, dried moss, and of the quill of a pen, were placed on several leaves, and they were all embraced equally well in about two hours. on other occasions the above-named substances, or more commonly particles of glass, coal-cinder (taken from the fire), stone, gold-leaf, dried grass, cork, blotting paper, cotton-wool, and hair rolled into little balls, were used, and these substances, though they were sometimes well embraced, often caused no movement whatever in the outer tentacles, or an extremely slight and slow movement. yet these same leaves were proved to be in an active condition, as they were excited to movement by substances yielding nitrogenous matter, such as bits of raw or roast meat, the yolk or white of boiled eggs, fragments of insects of all orders, spiders, etc. i will give only two instances. "minute flies were placed on the discs of several leaves, and on others balls of paper, bits of moss and quill of about the same size as the flies, and the latter were well embraced in a few hours; whereas after twenty-five hours only a very few tentacles were inflected over the other objects. the bits of paper, moss, and quill were then removed from these leaves, and bits of raw meat placed on them; and now all the tentacles were soon energetically inflected. "again, particles of coal-cinder (weighing rather more than the flies used in the last experiment) were placed on the centres of three leaves: after an interval of nineteen hours, one of the particles was tolerably well embraced; a second by a very few tentacles; and a third by none. i then removed the particles from the two latter leaves, and put on them recently killed flies. these were fairly well embraced in seven and one-half hours, and thoroughly after twenty and one-half hours; the tentacles remaining inflected for many subsequent days. on the other hand, the one leaf which had in the course of nineteen hours embraced the bit of cinder moderately well, and to which no fly was given, after an additional thirty-three hours (_i.e._ in fifty-two hours from the time when the cinder was put on) was completely reëxpanded and ready to act again."[ ] from these and many other experiments darwin concludes that inorganic and some organic substances not attacked by the secretion of the leaf act much less quickly and efficiently than organic substances yielding soluble matter, which is absorbed. he also writes of the curvature of radicles which come in contact with obstacles at right angles:-- "the first and most obvious explanation of the curvature is that it results merely from the mechanical resistance to the growth in its original direction. nevertheless, this explanation did not seem to us satisfactory. the radicles did not present the appearance of having been subjected to a sufficient pressure to account for their curvature. sachs has shown that the growing part is more rigid than the part immediately above, which has ceased to grow, so that the latter might have been expected to yield and become curved as soon as the apex encountered an unyielding object; whereas it was the stiff, growing part which became curved. moreover, an object which yields with the greatest ease will deflect a radicle: thus, as we have seen, when the apex of the radicle of the bean encountered the polished surface of extremely thin tin-foil on soft sand, no impression was left on it, yet the radicle became deflected at right angles. a second explanation occurred to us, namely, that even the gentlest pressure might check the growth of the apex, and in this case growth could continue only on one side, and thus the radicle would assume a rectangular form; but this view leaves wholly unexplained the curvature of the upper part, extending for a length of - mm. "we were therefore led to suspect that the apex was sensitive to contact, and that the effect was transmitted from it to the upper part of the radicle, which was excited to bend away from the touching object. as a little loop of fine thread, hung on a tendril or on the petiole of a leaf-climbing plant, causes it to bend, we thought that any hard object affixed to the tip of a radicle, freely suspended and growing in damp air, might cause it to bend if it were sensitive, and yet would not offer any mechanical resistance to its growth.... sachs discovered that the radicle a little above the apex is sensitive and bends like a tendril _towards_ the touching object. but when one side of the apex is pressed by any object, the growing part bends _away_ from the object."[ ] acting on this idea, darwin found, in many experiments, that the radicles of plants freely suspended in bottles, when brought into contact with the most yielding substances, bits of paper, etc., were deflected, in a very few hours, from their original course, and often at right angles to this. he says, further:-- "as the apex of a radicle in penetrating the ground must be pressed on all sides, we wished to learn whether it could distinguish between harder, or more resisting, and softer substances. a square of sanded paper almost as stiff as card, and a square of extremely thin paper (too thin for writing on) of exactly the same size (about one-twentieth of an inch), were fixed with shellac on opposite sides of the apices of twelve suspended radicles.... in eight out of the twelve cases, there could be no doubt that the radicle was deflected from the side to which the card-like paper was attached and towards the opposite side bearing the very thin paper. "this occurred, in some instances, in nine hours, but in others not until twenty-four hours had elapsed. moreover, some of the four failures can hardly be considered as really failures: thus, in one of them in which the radicle remained quite straight, the square of thin paper was found, when both were removed from the apex, to have been so thickly coated with shellac that it was almost as stiff as the card; in the second case, the radicle was bent upward into a semicircle, but the deflection was not directly from the side bearing the card, and this was explained by the two squares having become cemented laterally together, forming a sort of stiff gable from which the radicle was deflected; in the third case, the square of card had been fixed by mistake in front, and though there was deflection, this might have been due to sachs's curvature; in the fourth case alone, no reason could be assigned why the radicle had not been at all deflected." darwin found, moreover, by experiment, that, when the tip of a radicle is burnt or cut, "it transmits an influence to the upper adjoining part, causing it to bend away from the affected side." this deflection resembles, in a very striking manner, the avoidance of sources of injury and pain on the part of animals. and at the end of his book on the movements of plants, which contains very many other experiments bearing on the question of sensitivity in plants, the author writes, "it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals." it is true that the plant does not react with the rapidity which characterizes the animal; darwin found that radicles are not sensitive to temporary contact, but only to long, though to slight pressure. it is also true that the physical basis of the movement is more simple, and so more easily traceable in the plant than in the animal organism; yet why lay such especial stress upon this side of plant-life, since it is acknowledged that the physical basis is by no means peculiar to it, but that, on the contrary, all life-processes, in the animal as well as in the plant, have their physical side, although greater complexity of organization may make this more difficult to follow in the one case than in the other? but we may begin at the other end of the scale and examine the facts presented from the opposite point of view. the physicist demonstrates that force is indestructible; that is, that the sum of the motion and resistance to motion residing in indestructible matter is also imperishable, that all present motion must be regarded as the resultant of previous conditions of motion and resistance, as far back as we may go, until we reach some assumed primal state (which is only assumed and cannot be proved to have existed) in which the matter composing the universe is supposed to have been at complete rest; and that every resultant bears relations to its component factors of force that are constant, every component finding its full value in the resultant. what evidence has the present state of our solar system and the other systems of heavenly bodies revealed to us by the telescope to offer us in proof of their consciousness or sentience? how are the whirl and concentration of nebular mists, the crash and collision of elemental bodies, from which, by simple action and reaction, after ages of disharmony, only a comparative harmony is arrived at as inevitable result, evidence of aim, intention, will, consciousness, in the matter subject to this evolution? do we find anything here except blind law? the movements of plants, often directly favorable to self-preservation, may be explained by the arrangement of the cells and their chemical action. or, if sentience must be assumed to be the cause of movement attaining ends of self-preservation in plants, how are we to account for organic and instinctive action in animals? how is it, for instance, that the new-born infant sucks, and the chicken but a few hours old, even though it has been hatched in an incubator apart from its kind, picks at the food strewn before it, aiming, too, with considerable precision?[ ] how does it happen that the process of breathing and digestion, the beating of the heart and the circulation of the blood, all so necessary to life, go on with regularity, though not directed by reason? has the newly hatched chicken any experience to teach it what food is, and how it is to be seized; or does the caterpillar, which spins itself a cocoon, do this with the understanding that it is about to enter a new phase of existence? or, if such important and, at first view, seemingly intelligent action can be explained as unreasoning instinct, why cannot many other actions of the lower animals be thus explained? why may not nearly all, if not all of them, be thus explained, and consciousness be regarded as the exclusive property of man? but how much of the action we term automatic, instinctive, or organic, reflex or "merely functional," can be positively asserted to have no admixture of consciousness? if we examine our own action closely we shall often find that we were, in fact, conscious of much that seems, at first glance, purely automatic. it may appear to us, for instance, that reflection on the notes of a musical composition which we have known for a long time "by heart" hinders rather than helps us, even causing us sometimes to fail completely in our performance. but if we examine our condition at the time of such a failure, do we not usually find that, when we began to think about what we were playing, we were suddenly seized with a fear of failing and that the fear confused us? or do we not find, at least, that withdrawal of our attention from the music by conversation that requires any concentration of thought is as likely to confuse us as too great attention to it? a friend of mine one day related to me the following experience: having a felon upon his finger, he submitted to a surgical operation, for which the operator preferred to administer an anæsthetic. when he awoke to consciousness again, he was pleased to find the painful operation completely finished and the hand newly dressed. asked whether he had experienced any pain, he answered, "not a twinge," whereat the surgeon remarked that he had screamed and groaned during the operation. to this he replied that his action must have been merely reflex. an hour or so later, however, as he was at work, a sudden recollection of the whole operation came to him. persons undergoing dental operations under the influence of laughing-gas often scream and make convulsive movements as if in pain, though they declare, afterwards, in like manner, that they have felt nothing; but may not this be due, as in the case just cited, to a mere lapse of memory? why, indeed, should the patient scream if not in pain? again, there is a poison--curarine, the indian arrow poison--which has power to deprive its victim of all motion, while leaving him, as has been ascertained in cases in which it has been used as a medicine, a consciousness that is more or less dimmed. may not the seeming dimness, however, be due to the incomplete function of memory when turned to events that transpired under its influence? and may not the action of so-called anæsthetics of all sorts involve simply a paralysis of action similar to that caused by the indian arrow poison, together with a more complete lapse of memory than that ensuing upon the latter? to answer that anæsthetics affect the brain, and that therefore consciousness is not possible, is begging the question, for it is by just such experiments and experience of the apparent mental effects of anæsthetics in connection with peculiar brain conditions that theories of non-sensibility under these conditions have been arrived at. states of somnambulism generally used to be classed as outside the sphere of memory and were therefore sometimes called unconscious; but recent experiments in hypnotism have shown that similar states to these may be remembered or not remembered according to the individual case, and that persons who, when awakened, ordinarily recall nothing of that which has passed in the hypnotic state may be made to recall all the events of that state if commanded to do so before awakening. pflüger has attempted to demonstrate, by many experiments, that consciousness is not confined to the brain but is also connected with the spinal cord;[ ] why, however, draw a line at the spinal cord? is not nerve substance the same with that from which the spinal cord and the brain develop, are not all nerve cells primarily mere modifications of cells of the outer skin? of unconsciousness in ourselves we can have no more an immediate and direct knowledge than of unconsciousness outside ourselves, since, in order to be immediately known, it would have to be present in consciousness; and a conscious unconsciousness is a self-contradiction. we can only witness to a failure of memory at certain points (which failure has already been shown to be untrustworthy as evidence) or to movements of our body to which we can supply no corresponding conscious states as premeditation. but our inability to testify to such is merely negative. a great deal has been made, in one way and another, of the fact that there are links in premeditated action which do not come into consciousness, there being no knowledge, for instance, of the processes in nerve and muscle between the movement of the arm in writing and the premeditation of such movement. as a fact, however, none of the physiological processes which accompany the psychical are present to our consciousness except as given through the senses or through nerve-transmission similar to that of sense-perception. the conscious elements of any present state of thought do not include the changes in brain-matter concomitant with them. but the question may be raised, as haeckel raises it,--though perhaps somewhat differently,--in his essay on soul-cells and cell-souls, as to whether the brain-cells themselves are not endowed with consciousness; and any answer in the negative is, evidently, an assumption, of which we can give no proof. indeed, the question may be asked, and has been asked, whether the remarkable white blood corpuscles which traverse our body, and are so similar to certain lower forms of life, are not to be regarded as distinct beings, or whether, in fact, all the cells whose combined life and movement make up our own are not endowed with distinct being and consciousness. again an answer in the negative is evidently a mere assumption. and why stop, in this case, exactly with the cells of animal life; why not apply our question to those of plant life also? why not, indeed, suppose all forms to be endowed with consciousness, all harmonious motion to be accompanied by pleasure, all dissolution and conflict by pain? from analogy we may conclude something, but from mere non-analogy nothing. our experience may entitle us to the assertion that all beings possessing a nervous system are endowed with consciousness, but we cannot conclude, therefore, that all beings not possessing a nervous system are not endowed with consciousness. we have associated consciousness with acts peculiar to man, and hence inferred its presence in similar movements of animals similarly constructed. but if we could examine the physiological accompaniments of our own thought and feeling and their issue in action, if we could look on at all the details, the chemical and mechanical changes of the physiological processes, what hint should we find in these more than in any other physical processes, from which to infer consciousness? they are not the less rigidly in accordance with natural law than any other. but our observation of all other processes than those of our own organism is a mere extraneous one, like this we have imagined of the processes of our own body; if there were consciousness in other forms we could not enter into it; and how can we prove extraneously its non-existence? our own "stability" of function and the stability of all life-motion has been developed in a perfectly similar manner to that by which the stability of the heavenly bodies has been developed, the physical side of the process being just as fully a matter of action and reaction, and our action towards ends the slowly progressive result of this course of action and reaction, just as is the case with the harmonious movements of the systems of the heavens. it would, moreover, be perfectly easy to formulate a purely physical and mechanical explanation of our action, as carneri does of the action of ants and other species,--to explain the plucking of a rose, for instance, as mere reaction upon the sense of smell and sight, or as the mere mechanical action of cell-matter. but, again, on the other hand: if it is true that the nervous system is developed from cells of the outer covering of the body, it is, nevertheless, not true that those primary cells are the nervous system, any more than it is true that the lowest forms of life, from which man has developed, are human beings. rudimentary eyes exist in some animals in the form of mere pigment spots, but we do not suppose these pigment spots to endow the animal with sight as we understand it. sight is not a function of all forms of life, neither is hearing, and these powers have developed out of forms of animal life in which they did not exist; why then is it necessary to suppose consciousness to be a property of all forms of life because we know it to appear in some higher developments of life? why may it not arise, as do sight and hearing, by gradual evolution, as a function of special organisms? have we any direct knowledge of consciousness except in connection with certain normal conditions of our own brain? and, this being said, have we any means left by which we can prove the existence of consciousness, except in connection with a brain similar to our own? what grounds have we for assuming the existence of consciousness where the analogy of our own organization does not furnish us with an argument? if we argue from the analogy of our own experience to the existence of consciousness in animals whose organization is similar to our own, and then, following down the scale of life, find no pause or gap at which to draw an exact line, we must not the less forget that with the diminishing analogy the force of our inference diminishes in like degree. or where is the logical necessity of inferring that consciousness must exist in the inorganic either because the organic originally developed from the inorganic, or because it suffers continually a renewal by nourishment, which is, in effect, as much a development from the inorganic as the supposed primal one? the pigment spot from which the eye arises is not the eye, simple protoplasm is not the organized human being; whence does the physical organization arise? are we to suppose it, too, as preëxistent, "in a weaker form," or in any form, in the inorganic? whence have we any grounds for assuming that that which we know only in connection with a certain peculiar organization exists elsewhere? are we to suppose the color blue to be present in certain chemical elements because their chemical compound is blue? or how is it that even isomeric compounds may exhibit different qualities? shall we regard the color as not essentially connected with the chemical constitution of the supposed compound? as a matter of fact, color is one of the chemist's means of recognition. or shall we "explain" the color by the length of light-waves or the construction of the eye, correcting, thus, one part of our experience by another, and assuming one as fundamental and essential, the other as non-essential? we "explain" sound as wave-movement in some outer medium and in the ear, correcting, thus, the hearing by sight or touch; does this mean that that part of our experience given us through the eye or hand alone is truth, and to be relied on and recognized as such, while the experience given us through the other senses is non-essential and not to be accepted or relied on? but if the eye gives us the truth, then why do we, in the case of color, correct it again by another phase of our experience? how are we to decide which is essential, the wave-movement that is (or may be made) perceptible to our eye, or the sound heard by our ear, the color directly seen or the length of the light-wave concluded from experiment? as a matter of fact, we emphasize one or the other according to the end we have in view in our experiment. is it the length of the wave which causes the color, or the color which causes the particular wave-length? if we analyze brain-action as chemical action, do we prove thereby that the consciousness concomitant with this peculiar chemical action under these peculiar conditions must exist elsewhere under other conditions? are the characteristics of one chemical compound the same as those of another because both compounds are matter and motion? if we prove that the brain contains cells similar to cells in other parts of the nervous system, that the whole nervous system arises, in the first instance, from epithelium cells, that the whole animal is descended from some primal protoplasmic cell, and that the cells of plants are similar, in many ways, to those of animals, do we thereby prove that consciousness exists except as coördinate with the peculiar cells and arrangements of cells in the brain? we have no precedent from which to argue, since consciousness is to us a unique feature of the universe; we know it immediately only as existent in ourselves, and in order to obtain any precedent must be guilty of assuming it in order to prove it. the dilemma seems, thus, as we analyse and inquire into it more closely, to increase rather than decrease in significance. how is any solution to be arrived at? if we return to the beginning of our considerations on this point, we shall find that, in coming at the question from either side, we have made an assumption. our first premises were as follows: assuming that consciousness is the cause of movement by which man attempts to arrive at his ends, what reason have we for supposing consciousness to exist outside man? and, on the other hand: assuming mechanical action and reaction to be the cause of movement in inorganic nature, what reason have we for assuming this to be the cause of action in organic existence? let us examine these assumptions more closely. we may return to the theory of the gradual development of stable out of unstable conditions as stated in different ways by zöllner, fechner, and du prel. as has been shown, the principle applies to organic as well as to inorganic nature, and is only a broader principle including that of the survival of the fittest. there is a physical side to all psychical functions, and everywhere our investigation shows us the physical following unchanging laws. the development of the stable from the unstable explains to us the evolution of function in the direction of the preservation of the organic forms of which it is the function, as well as the evolution of harmonious movement in the heavenly bodies. the explanation of the natural and necessary elimination of the inharmonious covers the whole ground, and seems to assign a cause for every form of preservative action, for the harmonious conduct which preserves the state or the family as a collection of individuals, as well as for the harmony of function that preserves the individual. as long as reason can change no smallest detail in the workings of the laws of nature, as long as it can never render any motion other than the exact resultant of the forces represented in it, what room remains for reason as a cause? ought we not rather, though from a much broader and therefore more convincing, in fact from the broadest and hence most convincing view of the matter, to regard consciousness, as do many physiologists on narrower grounds, as the mere accompaniment of material processes? but this brings us again to a consideration of the concept of cause. what do we mean by cause? above, we spoke of the "cause of motion"; do we designate by this term those factors of preceding motion which, continued, produce it as composite resultant? if so, why not substitute for the term "cause of motion," "component factors of motion"? but is this, in fact, all we meant by cause? was there not, in our mind, as we made use of the term, a vague half-conception of some additional force beyond those so exactly summed up in the resultant, which, in some indefinable manner, guided the process? as has been sufficiently demonstrated, no such additional force can be shown to exist, or be logically assumed in theory, except in some transcendental sense; nature gives us only perfect equivalence of forces. a cause of motion except as the mere sum of its preceding components is, therefore, a natural impossibility. hence the reason or consciousness cannot be assumed to be such a cause. but if consciousness cannot be regarded as such a cause additional to the component factors of motion, neither can anything outside consciousness be regarded as such a cause. natural laws are often treated as if they constituted a cause; but they are not entities which control nature: they are merely forms by which we express nature's constancy, uniformity. neither is constancy or uniformity a controlling entity: it is simply a generalization, if a universal one, whether we regard it as _a priori_ or as _a posteriori_. it appears, then, that we have no greater reason for regarding the constancy of nature or natural law as cause than we have for asserting reason to be such. in this connection the question may be in order, as to why the student of the natural sciences, who is in the habit of proclaiming, so loudly, the necessity or at least the constancy of everything in nature, should yet elect to assign to consciousness the character of the non-essential, that is the accidental. action and reaction are, according to him, essential inherent properties of brain matter as such, but consciousness is merely a dependent. but who shall decide what part or form of force, what factors of the universe are accidental and what essential? if our assertion of constancy in natural phenomena means anything at all, it means that nothing is accidental, but that all factors of phenomena are essential. is the bell the less silver to my eye because it appeals to my ear with sound, or the ball the less round to touch because my field of vision is flat? even if we suppose forms of matter, and organic forms, to exist without consciousness, can we therefore assert consciousness to be any the less essential, any the less inherent in the nature of things, any the less existent and actual, where it appears? if so, what physiological function can we call inherent and essential, since these all also arise with evolution? heat may exist without light, but is light therefore less essential than heat, where it arises? the very constancy which psychical phenomena exhibit would show their essential character as factors of the universe. perhaps it is the attempt of the spiritualist to assign to consciousness something more than such a character which has led his adversary into the opposite error of asserting it to be something less; but the two extremes of doctrine are quite equally far from that scientific method which holds to given phenomena. materialism is as much metaphysics as spiritualism is; and the materialist who condemns metaphysics condemns himself. consciousness belongs to the actual; and the materialism which assigns it a place subordinate to that of other actual phenomena is as much dogmatism as is any theory which subordinates the other phases of the actual to it. the fact that consciousness bears constant relation to certain physiological phenomena is no ground for pronouncing it the effect and the physiological phenomena the cause, it the dependent and the physiological phenomena the independent factors; the relations of all forms of force to each other are constant. heat is constant in its accompaniment of light; and yet who shall say the one is dependent, the other independent, the one cause, the other merely effect? we have only to regard the theories of specialists in order to discover how easily habitual occupation with one particular side, form, factor, or phase of phenomena inclines one to regard that side as the only essential one, and all others as non-essential, dependent upon it, mere effect of which it is the cause. the physicist tends to interpret everything by mechanical action and reaction; the chemist lays more particular stress on the chemical properties of organic as of inorganic matter; the physiologist emphasizes cellular structure and combination, and makes much of brain cells, the spinal cord, the _nervus sympathicus_, and the special sense-organs; the biologist often regards the attraction and repulsion involved in the so-called sensibility of all forms of living matter as the cause of all life phenomena; the anatomist calls attention to the arrangement of organs with respect to each other, the mechanical adjustment of parts for function, the size and shape of bones as caused by weight and the angle of its incidence, etc., etc.; while the psychologist on the other hand refers everything to mental causality. for complete science, however, we need the aid of every special science,--of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, anatomy, psychology, and all the other branches which can contribute to any side of our knowledge of nature. the desire within us for unity is strong, the impulse to simplify by referring everything to a single principle almost irresistible; and in so far as we do this through a conviction of the oneness of the universe as consisting of interdependent parts we are in a certain sense justified; but until we can grasp this unity in its totality, our one-sided reductions must remain false in so far as they make claim to include the whole of truth. it may be most useful to choose out that side or phase of phenomena for any particular investigation which is most accessible to such investigation; where the links of the psychical fail, it may be necessary to scientific completeness or clearness to complete the chain with the aid of the physical, but it should be borne in mind that this is a device of reason for convenience' sake. it may be possible to imagine two worlds, one in which the physical evolution alone takes place and all phenomena peculiar to organic function arise through the action and reaction of organic matter;[ ] but the question is not what we can imagine but what is: we can imagine many things which do not exist and are impossible to nature. the human reason has also found it possible to conceive of spirit unconnected with body. the materialist calls triumphant attention to the constancy of material phenomena, and proves, by careful comparison with coördinate psychical phenomena, the uniformities in the latter. disease of every kind, but particularly those forms of disease which attack especially the nervous system--brain and spinal cord and the nerve endings--furnish the strong points of his argument, which is thus based on facts no lover of truth desires to gainsay; but when the materialist has shown us all these facts, has he not proved, with regard to the psychical, exactly that constancy which entitles it to consideration as a part of the actual universe subject to natural law? the materialist objects that if the physical side of nature is the essential one, the psychical cannot be essential. on what grounds is this claim based? is the color of an object not essential to it because its shape is essential, or do the actual existence and change of color according to natural law interfere with the actual existence and change of shape according also to natural law? does only one of our senses give us truth? logic is very ready with its definitions of "things" and their "properties" and "accidents," as physics is very ready with its analyses of light and color and sound, and physiology with its analyses of the sense organs and their relations to color and sound. but shall we accept only the physiological analysis of cell form and action, and reject the sense-synthesis of sight or hearing as less important, less actual? or are we to believe that the sense-function alone is essential and not also some actuality in its object, as of this or that color? are we to believe that any property or accident of a thing may change, and the thing remain yet actually the same thing? what are our essences as separated from their properties and accidents? as a matter of fact, we know nothing except we know it as some particular thing, every change in which leaves it something different from what it was before. changes of particular form or color are changes to some other particular form or color, unless they are such changes as withdraw the object from the reach of the special sense of sight before appealed to, as for instance in the case of evaporation. that one form of force may accompany or pass into another makes neither one of the concomitants and neither the preceding nor the succeeding form less real. as a fact, however, much superstition still remains with us as unconscious result of just such withdrawals from the perception of one sense and analogous new appeals to some hitherto unaffected sense, although we are accustomed to flatter ourselves that science has long overcome this superstition. there is no change that is not a particular change, that is not according to constant laws of nature, and, as such, essential to nature. there is no phase of nature that exact science can consistently regard as non-essential. so that, even if reason does not exist in combination with all matter, we have no ground for regarding it as non-essential where it does exist, and no more reason for defining it as effect than we have for defining it as cause. result it may be, as physiological function is result,--that is, an end-form of processes of change which we call evolution. but we have found our disproof and also our proof of the existence of reason outside the human species fail us wherever the direct evidence of extreme analogy is wanting, as soon as we cease to regard reason as a cause of physiological change. perhaps it will be well for us to define more closely the province of reason, before we proceed further in our considerations. an exhaustive analysis is not necessary to our purpose and it would be useless to attempt it at this point of our argument. the relation of reason to action is what chiefly concerns us here, and in this connection mr. leslie stephen's definition of it as that faculty which enables us to act with regard to the distant and future might seem to designate its important function.[ ] simple reaction on the present action of force belongs to all matter. however, when we consider further, a certain doubt may rise as to the exact correctness of this definition or description, for does not that which we call instinct often perform the same office for the animal as that which we have designated as the office of reason? let us look into this question a little more closely. we may take, for instance, the case of those insects and other animals which, though never caring for or indeed seeing their offspring after the hatching of the latter, make provision at the laying of the eggs for their nourishment during the helplessness of the first period of their life; are we to suppose that these animals have any means of knowing that they are providing for their offspring? can they have learned the fact from their own parent whom they never saw, or from others of their own species who are in the same predicament as themselves? as schneider points out,[ ] the human infant must have sucked before it could have had any ideas, as individual, of the act of sucking. the newly hatched chickens of eimer's experiments above referred to could scarcely have had any conception of the act of eating before they picked at their food. how happens it that the young of many of the lower animals which give no care to eggs or offspring yet know how to care for themselves after the peculiar manner of their kind? once it is admitted that any acts which attain results that constitute desirable ends for the acting subject need not be regarded as caused by knowledge of the ends, there is no reason to suppose that the principle may not hold of many acts in which a distinct knowledge of the end seems to play a part. but what do we mean by end? let us take, for instance, the act of eating. the biologist and the physiologist tell us that the end which eating serves is the preservation of life; and the biologist may further add--not the life of the individual, alone, but that of the species. the very consistent physiologist may principally have in view, in eating, the preservation of his own health, and may even take into consideration, in a degree, his possible future offspring, guarding his own health with a view to theirs. with a minority of other men these more general and distant results may to some extent be kept in view as ends. but it is evident that, with the majority of people, they are, where ends at all, subordinate ones, the immediate satisfaction of hunger, the pleasure of eating, or the relief of physical depression, appearing oftener as chief end. and what is to be said of the new-born infant, which sucks when the breast is placed between its lips? what is the end which it has in view in taking nourishment? shall we suppose it, as individual, to have any definite conception of the contrast between states of hunger and states of satisfaction, and to possess the knowledge that the act of sucking is the proper means to the attainment of satisfaction as an end? as the infant becomes the boy seating himself at table with a distinct conception of pleasure to be attained by the gratification of a vigorous appetite, so the boy may become the physiologist eating with a view chiefly to his own health and to the further end of health in his offspring. how does it happen that, thus, the same act, the significance of which remains the same, may be performed and by the same individual yet with quite different ends, or perhaps in some cases (that of the infant) no end at all, in view? when we perceive the sphex providing its eggs, as is its wont, with living and yet motionless and helpless insects, we can scarcely refrain from believing that it is inspired by parental affection thus to provide for its future young; and yet we might, with quite equal reason, suppose that the act of copulation, in the case of the sphex, must have in view the propagation of offspring and the preservation of the species, since this is its result also; we refrain from so supposing, simply because a common experience furnishes us with the knowledge that the act of copulation, most necessary to the propagation of offspring and the preservation of the species, may yet be performed with no direct view to either of these ends, the birth of offspring being even regarded, in many cases, as something to be avoided if possible. with respect to all manner of acts, we continually fall into error by imputing what would be our own end, in case we performed the act, to another individual of our own species performing it; and the danger of error is doubtless increased when we attempt to judge the ends of an entirely different species by ends in a degree common to our own species. there is no reason why we should not suppose that some less ultimate end than that of the preservation of offspring may be present to the consciousness of the sphex placing food about its eggs, just as some nearer end than preservation of the species, health of offspring, or even individual health may be present to the human individual in the acts of copulation or of food-taking. and there remains still the further question as to whether the care of the sphex for its eggs may not be, and continue forever, on the plane of the first act of food-taking in the human infant; and then the question again arises as to what the nature of that plane of action may be. these questions must remain, i believe, in great part unanswered, considerations such as those noticed above making the inference even of like ends from like acts very untrustworthy, the inference of similar ends from similar acts still more so, and the inference of the existence of no end or consciousness at all a logical impossibility. however, a certain general clew is given us in the constant coördination of our own nervous system with psychical processes, from which we may infer psychical processes in some manner and degree similar to our own in species whose nervous system greatly resembles our own; the similarity need not be that of ends, however. the decreasing similarity of nervous organization as we descend the animal scale may be supposed to be coördinate with some decrease of psychical similarity. _wherein_ this increasing dissimilarity consists, however, we have yet to inquire. if we return to the act of food-taking in the individual, we perceive that, avoiding any exact assumption as to the definite nature of the act in its first appearance in the infant, we may make the general assertion that, as in the case of the supposed physiologist who finally comes to eat with a direct view to the preservation of health in his offspring as well as his own preservation and health, the act itself, while remaining unchanged in nature, connects itself, in the process of development, with various ends. as the individual becomes conscious of farther and farther reaching and more and more complicated results of the act, he postulates these as ends, not forgetting, however, important ends earlier postulated. he may eat, as a boy, for the pleasure of eating, later with his health and the capacity for useful work in view, and finally to the end also, or perhaps primarily, of securing healthy offspring; but he eats, in all these cases; and it is even supposable that he may eat the same kinds of food, healthful food being, from the beginning, agreeable to him. the widening of knowledge by experience, in the case of the human individual, furnishes him with more distant and more complex ends, which were earlier impossible to him, since he knew nothing of them. something similar appears to be the truth in the case of the mental progress of the human species as a whole. the growth of knowledge is, in fact, a growth of consciousness of the constant connection of particular processes with particular results, and of human acts as affecting these; with which increase of knowledge a further coördinate development in the sense of a postulation of further and further and more and more complex ends keeps pace. we are continually making "discoveries,"--performing or observing operations some or all of the observed results of which are unforeseen by us, though these very results may be later sought as ends. we are often able to predict the results even of entirely new experiments; but we foresee, and can therefore assume as end, no results the elements of which in their connection with their conditions have not first come, in some way, within our knowledge. nothing is a discovery which does not involve some new element or new combination of elements. the growth of knowledge, in individual and species, and the increase in distance and complexity of ends never attain completeness, not all results become known; new discoveries are constantly being made which show us that we have hitherto been blind to results continually before our eyes, action in accordance with which would have been most advantageous to us. with all these facts before us, how are we to decide as to the end in view in any non-human act? how can we be sure whether the bird which covers its eggs is acting with a view to the production of offspring or merely, as some authors have assumed, to the more immediate end of cooling its own breast.[ ] how do we know whether any feeling which we might term mother-love is active in the sphex's care for her eggs, whether they are, as some authors have suggested, a part of her own ego and therefore cared for, or whether the act of caring for them has not finally come to have some immediate pleasure connected with it, such as accompanies the satisfaction of hunger or the sexual instinct, the pleasure itself being sought as an end? how do we know even whether the impaled butterfly is endeavoring to escape pain or merely attempting to continue its flight? there appear to be some general lines that we may draw. thus, for instance, all facts seem to justify the assumption that the possession of a nervous system involves sensibility and susceptibility to pain and pleasure; and thus it is hardly consistent to suppose that the struggle of the impaled butterfly can be without pain. it might be at times more agreeable to our selfishness to suppose animals insusceptible of pain, but i think we can scarcely lay that flattering unction to our soul, and must face the assumption of their sensibility and feeling. the question as to whether the butterfly has any distinct idea of escape as an end to be striven for is a different one and not so easily solved. yet as regards conscious ends, too, we may be able to arrive at some general conclusions with respect to the acts of animals, even of those low in the scale. some such conclusions have already been reached in our considerations. but it is to be noted that all these are purely negative--exclusions not inclusions. we may be able to say, for instance, after careful experiment and observation, that this or that act takes place where there is no possibility of previous knowledge, on the part of the animal performing it, of this or that result (which we may, however, regard as an end that should especially be desired by the animal), and that this particular result cannot, therefore, be an end present to the animal mind, as such, in performing the act. lubbock believes that the passive state of the caterpillar in its cocoon during its transformation to a butterfly is a necessary condition of its preservation, since the mouth while undergoing change to an organ adapted to sucking, and the digestive organs during their preparation for the assimilation of honey, must be useless, and therefore the animal in an active state must perish of starvation. it is scarcely to be supposed, however, that the insect is aware of these ends of self-preservation involved in the state of passivity in the cocoon and knowingly seeks them as ends. since the metamorphosis takes place but once in the individual life, the insect has no means of learning anything about it beforehand from his individual experience (though, even if this were not true, there would still remain the first instance of cocoon-spinning to be explained); and it is both difficult to suppose that the caterpillar has always had opportunity to be instructed in some way by butterflies of his kind, as well as unnecessary to suppose this, since we see, in other cases, that acts useful to the individual may take place without previous instruction or experience. in the case of the sphex, too, as in that of many other lower species that provide for offspring they will never see, it is not to be supposed that the welfare of the offspring but rather some result nearer than this is the end in view, if any end be present to consciousness. with regard to primary acts of instinct such as those of the newly hatched chicken, and the new-born infant, it would seem as if an argument like the following might hold; it is, in fact, often made use of in a somewhat different form. we have seen that not only the progress of the individual but also that of the human species as a whole has involved an ever increasing knowledge of the connection of processes with their results and the coördinate assumption of these increasingly distant and complex results as ends. the ends which animals with a less extensive knowledge of natural processes may postulate, must be nearer and less complex than our own, the ends of those whose experience affords them least extensive knowledge being nearest and simplest, until we arrive thus at those lowest forms of animal life which cannot be supposed to have any knowledge that may be termed such, whose action and reaction, in its psychical aspect, can be figured only as vague sensation. but first as to this vague sensation. among our own acts, in which "blind instinct" seems to play a rather larger part than reason, there are those in which the gratification of the instinct involved is attended with a peculiar pleasure, while the denial of gratification to a sufficient degree is correspondingly painful; these are the acts connected with the gratification of the primary appetites of hunger, thirst, and sex. the strength of the appetites, the degree of emotion involved in them, seems to be directly coördinate with their character as connected with primary functions. this being the case, why may we not suppose the functions of the simplest forms of life, which we believe to have been passed on from generation to generation almost unchanged, for the whole period of time occupied in the evolution of the human race, to be connected with feelings equally as strong as any of our own, or even stronger since function has been exercised on these few lines only? feeling changes direction with the growth of man's knowledge, with the development of reason; it may be connected with new and more complex processes; but it would be difficult to prove that strength of feeling has increased except as connected with increased exercise of _particular_ function--that is, it would be difficult to prove that the whole sum of feeling has increased. and if we may assume that it has not increased, then we must suppose as great a degree of feeling to be possible in the lowest animals as in man; and no reason appears why we should not suppose it to exist also in as great a degree in the plants and in the inorganic matter from which both these forms of the organic have sprung.[ ] and we have to notice a second fact: if the ends present to human reason are nearer ones according as the knowledge of the individual performing them is narrower, these nearer ends and the means of their attainment may yet be very clearly and thoroughly known, the narrower knowledge including the minute, often the minutest particulars, as far as it goes; and why may we not suppose the so-called "instinctive" movements of animals very low in the scale of being, which exhibit a most perfect adaptation as far as it reaches, to be connected with a like perfect, if very narrow, action of reason? or why should we draw a line here between the movements of animals and all other movements? we are thus brought face to face with a dilemma to which there appears to be no solution. if the solution is impossible, however, why attempt it? in this case, anything we may term solution can be only dogmatic assertion or else mere speculation. if the question is unanswerable, it is unanswerable, and there is no use in further endeavor in this direction. but, in reviewing our arguments, we shall find, i think, that that which led us astray at every turn and induced us to hope for an answer, now on this side, now on that, was the tendency to look for some independent cause, some essence, effecting change rather than being effected, or of which phenomena were only the properties. it was this which made us believe that we had found the means to an answer in reason as the cause of action towards ends, as also, again, that we had found it in the development of the higher organism from the lower, and of the organic from the inorganic. we know no such independent cause, no such essence. we know only variables, preceding conditions and succeeding conditions, all of which preceding and succeeding conditions we must regard as equally essential since they are equally actual; and we know in all variation a certain constancy of relations, which we, by abstraction, term law. the argument which starts with the dependence of "ends" upon reason, and so infers a necessary intervention of reason where motion is such as to attain results regarded by the onlooker as ends to be desired, is often applied in a still wider form in theology. of course if we start with a definition of ends as results actually desired and premeditated, then we may infer reason from the assumed existence of "ends" in any case; but such a form of argument is evidently a gross case of _petitio principii_; we assume that which is to be proved,--namely, the desire and premeditation of the results attained. this fallacy ordinarily escapes the eye through the double significance of the word "end" as it is generally used; in the premises of the argument the use of the word is justifiable if no implications of reason and will are associated with it; but, with such a non-committal definition of the word, the conclusion noticed could never be reached, we should find ourselves at the end of the argument no nearer it than we were at the beginning. the gradual development of stability from instability, harmony from disharmony, a state where collision is at a minimum from one where it was at a maximum, may be regarded as furnishing the best phase possible of a teleological argument. even the dissolution of any system is part, according to the theory, of the evolution of some higher system of stability, that is, of one including more elements. this leads us, however, to the question of the definition of "higher"; the friends of theological teleology are very ready to define the development of life up to man as the development of higher from lower forms, but are they willing to regard a succeeding stage of still greater stability, a state of barren and lifeless rest like that of the moon's surface, which our earth will probably one day attain, as a yet higher stage of development, the destruction of man and of the earth as part of a higher evolution? we have to consider, further, that, unless we assume some final state of absolute stability for the universe, we can suppose only an asymptotic evolution towards it, in which higher and higher systems of stability are developed only to be again destroyed. we know nature only as involving such processes of evolution and dissolution; we know no enduring stability. if we regard merely the side of evolution in these processes, we may seem to have a strong argument for design; but if we give attention to the dissolution succeeding every evolution, the argument loses its force. and, again, if we assume the continual order of destruction, reconstruction, and re-destruction finally to give place to a condition of absolute stability, the question may be recurred to whether this state could be one of motion, whether it must not rather be conceived as one of absolute rest, some frozen peace of which the moon's is but an imperfect type. we may ask, then, whether the friends of the teleological argument would agree to designate this state, which is highest from a mathematical point of view since it includes all the elements of the universe, as highest in any point of view favoring a theological theory of design. the teleological argument is accustomed to take into consideration only the evolution side of natural process; the pessimistic argument lays emphasis, on the other hand, on all forms of dissolution,--both views corresponding thus, as a matter of fact, to but half the truth. even if we do not look beyond the evolution upon the earth, it is evident that each step in advance is marked by wide-spread destruction, each survival of the few bought at the expense of the slaughter of the many. we may overlook the slaughter, but it does not the less exist; we may egoistically shut our eyes to the pain, when it is not our pain, but it is not the less a fact. but further than this: our previous investigations have shown us difficulties on every side, when we have attempted to assume reason in matter as the cause of stability or harmony, preservative action, or the survival of the fittest. we may argue that mere matter and motion cannot have produced such results as these; but how do we know this? how have we such an intimate acquaintance with the nature of matter and motion that we can assert this? where were we at the origin of the universe (if we suppose such) or where were we at the origin of life, that we should be able to be assured of this? or how do we know in any case, from an origin, what might evolve with time? we obviously cannot argue from the analogy of man's action, since he is a part of the problem itself, included in the question, and such an analogy is a _petitio principii_. if we have found it impossible to assume reason as cause in his case, how can we, by the analogy of his action and by a universal generalization, assume it as a universal cause? we have, in fact, absolutely no precedent from which to argue, and may answer,--when wallace asserts that combinations of chemical compounds might produce protoplasm, but that no such combinations could produce living or conscious protoplasm,[ ]--how do you know that they could not? we have, indeed, no evidence to the contrary: we do not know. if we assume the creation of protoplasm or the creation of the world to have been analogous to any of the phenomena of our experience, in which we find only certain constant results of the forces resident in matter, then certainly we have no precedent for asserting the necessity of divine creation; and if we assume the creation to have been essentially different from any of the phenomena of our experience, then certainly we have no data upon which to base any theory whatever concerning it. but the assumption that the creation of protoplasm, of the earth, or of the universe, was essentially different from any of the processes that we know, is a mere assumption, without basis: we have no data from which to argue in this direction; any hypothesis of such sort is made purely and absolutely _a priori_. a first appearance of protoplasm upon the earth we must infer from the facts furnished us by geology and astronomy; but a creation of either matter or motion is a mere assumption. as we know matter, it can neither be created nor destroyed. we cannot draw any inference from man's will, for man creates nothing; his action is itself a part of nature. advanced theological doctrine tends more and more to limit the creation to the first communication of motion to matter or to assume some transcendental government of the universe, known, according to the assumption, transcendentally, or inferred from the existence of moral tendency or from desire for the transcendental in man. with transcendentalism we have, as yet, nothing to do; and with moral principle in its bearings on this matter we cannot deal until later. but as for the hypothesis of a first communication of motion to "dead" matter, we may remark, as before, that this is a mere hypothesis with no facts to support it. we know nothing of motion apart from matter, or of matter except through motion; the two cannot be separated in fact, and there is no reason for their separation in hypothesis or theory. du prel says: "whether causeless motion is scientifically conceivable, depends on whether we have to regard rest or motion as the natural condition of matter; for a motion that is not primary must, as newly appearing change, be preceded by a cause. but though experience might incline us to regard rest as the original condition of matter, and therefore to seek a cause for every motion, this is, nevertheless, only the result of an incomplete induction. for if it is true that we never see a motionless body pass into a state of motion without a cause, on the other hand, it is just as certain that a moving body can never pass into a state of rest without cause; and if this axiom can never be directly proved in processes on the earth, we can, nevertheless, show reason for it: motion on the earth cannot be imagined without resistance from obstacles, since the attraction of the earth and the moments of friction can never be removed. but the axiom is indeed indirectly proved by the fact that we see the velocity of a body decrease in proportion to the resistance of obstacles; the body can only then attain to a condition of rest when the moving force is consumed to the last remnant. hence, if we subtract the whole sum of resistance to the motion, we have again the former condition, the motion with its original velocity.... which condition of matter is the original one, rest or motion, experience cannot inform us. we have as good reason for regarding rest as arrested motion, as for regarding motion as disturbed rest. the requirement of an outer cause for the first impulsion of matter therefore has meaning only in so far as rest is claimed to be the original, natural condition of matter; but this claim cannot be substantiated, and the opposite is just as conceivable, namely, that rest is only arrested motion, and that all cosmic matter had motion from the beginning."[ ] wallace practically abandons his own ground, not only in his later works in ascribing much to natural selection which he was at first inclined to believe the effect of some supernatural cause, and omitting from his chapters on the application of the conception of evolution to man several arguments for supernatural intercession employed in his earlier work, but even in his first book, by admitting that natural selection takes advantage of mental superiority just as it does of physical superiority. we may notice at this point, however, a consistent inconsistency of his, in that, though he denies the existence of consciousness in matter, he leaves no logical room for the opposite theory of a gradual development of consciousness, since he asserts that all instinctive actions were at first self-conscious. this position is held by others also. we may note here an objection of wallace's that "because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature, even though developed _pari passu_ with it, has been developed by the same causes only." the question may be again repeated as to what is meant by cause; and it will be well to keep distinct, in our thought, transcendental cause and cosmic conditions. we must admit that we have no proof of the absence of transcendental causes. neither the constancy of nature nor the inseparability and indestructibility of matter and motion can prove the absence of such causes, which might be entirely consistent with these things; we have no data from which to argue that they are not so. but though the law of excluded middle must hold good here as elsewhere, it is also to be noticed that the absence of proof in the natural order of things, with respect to the non-existence of transcendental causes, is not equivalent to the presence of proof of the opposite. we cannot infer, from the fact that no proof can be given of the non-existence of transcendental causes, that therefore proof can be given of the existence of such causes; or, from the fact that transcendental causes may be, that therefore transcendental causes are; they may also not be. there is, in fact, absence of proof for either view. of the transcendental, if it exists, we can know by definition absolutely nothing. the man who endeavors to prove its existence generally bases his argument on this very fact in order to disprove the validity of any argument of his opponent from natural facts; when he, therefore, after legitimately silencing his opponent, goes on himself to prove the transcendental, he is guilty of self-contradiction. when fiske asserts that there is no problem "in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude,"[ ] we may admit the point, but surely it does not follow, because we cannot solve it, that therefore we must solve it, far less that we must solve it in one particular way. if we cannot solve it, we cannot solve it, and there is an end to the matter, unless we find new proof. we may not be able, as fiske says, to elude the problem, but we certainly are able to elude the answering of it, and must do so perforce if the first part of the assertion,--namely, that we cannot answer it,--be correct. when fiske urges us to accept one view because "the alternative view contains difficulties at least as great," we fail to perceive any grounds in this position for such acceptance. to fiske's question as to whether we are to regard the work of the creator as like that of the child, who builds houses just for the pleasure of knocking them down again, we may answer that the existence of a creator must first be proved before we, from a scientific basis, may make any inference as to his purpose; and that we certainly cannot use an assumption of his existence in order to protest against a theory of disteleology,--as fiske seems to do,--if we use the teleological argument to prove his existence. we may furthermore protest against the elevation of any negative term, as, for instance, spencer's "unknowable," to a term signifying a positive existence. we do not know whether there is any positive transcendental that is to us unknowable; this mere negative term is admissible only on the assumption that it expresses such an absence of knowledge. the unknowable assumed as existent entity is the unknowable known,--a self-contradiction. a similar criticism may be applied to spencer's use in his "first principles" of the word "force," spelled with a capital, and defined as designating "absolute force," an "absolute, unconditioned reality," "unconditioned cause,"[ ] etc. the attribution of reality to a mere mental abstraction is a survival of old conceptions repudiated by spencer in their older form. of forces we know much, but of abstract force nothing,--except as an abstraction from reality; and the dangers in the use of such a term are made manifest by spencer's elevation of this concept to the character assigned it by the other terms quoted. to sum up. we have found in nature only variables, no constant and invariable factor, no independent one according to which the others vary; we have found no cause that was not also an effect; that is, we have discovered nothing but a chain of phenomena bearing constant relations to each other, no causes except in this sense. we have no precedent or data from which to assert that chemical combinations could not have resulted in protoplasm and in living protoplasm, no data from which to assert that mere evolution could not have produced consciousness. as a matter of fact, however, we find the relations of consciousness and physiological process as constant as those of the different forms of material force, and while discovering no grounds upon which to pronounce either consciousness or physiological process the more essential, find none, either, for pronouncing one more than the other independent of what we call natural law. the logic of all our experience leads us to believe that neither protoplasm, nor the earth, nor any of the parts of the universe, could have originated otherwise than under natural law, that is, as the result of preceding natural conditions which must have contained all the factors united in the result, and would thus explain to us, if we knew them, in as far as any process is explained by analysis, the results arising from them. we know matter and motion only as united; we know no state of absolute rest, and we have no grounds for supposing any initial state of such absolute rest, or any state in which motion not previously existent in the universe entered. on the other hand, we have no proof of the absence of consciousness outside animal life, and no proof of the non-existence of transcendental causes, though likewise no proof of their existence. footnotes: [ ] "origin of species," th ed., vol. i. p. . [ ] "lecture on cell-souls and soul-cells," . [ ] "entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls," p. _et seq._ [ ] see part i. p. . [ ] "der menschliche wille," p. . [ ] on the motions of the tendrils of plants; among the essays of knight published under the title, "a selection from physiological and horticultural papers," . [ ] see "insectivorous plants," chaps. i. and ii. [ ] "the movements of plants," chap. iii. [ ] see experiments made by eimer: "entstehung der arten," etc., p. _et seq._ [ ] e. pflüger: "die sensorischen functionen des rückenmarks der wirbelthiere," . [ ] see lange: "geschichte des materialismus," ii. theil, p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] "der thierische wille," p. . [ ] see, for instance, eimer: "entstehung der arten," p. . [ ] carneri's instance, cited in support of his theory of the possibility of sensation without pleasure or pain, that certain nerves connected with fine sense-perception, may yet be cut without special pain to the owner, is a poor one, first, because highly developed nerves, the media of fine perceptions, are especially inapt examples for citation in support of any theory of primitive sensation in lower organisms, and, second, because the problem of pain and pleasure in such cases is very different from the problem of pain and pleasure in connection with ordinary excitation of nerve endings or the outer covering of the organism from which the nervous system has developed. the fact that, in highly developed organisms, some parts are less susceptible of pleasure and pain might as easily be construed into an argument that corresponding parts of lower organisms differ, in the same manner, in susceptibility. furthermore, sensation being admitted, as carneri admits it, or rather asserts it, of all forms of animal life, it is difficult to conceive how he can interpret the phenomena of appetition and repulsion as devoid of feeling. most authors have argued, with much more reason, that pleasure and pain are primordial. carneri's further argument that he who conceives the lower species as feeling pleasure and pain introduces an immense amount of pain into the world (p. , "grundlegung der ethik") is quite aside from the question as to the facts of the case. nor can man create pain by his conception of its existence, or destroy it, if it exists, by a refusal to acknowledge its existence. [ ] see part i. pp. , . [ ] "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls", p. _et seq._ [ ] see part i. p. . [ ] pp. , d. chapter iii the will in any discussion of the will, we are met at the outset by the difficulties of definition, on which whole chapters might be, and have been, written. but one great difficulty has already been considered in the discussions of the previous chapter, in the questions as to the existence of consciousness in inorganic nature, in organisms which differ from our own in not possessing a centralized nervous system, and in connection with actions of our own body known to our centralized consciousness only as results. leaving these questions open, as we have found it necessary to do, and confining ourselves, in speaking of consciousness, to consciousness as we immediately know it, or as we may, with some degree of probability, infer it in animals constituted similarly to ourselves, we find one obstacle to our definition removed. for by will is generally meant a psychical faculty; and to speak of "unconscious will" is either a self-contradiction or a mere figure of speech. we shall also find, i think, that the most essential characteristic of the will as a psychical faculty is that it is connected with action which has in view some end consciously sought; action to which there corresponds no conscious end, whether a long premeditated end or an end instantaneously comprehended and assumed in the moment of need, we term reflex. the question may arise as to whether there are not acts which we name merely "involuntary," which must be classified, from a pyschological standpoint, as midway between the voluntary and the reflex. but it may be answered that here, as everywhere in connection with the organic, there is difficulty in drawing distinct lines; there are psychical conditions in which some strong emotion, for instance, terror, so takes possession of the mind as almost to exclude plan of action, and the individual appears to act, as we say, "unconsciously"; but i think this very adverb solves, for us, to all practical purposes, the question we have put. when we analyze such psychical conditions, we often find that, besides emotion, there was some degree of preconception of action, though the emotion so absorbed our attention at the time that the other appeared subordinate and was easily forgotten; but the fact that we term action of this sort, where we fail to discover preconception, "unconsciously" performed, would go to confirm the definition with which we began, though we may have difficulty in deciding whether or not a particular action comes under the head of willed action, that is, action to a preconceived end. another question which has been frequently asked, in analyses of the will, is whether mere abstinence from action, the negation of action, can be classed as an instance of willing, willing being, by definition, an active, not a passive state. it may be answered that, from the physiological point of view, a point of view not to be wholly disregarded even by the conservative psychologist, the arresting action of the will as the control of lower by higher centres, is its most important function. and to this physiological fact corresponds the psychological fact that no stronger exertion of will-power is known to us than that sometimes necessary to the attainment of mere passivity. a definition that would exclude such passive states from the province of the will must exclude, on the same principle, all other willing not issuing in muscular action, and so all voluntary control of thought. the choice between activity and passivity may be as real and as difficult as between two different forms of activity. we have here introduced the concept of choice, and it may be well to define this, and its significance in our definition of will, more exactly. voluntary action is, we say, often preceded by long deliberation and severe struggle, ending finally in the choice of one of the many modes of action deliberated. we can conceive of this struggle as not so long, as shorter and shorter, until it occupies so little time and attention as to be scarcely perceptible. but we can conceive, also, of a premeditation which includes no struggle, in which one motive appears so strong as to exclude consideration of any but the one end, and the deliberation has reference only to the best means of attaining that end. the murderer, inspired by a desire for revenge, may seek his end with the same directness, if not the same instantaneousness, or with the same directness and instantaneousness, as the dog who snaps at a piece of meat; yet we call his action voluntary, whatever we may think of the dog's action, our conception of which may be rendered indistinct by our uncertainty as to the nature of instinct and the part it plays in the action of other species. we call the action of the murderer voluntary because we conceive that he consciously sought the end involved. we are even inclined to call it voluntary in cases where the criminal is moved by momentary passion, since we conceive that he might have exerted self-control. our conception of will is, therefore, closely bound up with the conception of conscious end, distant or near. our association of choice with the act is not always exact; we may conceive of the choice as actually taking place between one of several ends deliberated upon, or as involved in the conscious determination of any end, even though no other was deliberated upon, even though all others were excluded from consciousness by passion; since we conceive that as all definition is, in fact, exclusion, so the determination of one end is in effect the negation of others that might have been sought, if only in the form of the contrary of action, inaction. we are thus brought, first of all, to a consideration of the meaning of the term "end." as we have seen in the last chapter, an end is that part of the results of an action which consciousness especially holds in view in the performance of an act. the end in view has sometimes been called the cause of the act, but it is evident, as both gizycki and stephen have shown, that a future state, that is, something which at the time of willing does not exist, cannot move the will; though the representation of a hoped-for end is concerned in action,--in just what capacity we have yet to determine. it has also been urged that nothing external can act upon the will, but only internal states of consciousness. all depends, here, upon the definition of external and internal. the distinction between the two is a legitimate one where it calls attention to the difference between that which is at present perceived and that which is only remembered, or imagined from the elements given by memory. but what _is_ an object, as present to me, beyond what it is to my consciousness? my knowledge of a thing is made up of various elements contributed through the different senses; and this assertion is exactly the same as the statement that a thing is the sum of its qualities. my idea of the fire, the lamp, or any other object as external, arises from the fact that it appeals to more of my senses than one, that, if withdrawn from one or from all but one, it may still be perceived by the other or others, or that, if withdrawn from all of them for a time by some obstacle, it may be perceived again when this obstacle is removed; but beyond perception or memory of perception, in any case, i have no consciousness of the object. the perception is not, however, something distinct from consciousness, but _is_ consciousness. the error above noticed arises from the conception of consciousness as a sort of place, another space into which we cannot get objects from external space; the conception is a crude one, yet it often enters into psychological speculation. the perceived, that is the external, does, as a matter of fact, affect our will. there may thus be two definitions of the term "internal" and two of "external," as the words are generally used. internal may mean either within the body or within consciousness, external may mean external to the body or external to consciousness. the two meanings are, in both cases, commonly confused,--that is, consciousness is looked upon, as has been said, as a sort of internal space within the body to which external things cannot get admission. "external to consciousness" should refer simply to that which the individual or individuals considered do not perceive, of which they are unconscious. that of which we are conscious is in consciousness. but all manner of ingenious jugglery is played with the help of the metaphysical dualism implied in the other definition of the terms. the objection of a possibility of this duality of meaning applies to barratt's use of the term "external" at the opening of his book on ethics, and the objection of a possibility of a similar duality applies to many other expressions in the propositions and definitions with which he begins,--to such expressions, for instance, as "relative to our faculties," "state of consciousness," etc.[ ] objection may also be taken to such quantification of the predicate as is found in cor. of prop. i. to return to the question of the will. the thought-image, memory or perception, with its associations, has been termed the excitation or the motive and said to move or determine the will to some end. thus the perception of the burning house is said to be that which leads me to give an alarm, or the perception of the smoking lamp that which moves me to turn it down. to this form of statement is often objected that mere thought or perception can never move the will, but that feeling is required to do this. a further discussion may arise as to whether it is feeling in the form of pleasure or of pain which moves the will. many authors regard anticipated pleasure as a constant motive; rolph, on the contrary, as we have seen, inclines to the view that it is always some present pain by which we are moved to action. and it is argued that, since the direction of the will is determined by pleasure or by pain, that is by motives, the will is not free. again, the physiologist calls attention to the fact that the so-called free action of the will has for its basis physiological processes, all of which are in accordance with the strict uniformity of nature, all subject to law, and all, as we must believe, capable of exact prediction from the conditions which produce them, if we but comprehended these conditions. there is no gap in these processes where free will might interpose; the whole thought-process, the deliberation preceding decision, the moral struggle if there is one, the decision itself, and its realization in action, have for their foundation physiological function, which is as much determined by necessity as any of the processes in inorganic nature. the results of past experience, not of the experience of the individual only but of that of the whole species inherited as inborn tendency and capacity and modified by individual circumstances, are stored up in the organism, the point of centralization being the brain; any single excitation sets this whole complicated machinery in motion and the result is the act. the individual, not understanding this complicated process of reaction, not being able to trace the results of experience to their source, to descend the whole scale of being to the beginnings of life and note the gradual development of tendency, and seeing the inadequacy of the excitation in itself to account for the action following, attributes to this a peculiar character, regarding that which is really result as absolute beginning, independent cause. we may consider the matter from still another point of view. we may inquire whether the freedom predicated of the human will is predicated of that alone, or of will in the whole range of animal life. and if it be predicated of the human will alone, we may ask at just what point of the evolution this is supposed to arise, whether, in the gradual development, any particular point can be found or assumed to exist, of which we can say: here the animal ceases and man begins. or if freedom is asserted of the whole range of animal will, not, however, of plant movement or the motions of the inorganic, we may again inquire as to the point of exact division between the animal and the plant. evolution is, by definition, a gradual process, a growth in which there are no gaps, and of which our finest and most minute calculations by infinitesimals can give us only a faint conception. where is there any point of such a process at which we can suppose the entrance of a totally new principle that cannot be regarded as another expression of force or merely a new form of animal function, but as directly opposed to developed function and to the force that is subject to natural law? the evolutionist may state the problem in still a new form, as follows: the survival of any organism at a given period is determined by the fitness of that organism for the conditions of the environment at that period. the form and function of the animal are thus, at each moment, determined by the environment. and since only functions in harmony with the environment render the organism capable of survival under that environment, the functions of surviving organisms are in a direction favorable to the preservation of the form of which they are the functions. since, moreover, self-preservation in some form, whether as preservation of the whole organism or as preservation of a part through satisfaction of its function (rendered possible only through harmony between the function and the environment), always constitutes the end sought by the will, the individual appears to himself to will ends, whereas these are all determined for him by the survival of the fittest, whose function he inherits and carries out subject only to the modification of the peculiar elements of his own environment. if we suppose, at any point of development, an action not in accord with that which the laws of nature necessitate decided upon by the will, such an action cannot be carried out. but even a decision is impossible contrary to natural law, since in preceding evolution there has been no point at which nature has not in like manner determined action, and the present decision, being the expression of function attained as the result of evolution, must be as much determined as the action which follows. or if we return to our conception of the development of stable from unstable conditions, we may consider all evolution of higher function as increased adaptation, that is, as harmony with an ever wider circle of nature, the reason appearing as corresponding concomitant knowledge of this widening circle, to which the function of the organism is adjusted. the reflection preceding decision on an end consists in the imagination, by aid of the memory of past experience, of some of the constant results of particular function, to which function, however, the organism is irresistibly moved. thus that which is generally regarded as the greatest independence of nature is, in reality, the greatest subjection to nature considered as a whole, although this wider subjection means an increasing independence of the mere excitation of the moment. the ability to weigh all sides of a question, sometimes termed freedom, is rather the widest adaptation, which means the widest determination by nature. the lower organisms may be, as rolph and alexander assert, as well adapted to their particular environment as the higher; but the higher are adapted to a wider environment, to more of the variations of the conditions on the earth's surface. man is the most widely adapted of all animals. this is a fact which we express when we say that man's power of adaptation is greatest,--that is, that there are latent tendencies in him, the result of former adaptations, which may correspond sufficiently to new environment, _i.e._ to environment involving many new elements, to enable him to survive. this wider adaptation expresses itself especially in the higher development of the nervous centres, to which man's higher reason corresponds; it is through the reason especially that his adaptiveness comes to light. the statistician often has considerable to say against a doctrine of freedom of the will. he calls attention to the necessary character of human action as evidenced by its uniformities under uniform circumstances, in the various important relations of life. these uniformities are not less than those which statistics reveal in disease and death and other events classed as not under the control of the will. and to all this evidence we may add that of the history of the mental life of the species, derived from the combined labors of the geologist, the ethnologist, the philologist, and the historian. everything goes to prove an evolution in the mental life of man, as gradual, and as much subject to the influence of the environment, as his physical evolution has been. carneri says, "the eternal laws of mind point out the way upon which man has to proceed; it is the same way by which man has become man, and by which mankind must go forward even if it does not will thus to proceed."[ ] and again, the authorities on mental disease demonstrate the constant relations, not only of general health of brain to health of mind, and of disease of brain to mental unsoundness, but also of particular physical symptoms to particular mental symptoms. this constancy of relations is revealed with more certainty and distinctness by every step in the progress of medical knowledge. the specialist in mental disease inquires with reason how we can acknowledge the physical processes of the body to be governed by natural law, yet assert the emancipation from law of the psychical processes which vary concomitantly with these in a manner that science shows to be perfectly constant. to the testimony of psychiatry may be added that of the comparatively new science of criminology. and, finally, evolutional ethics demonstrates the constancy of character, the persistence of habit, and the uniformity of its change under the influence of environment. if there is no persistence of character and uniformity in its action, we have no reason, as various authors have shown, for trust or distrust, for praise or blame; and, i think we may add, none for love or dislike, reverence or contempt, enthusiasm or coldness, in the contemplation of character or conduct. if the fact that a man acts honorably, kindly, nobly, in one instance is not a warranty that we may with reason expect him to act similarly again under similar circumstances, allowance being made for error in our interpretation of motive (which may have been merely self-interested where we thought it disinterested) and for changes produced in character by the environment between the first act and the opportunity of the second, then character is merely a jumbled chaos of chance, and the name "habit" a contradiction in terms. we may, perhaps, respect the single act, but we have no reason for respecting the individual performing it, since the "individual" cannot be regarded as coëxtensive with a single act of his life, and least of all when the act gives no clew to a permanent basis issuing in uniform action of which law can be predicated. in this case, the noble deed, or any number of noble deeds, afford us no security that the next act of the person performing them, or all the rest of the acts of his life, may not be wholly ignoble, base, and vile. in the face of all the considerations thus offered us, we cannot well find reason for accrediting the will with a peculiar position in the universe, as emancipated from the natural law which we discover in all other phenomena. but it behooves us, in this connection, to inquire as to just what is the significance of the term "natural law." it has already been implicitly defined in our previous considerations. lewes and several other modern philosophical writers have given excellent definitions of the expression. lewes writes as follows: "law is only one of two conceptions, ( ) a notation of the process observed in phenomena, which process we mentally detach and generalize by extending it to all similar phenomena; ( ) an abstract type, which, though originally constructed from the observed process, does nevertheless depart from what is really observed, and substitutes an ideal process, constructing what _would be_ the course of the process were the conditions different from those actually present. the first conception is so far real that it expresses the _observed series of positions_. it is the process of phenomena, not an agent apart from them, not an agency _determining them_, but simply the ideal _summation of their positions_.... phenomena, in so far as they are ruled, regulated, determined in this direction rather than in that, and necessarily determined in the direction taken,... are determined by no external agent corresponding to law, but by their coöperant factors internal and external; alter one of these factors and the product will be differently determined. it is owing to the very general misconception of the nature of law, that there arises the misconception of necessity; the fact that events arrive irresistibly when their conditions are present is confounded with the conception that the events must arrive whether the conditions be present or not, being fatally predetermined. necessity simply says that whatever is, is, and will vary with varying conditions."[ ] neither natural law nor necessity is an entity extraneous to phenomena which governs or compels them; the two are generalizations merely by which we express a certain uniformity that we find universal. let us return to our analysis of the organic as matter and of function as its motion. go as far as we like in our analysis, and we still have left positive entities of matter and force, or matter, motion, and the equivalent of motion in resistance; moreover, we cannot suppose either matter or force to decrease by our analysis. here, therefore, we have indestructible entities, and these, not law and necessity, are the positive factors. but if the final divisions of matter leave us still positive factors, then the combinations of these must be positive also; not only the theoretical atoms of the chemist, or the organic cells with their motions and functions, but the combinations of these in organisms, must be positive. it is said that the organism answers to its environment "as the clay to the mould"; that it is formed by the environment and adjusted to it. here we may inquire whether the adjustment referred to is present adjustment or that of the whole development of the organism. if present action of the environment is all that is had in view, it may be objected that not anything in the environment, and not the whole environment, is more positive than the organism. the one of the two factors cannot be regarded as positive, the other as merely negative, the environment as the active and formative, the organism as the passive and formed, the environment as determining, the organism as determined. but we may also consider the organism in the process of development. in this case, we seem to find reason for regarding it as purely the product of the environment in which it has arisen. the product it certainly is in one sense; that is, it is the end-form of a series of changes which we may suppose originally inorganic matter, or (if we prefer to begin with the lowest form of life) simplest forms of organic matter, to have undergone. but the present forms of matter everywhere are, in like manner, the products of the past changes of matter; if we trace these changes which have produced present forms, in the case of the inorganic as well as that of the organic, back to any point of time which we may choose as a beginning, we shall find in neither case more matter or a greater amount of force than at the present period; we shall find the same matter in different combinations, the same force in other forms. present forms are not greater or less than past ones, but their exact equivalents; the beginning was not greater than the end; the producing forms and forces were not greater than are their products. by a backward course of thought comprehending evolution we may bring unity into our conception of the organic, but we find no new factors of force, and need to avoid laying stress upon the process to the depreciation of the importance of the product. we may be led to suspect that our search after new and more important factors was only another form of the search after an independent cause according to which all other phenomena may be said to vary. our mathematical habit of selecting some one side of natural process as independent, in order to trace, by its variation, the variation of the others, leads us to regard the one side, phase, or portion, of phenomena as actually thus independent; although we forget, in this assumption, that we may select any phase for our mathematical independent, and are not confined to any particular one. the organism is itself a part of the environment regarded as conditioning, when we consider the development of other organisms, or change in inorganic matter, with which it is in contact. our minds are unable to comprehend the whole of nature as variation only, and we fasten on some one part of the process as independent of the general change or as holding a unique position in it, from which to consider the variation of the rest. and the conception of some one part of phenomena as cause disappointing us, on closer investigation, as far as merely present phenomena are concerned, we remove the conception farther back into a dim past which we fail to analyze in thought with the same completeness with which we analyze the present. we are not, however, in the habit of tracing back any other than just the organic forms to an arbitrary point which we call the beginning, and emphasizing this in distinction from present conditions; in considering the inorganic, we simply notice present conditions and mark the result of action and reaction between this and that other form of matter with which it comes in contact. the action of the animal at any moment may be said to be determined by the tendency or potential energy inherent in it at the moment, and the influence exerted by a particular excitation; this is a matter of action and reaction; but the force represented by both sides, by that of organism and by that of environment, is equally positive and equally represented again in the result. particular emphasis has been laid, now on the positive activity of the organism by one school of writers, now on the activity of the environment as moving the organism to action by another school; but both sides contribute to the result. where action and reaction in inorganic matter are considered, we do not regard either of two incident forces as alone positive; nor do we regard one as overcome by the other in the sense that it is not fully represented in the result. again, if we return to the dispute as to the importance of the physiological "basis" of action, the remark may be repeated, that it is mere dogmatism to select some one phase of phenomena as the only essential phase, while all other phases are regarded as non-essential or subordinate. the materialist who derides the idea of a "ding-an-sich" is himself assuming something very like it, when he endeavors to prove matter to be the cause, essence, or independent, of which consciousness is the mere effect, property, or dependent. even if it could be said with truth that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile (and the analogy does not hold), it should be borne in mind that the bile is no mere dependent creation of the liver, but that, before it became bile, it existed in another form, was, in fact, a part of the liver of which it is regarded as the dependent creation. matter and force have simply changed form; that is all. the later form is not rendered secondary in importance or less positive by the fact of its sequence upon the other form. the conditions equal the result; they are not greater than it. where is there, on closer analysis, passivity as distinguished from activity? all force is, by definition, active; and all matter represents force. we find simple equivalence, that is, a uniformity of relation between preceding conditions and succeeding conditions. our "natural law" and "necessity" resolve themselves into this. yet the conception of law as something extraneous to things, something without them not included in their primary nature but controlling them, is a very common conception. thus du prel, though rejecting other forms of teleological argument, bases a whole course of teleological reasoning upon the mere fact of law.[ ] however, we know of natural law merely as an expression of uniformities, a generalization from the relations of things; we have no reason for treating it as extraneous to the nature of things themselves; and nature itself furnishes us with no reason for supposing the relations of things to be of more significance than things themselves; relations are not entities. if man be part of nature, it is strange that the force within him should be regarded as so shaped and compelled, the force without him, on the other hand, as so compelling and mighty. no part of nature is, as a matter of fact, compelled. all things act and react spontaneously from their own nature, and man in the same manner acts from his. law cannot be defined as determining action and reaction, nor can necessity; they are not entities. force is sometimes called the determining factor, but an abstract force we do not know; we know force only as motion or the equivalent of motion in resistance, or as the conceived potentiality of motion. the concept of potentiality of motion is, however, again only a device of reason for bringing unity into our conception of things by accounting for the appearance of motion where before it was not. potentiality is no existence, no reality; actual potentiality is a contradiction in terms. nature contains only actualities. force is the abstract term by which we include motion, resistance, and the conceived potentiality of motion, under one head. motion again is often defined as the cause of movement; but such a conception makes the abstract notion of a thing the cause of the thing itself, unless by motion as the cause we understand the preceding motion, and by movement as the effect we mean the succeeding motion, in which case we have to bear in mind the equivalence of conditions and results. nor do we know motion as something apart from matter, moving it; we know no abstract motion; we know only things as moving, changing, and resisting motion. there is no outside cause given us in our experience as the mover, from which things are to be distinguished as the passive moved. things move. and in correspondence with the activity of things is doubtless the sense of freedom in the exertion of the will. outer compulsion, resistance to the carrying out of a course decided upon or desired, has sometimes been interpreted as the negation of freedom of the will; but it has with reason been objected to this definition that the very strongest sense of inner freedom may exist in connection with such compulsion. it may be supposed that, as long as there is action in the brain, the corresponding sense of freedom will exist; or, lest this statement be interpreted as materialistic, we may say instead: as long as consciousness exists, it must by definition exist as activity, with which the sense of freedom is indissolubly connected. but we may look at the matter from the more purely psychological side. the opponents of a theory of freedom make much of the determination of the will by motives. in their argument, the will is treated as if it were some separate material thing, the motive another equally separate thing which, when brought into contact with the will, sets it in motion in somewhat the same manner as the powder in the gun drives the ball. but the motive is not something external to consciousness, something foreign, that, introduced, impels the will to action; nor can the will be compared to an organ of the body, the motion of which is given us through our senses as the motion of a part, not of the whole body. the functions of the body are, in this sense, a part of the material world to us. but the will is no material thing, no separate organ of consciousness in this sense. in the will, consciousness expresses itself; and we cannot say that it is only a part of consciousness that thus expresses itself. the motive, as conscious, belongs to that consciousness which finds expression in the will. a similar form of theory to that just noticed regards the will as determined especially by feeling. but feeling belongs as evidently to consciousness as does will, nor can we say that one part of consciousness feels and another wills, the one part being the active mover, the other the passive moved; the division into parts is a material one applicable to things occupying space, but not to consciousness. the notion here of mover and moved is very similar to that noticed above, of motion as cause, movement as effect. it is sometimes said that the desirability of an object moves or determines the will. here arises the question as to whether the desirability of an object lies in the object or is only dependent upon consciousness as a quality of feeling. thus we come, by closer analysis, to the fundamental problem of the connection of consciousness with the external world. it is often said that desirability is a mere predication of consciousness and does not lie in the object or end itself. that desirability is a predication of consciousness is true in a sense. and yet it is evident that this predication corresponds to actualities existing in the thing or end, on account of which it is pronounced desirable or, under proper conditions, desired. when we analyze the state of consciousness itself, we find it impossible to separate the desirability as predicated by consciousness and the desirability as predicated of the end, the excited feeling and the feeling as excited by the object. from one point of view, excitation and consciousness are the two sides of the conditions, both of which are essential to the result; but, from another point of view, it is equally true that the desire of the end is always a part of consciousness, which expresses itself in the will according to its own inherent nature. the act of the will, as following excitation, is sometimes treated as its mere result, hence subject to it, subordinate and passive; on this principle, we could also define brain-action as subject to nerve-action and passive in comparison, wherever it follows. the mere conception of the conservation of force would make it impossible to suppose a result of force to be less than preceding force of which it is the result. we do not call the evolution of organic life on the earth subject or subordinate to the motion of the nebular mists, or passive with respect to them. the mere sequence of one event upon another in time does not justify our pronouncing the one subordinate to the other or passive with respect to it, the whole sum of matter and force remaining always the same, and a resultant in any particular instance exactly representing its factors. from our examination of the above arguments, we perceive that the materialist uses both the concomitance of consciousness with material processes, and, again, the sequence of particular conscious states upon material processes, as proof of the subordination and passivity or dependence of consciousness, as proof that the latter is effect of the material as cause; indeed, we are not at all sure that he does not often confuse the two arguments from sequence and from concomitance. on the other hand, the argument of sequence is often used to prove the greater importance and activity of consciousness in contrast to matter, consciousness being regarded as antecedent to excitation in general or to some particular excitation. but consciousness is not the "prius" of its excitation in time, since its very definition includes activity and this is not possible without excitation; consciousness is always the consciousness of something. to regard consciousness as the "logical prius" of matter or of excitation by matter may be possible, but the standpoint is either a purely fanciful or a purely dogmatic one. with regard to its priority in respect to a particular excitation, the remarks made above hold good, that mere sequence does not prove subordination or passivity as distinguished from activity. the fact of concomitance is also sometimes treated as a part of theories of the causal nature of consciousness, the brain being regarded as the mere organ of mind, the passive instrument upon which it acts. in this case, however, as in the opposite argument that consciousness is dependent upon brain-action, there is probably some indistinct idea of sequence at work. the argument applies equally well, indeed, in either direction, the materialistic or its opposite, and merely this fact would lead us to suspect that it can be conclusive in neither. thus, in hunting for some cause and effect in the activity of the will, we bring to light, in the end, only a certain concomitance and sequence. that which we call "explanation" of natural process is, in fact, in all cases, merely a finer analysis of concomitance or sequence, or the analysis of some new phase of it. we have only the finer elements of the process analyzed before us in any case, although we are often inclined to treat these elements as if they were the essence and cause of the process to which they belong. we explain, for instance, the green color of the leaf by the continually renewed presence of a certain chemical combination; yet the green color is not less real and essential than the chemical composition which constantly accompanies it. the musical note is not the less real to our ear because we can make the vibrations of the string and the air perceptible to our eye, or because we can observe to some extent, and infer further, vibrations of parts of the ear that are the physiological accompaniment of the note heard. the light of the fire is not the less real because of the heat that i feel from it, nor is either less actual because i can analyze the process of combustion in the case. the shape of the leaf to my touch does not make its greenness of color the less real to my eye, nor does change of form prevent change of color or prove it less essential in any case. the smell of the rose does not render its color less real and essential, and, _vice versa_, the color does not render the smell less an essential part of reality. neither does the activity of the brain render the activity of consciousness less real, or interfere with its freedom, any more than the activity of the consciousness renders that of the brain less actual or interferes with its free action and reaction. my knowledge of a thing given me through one sense is totally different from the knowledge of it given me through other senses; yet i do not find this various knowledge contradictory or irreconcilable. why, then, do i find such great difficulty in reconciling the simple facts of consciousness and brain-activity? and why should there be such an inclination to give greater prominence to physiological process than to mental process, to regard the only method of reconciling the two that of proclaiming the dependence of consciousness? the solution of the question is not so difficult to find. in the first place, our knowledge of the concomitance of brain-process and consciousness, or at least of the constant uniformity of this concomitance, is only comparatively recent. further, this knowledge is not given us immediately, but is the conclusion of a process of reasoning. while such concomitance as we immediately perceive--the concomitance of certain impressions on one sense with certain other impressions upon other senses--appears to us so natural as to need no comment, the newness and mediate nature of our knowledge of this other concomitance incline us to regard it as strange and needing some especial "explanation." while the concomitant impressions upon the senses, wherever they are constant, become united in our conception to a single whole, we fail to unite the elements of this mediately known concomitance to such a whole; doubtless, however, if a perception of all the details of our own brain-activity were the invariable accompaniment of thought, we should thus unite them. we can no more "explain" why the two activities are concomitant, except as we show it to be a fact and analyze it into its elements, than we can show why just prussian blue should be the characteristic of one chemical compound and the green of plant-life of another, why the connection of the colors should not be the reverse. the importance we accord the physiological accompaniments of mental process is partly accounted for by the significance which attaches to more recent knowledge as constituting scientific progress; in the effort to bring together in our conception the two elements of consciousness and brain-action, to whose association we are not accustomed by immediate perception, we are led to lay especial weight upon the facts of recent discovery, which are connected with so great advance in science and have done away with so many superstitions. and, finally, in the rebound from the old superstitions, the tendency is to exaggerated views in the opposite direction. the attempt to correct spiritualistic ideas of a soul superior to the rest of nature and no part of it has resulted in materialism. and by the physiological basis we now think to "explain" the facts of psychology. "notable enough," says carlyle, "wilt thou find the potency of names; witchcraft, and all manner of spectre-work and demonology, we have now named madness, and diseases of the nerves. seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: what is madness, what are nerves? ever, as before, does madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the nether chaotic deep, through this fair-painted vision of creation, which swims thereon, which we name the real. was luther's picture of the devil less a reality, whether it were formed within the bodily eye or without it?" if the connection of physiological and psychological processes requires "explanation," beyond that of analysis, why should we not feel ourselves equally required to explain, in like manner, the connection of light with heat and sound, and form with color? why is it more comprehensible that the ball can be at the same time round to my touch and red or gray to my eye, and that the rose can both smell sweet and be yellow in tint? why should we, in this particular instance, make such a strenuous effort to find reasons which can never be given in this case any more than in the others, and which we do not, moreover, demand in the others? why cannot we accept the simple fact of concomitance in this case also? our attempts to show the reason of brain-activity by means of mind-activity, or, _vice versa_, to explain mental activity as caused by, and dependent upon, physiological activity, must end equally in failure, in a one-sided dogmatism. it is the concomitance of the two, to the thought of which we are not yet used, that thwarts us. and yet zeno, the sceptic, found as great difficulties in sequence, and proved, to his satisfaction and that of his followers, the utter impossibility of many things which we accept as simple facts without troubling ourselves to solve his problems. we have seen that any explanation of facts beyond analysis, except as we assume some transcendental intuition, is impossible. the search for some further explanation embodies the last remnant of the idea of some special separate agent behind each single event and process, with which early superstition was animated. driven by the gradual spread of knowledge to more and more obscure details in concomitance, and to ever greater distance of time in sequence, it has reached the final shadows of the one, and the furthest ends of evolution, whither thought seldom travels, in the other. that we expect other explanation than analysis, or read into analysis more than its real worth, is the result of an indistinctness and confusion in our thought, which has not yet lost the habit of infusing into generalizations and abstractions a vitality of their own apart from reality. we continually hope and strive for some explanation that shall give us more than nature, and yet, strange to say, we endeavor to found our theories in and on nature. we acknowledge the scientific truth of the indestructibility of matter and force, the constancy of their sum, and yet we nevertheless continue to construct our many-storied theories of causes and essences, failing to notice that we are bringing all our concepts from a time when the equivalence of results and conditions, of results and their factors, was not yet comprehended. footnotes: [ ] see part i. p. _et seq._ [ ] "sittlichkeit und darwinismus," p. . see also, however, the "grundlegung der ethik," p. . [ ] "problems of life and mind," ser. i. vol. i. pp. , . [ ] "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls," pp. _et seq._ chapter iv the mutual relations of thought, feeling, and will in evolution hume, in his essay on the passions, writes: "what is commonly, in a popular sense, called reason, and is so much recommended in moral discourses, is nothing but a general and calm passion which takes a comprehensive and a distant view of its object, and actuates the will, without exciting any sensible emotion. a man, we say, is diligent in his profession from reason; that is, from a calm desire of riches and fortune. a man adheres to justice from reason; that is, from a calm regard to public good, or to a character with himself and others. the same objects which recommend themselves to reason in this sense of the word, are also the objects of passion, when they are brought near to us, and acquire some other advantages, either of external situation, or congruity to our internal temper; and by that means excite a turbulent and sensible emotion. evil at a great distance is avoided we say from reason; evil near at hand produces aversion, horror, fear, and is the object of passion." we know no state of consciousness from which elements of thought are excluded; consciousness is not a state of rest, but a continual passage from percept to concept, or from concept to percept, or if from percept to percept even then with the intervention of concepts. judgment, exclusion and inclusion, has part in all consciousness; and thus pleasure and pain must be regarded as always accompanied by thought-elements, though the thought-factors may escape notice because of the prominence of violent emotion, just as, in like manner, feeling may draw less attention when of a less turbulent nature. this is not equivalent to saying that emotion must always be accompanied by a representation of its object. to this last statement might be objected that emotion may not be, at first, connected with its proper object, just as so-called purely physical pain may not be, in the beginning, combined with any perception of the object producing it, may not even be localized, in fact. but to this objection may be answered that our conception of "its" object, in the case of emotion, is similar to our conception of "the" end of any particular act; that which we regard as "the" object of the emotion may be entirely different from the object in the consciousness of the being subject to the emotion. that is to say, emotion speedily connects itself with _some_ object, or even if felt for some time as vague want is yet combined with thought, in that we make mental search for its object or, where it is too faint to induce this action, tend to turn to memories or imaginations sad or joyful, according as the feeling tinges our mood with exhilaration or sadness; but the objects with which it connects itself in thought may be quite other than those which onlookers regard as its proper object. into many an emotion of childhood and growing adolescence, for instance, the adult reads a meaning and object of which he is aware the individual subject to the emotion has no thought. physical feeling may not be connected with any distinct perception of the object producing it (as, for instance, when one bruises oneself in the dark), but it is never unconnected with thought-images. the intermediate links between this outwardly stimulated physical feeling and so-called purely mental emotion are represented by localized organic feelings, passing by imperceptible degrees into non-localized feeling experienced as mood. but feeling on any plane is not, as conscious, uncombined with thought. it follows that, as connected with the human will, emotion is never uncombined with thought. this fact is implied in the definition of will as the conscious determination on some definite course of conduct which, as definite, is an exclusion of other courses, and thus involves judgment. where action takes place without conscious predetermination, we call it "organic," "automatic," "reflex," or "involuntary," the pain or pleasure connected with the act rising into our individual, centralized consciousness when the action has already taken place or during its progress. in the latter case, part of the act rises into consciousness as result, as already performed, and the will may then interpose to check and prevent the elements not yet performed. the question as to whether thought is always accompanied by feeling, at least by feeling as pleasure or pain, may appear more difficult than the previous one. that thought is not always connected with violent emotion as pleasure or pain is evident. but, as höffding says, "feeling may be strong and deep without being violent." if we examine carefully any train even of abstract and apparently, at first glance, wholly unemotional reasoning, we can generally trace a distinct vein of varying feeling accompanying the thought,--perhaps extreme interest in the problem involved and pleasure in its solution, hope as we seem to be on the point of finding the key to it, disappointment when the hope proves a delusive one, shame or impatience at our failure, or pride in our readiness, and exultation when we have finished our work. all these feelings may relate to the mere solution of the problem as end, or may pass beyond it to ends more or less distant and complicated, to which the solution of the problem then appears as means. even if we could suppose all other feeling to be excluded, we cannot conceive of a train of thought untinged with mood,--interest or weariness, exhilaration or depression,--the dim complex of perhaps many elements, but admitting of general classification on the side of either the pleasurable or the painful, the agreeable or the disagreeable. is feeling the result of thought, or thought the result of feeling? which of the two is to be accorded the greater importance with regard to the will? and what is the significance of feeling as pleasure and of feeling as pain with respect to the will? these are some of the questions generally considered in one form or another in the discussion of the relations of mental functions. the first question may be interpreted in any one of several different ways. it may be regarded as referring to particular excitations, objects, or ends, or to precedence at the earliest beginning of consciousness in general, or to the initial state of consciousness in the case of the individual organism. since we are not able to determine as to where consciousness does begin, either absolutely in nature as a whole or relatively in the individual, whether there is, indeed, any such thing as an initial state, and since we can predicate nothing certainly as to the nature of such a state if there be one, the interpretation of the question which has reference to this relative or absolute beginning of consciousness cannot be answered. if we regard the question, however, as having reference to particular excitations, objects, or ends, it is evident that sometimes one, sometimes the other of the two functions appears more prominent in the beginning; pain or pleasurable excitation sometimes makes itself felt before it is connected in consciousness with any distinct object, and again perception may give us thought-images which only consideration renders painful or pleasurable. but there is no real beginning in either case; in consciousness as we know it, thought and feeling are continually intermingled, and only their direction varies with varying excitation, now thought, now feeling, assuming the greater prominence. this last consideration has important bearings on a question which we have previously discussed and to which we may, at this point, revert for a moment. the fact alone that we know nothing of a beginning of consciousness, but only its variation, is sufficient to make us doubt whether we are in possession of any data from which to pronounce dogmatically on the absence of consciousness in the case of organisms differing from our own, or even in the case of inorganic matter. why may we not equally well suppose merely a difference in the direction of consciousness corresponding to differing organization and function in the one case and differing composition or constitution and corresponding motion in the other? our error begins in assuming no ends possible in action except such as we ourselves would set, and so in assuming no end to be present in cases where no end would exist for the human being, or where the end which would be involved for us cannot have come within the experience of the organism performing the act. in the latter case, we speak of "blind instinct" or of "automatism." we forget that an "end" is merely some one of such constant results of function as are brought within the circle of our experience; which end may come to lie farther and farther away, for the same act, as the circle of experience widens and varies in direction, even in beings as similar as individuals of the human species. with the attainment of manhood and womanhood, whole regions of thought and feeling, whole classes of motives, are opened up which are wholly unknown to the child and would be incomprehensible to him; the ends of the scientist, the man of letters, the idealist in morals, the sensualist, and the boor, may differ radically in performing the same or very similar acts. however, there is a certain community of ends in human beings, due to common organization and experience, which enables them to judge to some extent of each other's ends. but these data of organization and experience fail us when we come to judge of beings not human, and hence we are liable to error in their case. a superior being of an entirely different species from our own might be greatly puzzled to discern the motives which could govern some of our acts,--those, for instance, which incite the miser to starve in misery with a fortune hidden in the cellar. a superior being of another species gifted with pessimistic views, if we can suppose such, regarding our action externally as we regard brute-action and plant-function, might imagine our whole action to be directed to the attainment of our own death, since that is what we finally achieve as the result of action, and sometimes with most purposeful rapidity; and he might suppose the suicide, and the miser, and the opium-eater, and the drunkard, and the glutton, to be only the more intelligent members of the species, the others to be led chiefly by blind instinct. it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that there can be no "ends" but those of which we are conscious. the question as to the existence of any causal relations in the old sense between thought and feeling has already been answered in previous considerations; all we can assert is sequence or simultaneity. indeed, as psychology has rarely troubled itself with any direct question of this sort, its introduction may appear foolish. yet feeling is sometimes, by imputation, treated as a mere attribute of thought, while again, as we shall see, it is often considered as an independent, directing, if not perception, at least the subsumption of percepts in thought. and, indeed, it is difficult to perceive why, if feeling and thought be regarded as two quite distinct yet simultaneous activities, the same problem as to precedence might not arise, under the concepts of cause and effect, as in the case of physiological process and consciousness as a whole. but a question with which psychology and ethics have occupied themselves as a most important one is that of the relation of pleasure and pain to the will. a point around which strife particularly rages is the problem as to whether it is the pleasurableness of the end which moves the will to seek it; and on the view taken as to the truth on this point theories of freedom or determination of the will are often based, the advocate of free will arguing that the power of choosing the painful proves his theory, the determinist declaring that the invariable might of the pleasurable over the will shows the subordination of the latter. but i cannot, for my own part, see how the demonstration of the fact that the will may be moved by the imagination of a painful end rather than, or as well as, by that of a pleasurable one is a proof of its freedom; as i also fail to perceive how it is proved that the will is determined because it invariably chooses the pleasurable rather than the painful end. in either case, choice may be said equally to depend on motive, and in either case the will may be said equally to choose. it is true in either case that the strongest motive moves; it is true in either case that the will decides upon the act with a feeling of its own spontaneity and freedom, and guides the movement of the body in the performance of the act. that which is shown in an invariable connection of the will with pleasurable motives is a constancy which we find elsewhere in nature and which forbids us to regard will as something outside and above the rest of nature. as we have seen, however, the theory of a compulsion of nature anywhere by constancy or law, or of the compulsion of one particular part by the rest, is untenable. in speaking of the pleasurable and painful, we have introduced the conception of ends into our considerations, and may emphasize, in another form, the fact that we cannot consider indefinite feeling alone as the mover of the will to an end. the pleasurableness or painfulness is predicated of some definite object or event, and corresponds to definite actualities perceived in the object or imagined with the help of former experience. thought and feeling are thus inextricably commingled in the state of consciousness leading to choice, and the nature of the acting individual and that of the external objects concerned are equally essential to the result. we have hitherto treated thought, feeling, and will, as separate parts of consciousness, defining each, by implication, much as we would define wheel, tongue, and whiffletree, as parts of a wagon. but the three are indissolubly connected in the act of the will, and thought and feeling are not, as we have seen, ever disconnected. nor can we say that it is one part of consciousness that feels, another that thinks, and still another that wills. further, a closer analysis may render it doubtful whether that which we call will is only an occasional act of consciousness, or whether it is not rather involved in all operations of consciousness as we have seen thought and feeling to be. the identity of will and that which is often called involuntary attention has already been asserted by some authors, and not the identity of will and outward attention alone, but also of will and attention to the inner process of consciousness. here, however, the dividing line generally sought between willed and unwilled, involuntary, or, as we say, drifting thought, becomes dim and uncertain. but it is evident that attention is given to that which interests us for one reason or another; and the question logically presents itself as to whether thought ever follows a direction wholly uninteresting to us, or whether it does not the rather always turn from such direction to one which has for us at least some degree of interest, whether, in short, the will does not in this manner, as the innervation of attention, accompany and direct all mental process. the sense of effort involved in choice, in the struggle of interfering impulses, may bring into prominence mental activity at points where such obstacles and interferences occur; but is not the mental force which we, in this case, especially notice the same with that involved in all processes of consciousness? just as the physiological process in nerve and muscle with which the limbs are moved in action, or eye or ear innervated in the effort of attention, is only the outcome of the processes which are constantly going on in the brain, so the concomitant process of will or attention is but the expression, in another form, of the activity involved in all consciousness. the division of consciousness into separate entities or parts has often been carried much further than this threefold one; the division has varied with the particular theory and fancy of the student, until some one has suggested that we might, on the principle used, assume a distinct faculty for dancing, for eating, sleeping, dressing, reading, writing, and so on, _ad infinitum_,--the faculty, in each case, being defined as the special activity that discharges the particular function assigned to it by the name. only by abstraction and by the investiture of our abstractions with a life of their own do we arrive at a theory of thought, feeling, and will, as separate entities, or parts; in the mental process itself, they are indissolubly united. we have seen that thought acquires new directions with the evolution of the individual, that pleasure and pain attach themselves to new objects, and that will is directed to new ends. if we can discover in these changes any uniformities of relation everywhere manifest as far as experience extends, the constancy of nature may admit of our conclusion that the relation is fundamental, and we may be able to formulate thus a general law of evolution with respect to the mental processes. such a law must, of course, be interpreted, not as governing the changes which it regards, but simply as the expression of general facts of their development. our considerations on this point are in a line with those of chapter i; indeed, they are only a more special application and more careful derivation and expansion of points there noticed. if we begin with our own experience, and study the growth of this or that particular habit gradually acquired, we notice that it not only becomes stronger with time, acquiring an intensity less and less easy to check, but also that this increasing strength of tendency is accompanied with a corresponding increase of pleasure in the performance of the act. the drunkard may have derived no especial pleasure from his first glass; he may, indeed, have found the taste little to his liking, and the slight succeeding dizziness disagreeable; but, with habituation, both gradually become agreeable. the first fit of intoxication may be felt as unpleasant, not only in the succeeding shame and physical depression, but in itself; though it is also conceivable that the state of thorough intoxication may have been led up to so slowly, by such imperceptible degrees, that it may be combined, even in the first instance, with a certain degree of pleasure. it is, however, evident that this pleasure increases with further lapse of time. if we study the habits of individuals, we shall find a thousand little peculiarities of habit in which others than their performers would be puzzled to discover anything attractive, and in which, indeed, the latter themselves would find difficulty in pointing out the source of the gratification that they nevertheless experience. our habits are things we are loth to break with; and we grow more loth as time passes, until finally no consideration, no shame of scorn or pain of punishment in any form, can suffice to counterbalance the craving of desire and the fierce pleasure of satisfaction, or the less turbulent but not less strong impulse that carries us steadily in the course which past custom has worn for us. customary acts are themselves agreeable to us, though their results may bring with them disagreeable factors. again, this same principle is directly traceable in heredity. we say, for instance, of the drunkard whose father and grandfather were drunkards before him, that he has inherited a "taste" for intoxicants, meaning, not that he can feel their attraction before he has tasted them and experienced their influence, but that the habit of drunkenness is one more easily formed in him than in the average individual, constitutional peculiarities corresponding to a pleasure derived from the alcohol. we often notice striking resemblances, not only in general appearance but also in mental characteristics and habits, extending even to attitude and gesture, between children and parents deceased when the children were yet infants. i have known very peculiar physical habits to appear, in one instance in three, in another in four, generations, with the avowal of satisfaction in their practice on the part of the persons subject to them, although neither they could explain, nor onlookers comprehend, the pleasure derived from them. imitation is not always possible in such cases; in one case of these two just cited, it was, in the third generation at least, impossible; and even where there is imitation, it is by no means proved that an innate tendency does not lend readiness to the formation of the habit. it may here be objected that we are venturing on too uncertain ground in endeavoring to formulate any general law of the growth of habit in relation to heredity, opinions differing so much as to the relative importance to be accorded to environment and innate tendency in the formation of character, and especially as to the possibility of the inheritance, by succeeding generations, of new peculiarities not common to the species as a whole but acquired by individual parents. as far as the former question is concerned, it may be said that the whole development of plant or animal in organization and corresponding functions must be regarded as directly dependent upon present environment, never independent of it; but that, while it must be conceded that the environment is greatly concerned in the development of habit, and that no innate tendency can manifest itself unless the complementary conditions of its appearance are presented by circumstance, it may likewise be claimed that the influence of environment no more excludes heredity than heredity excludes the influence of the individual environment. we tend, generally, to emphasize heredity in the case of the plant and the animal, and environment in the case of the human being. this is because our knowledge of species other than our own is merely an outward one, while the ideas of heredity in our own case are confused by our consciousness of the influence that even minute circumstances may have upon our inner life and character. and yet just those who are inclined to lay most stress upon the power of good influences are generally, strange to say, the very ones who would most protest at the assertion of the superiority of outer conditions over inner ones. it can scarcely be supposed that any law of heredity which applies to the rest of the animal kingdom does not apply to man also. with respect to the second of the two questions noticed above, something has already been said from one point of view, and more will be said later from another. at present it will be sufficient for our purpose to notice some generally admitted facts. darwin uses a certain caution when he comes to the consideration of the conditions of inheritance, and makes the general statement that the tendency to inheritance of any function is increased by the continuation of the action of the inducing conditions of environment for several generations. but it may be questioned whether an innate tendency may not have favored and assisted the action of the environment in the later of these generations, whether, indeed, the continuity everywhere supposed in evolution does not compel us to assume, between the first appearance of any function, trait, or habit, and its attainment, after several generations, of sufficient strength to render its hereditary character noticeable, intermediate degrees of strength in the intermediate generations. on the same principle on which we accept the theory of evolution as a logical necessity, despite the gaps in the proof, we must also, i believe, consider development of any sort to be continuous increase. but even the theory of the increased probability of the inheritance of any mark, function, trait, or habit, after several generations of inducing environment, is sufficient for our present purpose. it still remains true, if we regard the development of function or habit in its broad features, that the tendency to inheritance, the organic significance of any function or habit is increased with increased exercise. merely in the one case we regard the increments of increase as infinitesimal, while, in the other case, we regard them as of much greater than infinitesimal value. even the theory of weismann, which regards everything as present in the germ, must formulate some such theory as this of the environment as the condition of the development of germinal possibilities. not only are the strongest and most infallibly recurring functions those which have been most strongly and longest exercised, but these strongest functions, those to which, as we say, the tendency is strongest, are connected with the strongest pleasures of gratification and the most extreme pain of denial. the sexual appetite is an example of such a function fundamental to all the higher forms of animal life. hunger and thirst, if long unsatisfied, are connected with intensest suffering and, if not dulled by general ill-health or too great satiety, involve a keen pleasure of satisfaction. muscular exercise is a source of keen enjoyment, and physical inaction results in general depression that may become extreme if the inaction be long continued. in this pain of inaction, a new conception has been introduced into our considerations. the converse of this pain is that involved in the over-exercise of any function. we thus perceive that the pleasure involved in the exercise of function lies between two extremes, beyond either of which is pain, discomfort. such pain is connected with the vacillations in the relations of food-assimilation to the use of accumulated energy. these two general processes or functions of all organic matter are reciprocal or complementary, and the too much or too little on either side which involves pain may be looked upon as a disturbance of equilibrium. excess on either side means want on the other.[ ] and this brings us again to the conception of normal function as a stable form of motion. long-exercised function, fundamental functions of animal or plant life are forms of motion that for a very long period have found their sufficient complementary conditions in the environment, have met with but little interference in this environment. and thus we attain a conception of pleasure as that form of feeling accompanying forms of physiological motion with which there is a minimum of interference. pleasure appears as the accompaniment of unimpaired and unimpeded function everywhere as far as our knowledge extends. function and habit are essentially the same; habit is merely function. the functions of the species furnish the foundation of the habits of the individual, which vary according to individual surroundings and the family peculiarities acquired through peculiar circumstances. the degree of pleasure in the exercise of any function or habit bears constant relations to the strength of the acquired function, while this again bears constant relations to degree of exercise, in which the time relation plays a prominent part. here we have, too, by implication, the explanation of the disagreeable character of the strange and new except as it corresponds to some tendency of the organism, some capability not yet exercised, in which case it appears as nothing strictly new but only as pleasing variety. from a physiological point of view, the new appears as that which demands a readjustment involving the fresh action of natural selection, and the possible destruction of the organism in case the readjustment demanded is too great. from the physical and mechanical view, the new may be regarded as a disturber of equilibrium. to this analysis the objection may possibly be urged that obstacles often increase pleasure. if, however, a definition of obstacle be demanded, it will soon appear that what is meant by an obstacle that increases pleasure is not anything that interferes with function but rather that which is exactly its occasion and opportunity. to a man in health and vigor who sets off for a walk through the fields, a hedge or fence in the way is no real obstacle, but furnishes rather an agreeable diversion, a new method of trying his strength and getting rid of superfluous muscular secretions; it adds but the spice of some slight variety to his exercise. that which is an interruption of one function, may be the opportunity of another; and if the demands of the first function for satisfaction are not too imperative, the interruption of too great duration, the obstacle may not be felt to be disagreeable. but pain and pleasure are often mixed, since the satisfaction of one function may be the prevention of another. if, in this case, the function which is satisfied is a fundamental one, the function which is prevented a subordinate one, the pleasure exceeds the pain. if, on the other hand, the function prevented is a fundamental one, the function satisfied a merely subordinate one, the pain exceeds the pleasure. with the ideas of unimpaired and unimpeded function as pleasurable, and of the new as demanding readjustment, we arrive at the consideration of health and disease. the free performance of any particular function is the first condition of the health of the organ of which it is the function, the regular performance of all physical functions according to the mutual adjustment of the organs of the body the condition of the health of the organism as a whole. and thus again we come round to the conception of pleasure as connected with the action that accords with the health of the organism. and this leads us to some remarks concerning the act of food-taking which may answer a possible objection to the statements made above with regard to the pleasure involved in the act. the moralist and idealist are wont to protest against any theory that may seem to give prominence to "the purely animal" side of human life. but first, we have to do, at present, merely with facts on which ethical theory may be founded, not as yet with such theory itself. furthermore, the selection of the appetites of hunger, thirst, and sex, as illustrating the general theory of the relations of pleasure and pain to function is not made in order to lay special stress upon these appetites but because they afford, as fundamental, especially good examples. and, finally, it may be noticed that the pleasure connected with the stilling of hunger and thirst is not that of taste alone, though doubtless there are many with whom this pleasure is one of the most important of life; on the taking of sufficient and proper nourishment depends the pleasure involved in the general health of the body; the pain of non-satisfaction in this case is not simply that of a single organ but that of the whole organism. even the deferment of a single meal beyond the usual hour often lowers the "tone" of the whole body, and the variations of too much or too little strongly influence the mood and general happiness of the individual. on the right use of nourishment depend, in great measure, the ability to cope with circumstances and the moral power of cheerfulness. in connection with the idea of a certain equilibrium between exercise and nourishment, waste and repair, as normal, healthful, and pleasurable, rolph's principle of the insatiability of life may be considered. evidently the facts of evolution demonstrate the power of the organism to advance by slow degrees beyond its original normal. but the progress is an exceedingly slow one, and the power of advance in the individual organism, at any particular point, by no means limitless, but very definitely limited. the limitations of the power of assimilation are evidenced by the evil results of over-eating, of over-satiety of function in any direction. even at an early period of life, when growth is most marked, the capacity for assimilation is by no means limitless. the idea of insatiability is advanced by lewes[ ] in a somewhat different form. it may possibly be an aid to the comprehension of the process of growth to regard one factor, namely the organism, as the active side of the development tending to indefinite growth in all directions, and the other factor, the environment, as the regulating, resisting factor, limiting such growth; the conception may, perhaps, be legitimately resorted to as we resort to various other devices which bring into prominence some one side of a process to the neglect of others but to the simplification of our concepts and calculations. a similar device is used by zöllner in his consideration of sun-spots.[ ] but these representations should not be mistaken for actuality. the limitless expansion of the organism is as much a fiction as a theory of the limitless coercion of the environment resisted by the organism would be. the latter fiction is involved in one interpretation of the struggle for existence. either view is one-sided; environment and organism both alike represent active forces, of both which combined, growth is, at each moment, the exactly conditioned resultant. we may notice another assertion of rolph's, namely, that growth is produced by increase of nourishment rather than that it demands[ ] increase of nourishment as the darwinians state. i do not know how the darwinians come to be accredited with this statement in the sense which is evidently criticised by rolph. in so far as the statement may be interpreted as meaning that growth takes place first, and without nourishment, and that the demand for nourishment then ensues on this growth, the criticism is evidently valid. but the word "demands" may be interpreted in quite a different way as designating the need of growth for its conditions, or rather (for this is the ultimate significance of the word in this sense) the logical demand of the reason, which cannot suppose anything to take place in the absence of its conditions. any other signification of the word is contrary to the whole spirit of darwinism, and would accord much better with a theory of insatiability or with other forms of theory that imply a special vital principle of some sort. if, when rolph makes the assertion that increase of nourishment produces growth, he refers, by "increase of nourishment," to the mere act of mastication, it is true that growth must be regarded as following upon this as its condition; but growth and the assimilation of nourishment are identical. and, in fact, assimilation begins in the action of the saliva in the act of mastication. analysis of assimilation gives us sequence in one sense, since the parts of the act follow upon one another; but any interpretation which tends to draw a distinct line at any point in the physiological process, or to distinguish between assimilation as active, performed, and growth as passive, suffered, should be avoided. we may return to the consideration of pleasure and pain as connected with function in general, with a view to a solution, if possible, of the problem of its especial connection with the will. the brain may be defined, from the point of view of the theory of evolution, as the organ of centralization through which the unity of the organism is established, and the adaptation of parts or the development of special function becomes the adaptation or function of the whole. with this physiological adaptation, an increasing breadth of knowledge by experience, the deviation of feeling from old into new channels, and the attainment of new ends of action, are associated. just as past adaptations must have their physiological representation in brain-organization, so psychical experience is stored up to be remembered on sufficient suggestion, and finds, thus, its expression in conscious will, just as its physiological concomitants must be supposed to find their expression in nervous and muscular action. as we have seen, pleasure follows the line of evolution of function, strongest pleasure appearing in the direction of most strongly developed function, so that, just as any conflict of tendencies to function in the brain must result in conquest by the strongest tendency, the line of action must always correspond with that of the greatest pleasure. and just as the most strongly inherent function is combined with the greatest pleasure, so the representation of the performance of this most strongly inherent function is, in the conflict of tendencies before action, combined with the greatest pleasure of anticipation. this statement coincides with stephen's remark that it is not the representation of the greatest pleasure, but the pleasantest representation, which furnishes the decisive motive to will. contingent circumstances may introduce into the actual carrying out of the act determined upon an element of pain not before experienced, in which the wish may arise that the act had not been performed; and the strength of the tendency to action in this direction is thus diminished. with regard to this analysis, several things are to be noted. ( ) it is no more claimed that the strongest pleasure of anticipation is unmitigated pleasure than that the pleasure involved in the attainment of the end is necessarily unmitigated. wherever there is interference, there is also pain. where any struggle is involved, where any conflict of tendencies and wishes precedes choice, the struggle itself and the relinquishment of one or more courses in favor of the one chosen involve disagreeable elements, and the fiercer the struggle the greater the pain. where two extremely strong tendencies thus come into collision, the pain involved may amount to agony. our statement that the more pleasurable end or rather the one the imagination of which is the more pleasurable is the one sought by will needs therefore to be put into a somewhat different form, since, among all the methods of action open to choice in any case, there may be none the thought of which involves any positive pleasure, though there is in all or most cases some one which promises at least a negative excess of pleasure, that is, least pain. ( ) no assumption is made as to the particular kind of representation or the particular kind of end with which the greatest pleasure of anticipation or of realization is combined, whether these are "higher" or "lower," sensual or intellectual, moral or immoral. it is not by any means asserted that the most moral end may not be that which is chosen. ( ) it is not asserted that any direct calculation of the pleasure to self involved in any course of action necessarily contributes to choice. ( ) the pleasure or pain connected with the imagination of a future event is not to be confused with the actual pleasure or pain of the event itself. the feeling experienced in the event may be wholly different from that of anticipation. in connection with the second point, reference may be made to an assertion of sidgwick's in his attack upon hedonism. he writes as follows, "we have to observe that men may and do judge remote as well as immediate results to be in themselves desirable, without considering them in relation to the feelings of sentient beings."[ ] the question for us here is, first, whether the emphasis of the assertion is on the word "considering,"--a question the context does not answer. it is certainly true that decisions are reached, judgments pronounced, without introspection and self-analysis, and without long reflection of any sort. it is true that, even where reflection does take place, there is not necessarily any distinct attachment of the concept "pleasurable" to results considered, whether with relation to self or to others. the dog who snatches at a piece of meat does not probably waste any time in reflecting on the pleasure he will experience in eating it; and yet we do not the less believe that if the act were not pleasurable to him he would not perform it. it may also be true that a man often pronounces results to be desirable without noting or caring for their relations to other sentient beings; but if these results are regarded by him as desirable, then they must be in some way desirable to himself, that is, must have a pleasurable relation to his own feelings. desire appertains to sentient beings and to sentient beings as such; a thing which is desirable must be desirable to a sentient being; the desirable which is not desirable to a sentient being is the desirable which is not-desirable, a self-contradiction. in connection with the third of the points above noticed, rolph's assertion that not pleasure but pain is the motive to action, may be considered. the author does not mean anything else than that action is in the direction from "want," "hunger," "pain," to ends involving pleasure, so that this theory does not, when analyzed, differ fundamentally from theories which assume the motive to will to be furnished by the most pleasurable end or by the most pleasurable representation of an end. the chief point of difference is the conception of the state of consciousness preceding will as invariably one of pain, the want of the end willed as invariably painful. now it is evident that the satisfaction of a function may be so long deferred as to involve the severest pain; hunger, thirst, may reach a degree of intensity that is frenzy, muscular inaction, in an ordinarily active individual, if long persevered in, may be combined with extreme discomfort and depression. and it is also true that all desire involves want in the sense that an end is sought because its absence is felt as undesirable. but want in this sense means merely desire, and is not necessarily combined with any real pain of deprivation. the state of consciousness preceding action may be, on the contrary, one of exhilaration, of exceeding joy of anticipation; the gratification of a desire may take place so soon after the first appearance of the desire, or the gratification of the desire become so certain so soon after the desire is first felt, that no pain of want is felt at all. rolph, indeed, finds great difficulty in demonstrating his theory, and finally resorts to the definition of the pain which, as he asserts, furnishes the motive to action as "the pain of the absence of pleasure." he says, moreover, that not all pain is felt as such, since much feeling is below the threshold of consciousness.[ ] but "unconscious pain" and "feeling below consciousness" are mere self-contradictions. specification of that of which, as unconscious, we know nothing is a very easy way of delivering oneself from the necessity of positive proof, but it is a very unscientific one. with respect to rolph's assertion that pain can not be dispensed with, since it is everywhere the motive to action, it may be remarked that this statement seems to accord ill with rolph's other theory that never the struggle for existence but always states of plenty and comfort are the conditions of growth, and the lengthy demonstration that periods of want must condition decline, retrogression, and finally the extinction of the species suffering the want. from the standpoint of darwin, the struggle for existence is not inconsistent with the possession of plenty on the part of favored individuals and species, but rolph expressly denies the compatibility of the two principles. in his theory of want as the universal motive to action, rolph cites suicide as an extreme case of this want. our analysis has already taken into consideration some of the cases of mental struggle and postponement of the satisfaction of desire involving pain. but where one end greatly desired is unattainable, choice may yet be possible of another end affording partial satisfaction of the function corresponding to the desire, and, in cases where choice is necessary between two or more conflicting ends, the gratification of one may be attended with a sufficient degree of pleasure to cause partial forgetfulness of the disappointment in the necessary relinquishment of the other ends. where, however, the function denied is one of the most fundamental of the organism, its denial may be combined with intensest pain and a gradual physical degeneration, or even a sudden collapse of the organism, ending in death; or it may induce an act that secures this end through the mediation of self-conscious will. what is true, in this case, of the denial of some one fundamental function, is true also of an accumulation of coincident denials of a number of lesser ones. our desires are, indeed, in all cases, more or less complex, and involve the fulfilment of various functions; but we can easily imagine such an accumulation of small ills as to lead to desperation. where no choice of action seems left us by which we may attain some one end deeply desired, or where a coincidence of obstacles makes it appear as if there were no choice of action towards any desirable ends, death may be chosen as a lesser evil than life, the equivalent of a lesser pain in the absence of feeling altogether. it may be noted, however, that where suicide is prevented in the first moment of desperation, the individual planning it may not only never again attempt it, but may afterwards even find much pleasure in life. as there is a high degree of pleasure connected with the performance of deeply rooted function or habit, so the performance of all function is attended with some modicum of pleasure, except in such isolated moments as render suicide possible. every end desired is one of function, and all function furnishes ends to the will. the pessimist lays emphasis upon the fact of the speedy loss of pleasure in ends attained. but herein lies the higher pleasure of life, that it is not rest but progress. the pleasures we attain may be continually renewed if rightly sought, but they cannot be unintermittently sustained. we cannot rest at ends attained and find unlessened rapture in them. rest is not an attribute of life; life is essentially motion, that phase of it which we term rest being mere change of function for a time. the intimate relation, between pleasure and an equilibrium of waste and repair renders it impossible to obtain pleasure except as occupation is varied in order to afford opportunity of recuperation to organs and cells before used. proper variation, however, may enable us to return to old pleasures with ever renewed and even increased enjoyment. but it is conceivable that the pleasures of gratification and the pains of disappointment may be so nearly balanced as to make life possible and yet endow it, at least for a period, with but little joy. it is to be noticed, however, that intense pain cannot endure, unmodified, for any great length of time. as pleasure follows the line of customary action, so pain diminishes with long-continued lack in any direction, unless this direction be that of too fundamental function, in which case the organism succumbs entirely and perishes. either we grow gradually used to our disappointment and forget it to a great degree in other gratification, or we die under it. certainly there are losses the pain of which is never entirely forgotten, after which life is never quite the same again; but the first agony of such losses is materially modified with time; and many of the losses which have seemed worst to us at the time they occurred are later looked back upon without regret. we progress to another stage, and the ends we desire to gain are changed. the habitual misanthrope, indeed, generally derives a great deal of satisfaction from his own misery; and this leads us to the apparently anomalous remark that even pain as function may come to be combined with pleasure; we feel a satisfaction in our own capacity of emotion. the sensitivity of the poet to pain as well as his sensitivity to pleasure is a source of often very keen gratification and pride to him. of the weak and aged who have no especial pleasure in life, it may be said that they have also, in general, no fierce pains, at least seldom such as bring desperation in youth. having learned from experience, they are not subject to such exaggerated expectations, and hence disappointments, as accompany youth, vigor, and ignorance of the realities of life; and often they derive enjoyment from things which would have no attraction for the young. the old question as to the relation between health and happiness may be answered by the statement that the two coincide. the statement is not meant, however, in the sense that the happiness which we at present attain is coincident with health in an absolute sense or that, _vice versa_, perfect happiness is, or can be, coincident with that which we ordinarily term health. the two terms are generally very ill-defined; sometimes the one, sometimes the other, is used in an absolute sense in connection with the discussion of the parallel term in a comparative sense. perfect happiness must coincide with perfect health; for perfect health must coincide with perfect fulfilment of all function, and this coincides with the gratification of all desire. at present desires conflict, and the gratification of one is bought at the expense of others. this partial gratification corresponds to a partial health; but we too often forget, in the discussion of health and happiness, that health is no more perfect than is happiness. the individual is not yet in harmony with himself. but this means that he also is not in harmony with the environment. in the development of thought, feeling, and will, we have noticed a certain parallelism, the attainment of new knowledge, the deviation of feeling into new channels, and the direction of will to new ends; indeed, our analysis must bring us to regard this development as something more than a parallelism, since, as we have seen, thought, feeling, and will, cannot be defined as separate organs of mind. and we are here led to notice a theory sometimes advanced, that the feelings of one individual can never be changed by another. you may present a man with arguments, say the advocates of this theory, but this is all; you cannot bring him to act on the arguments unless his feeling is already of the right sort before you present your arguments; if it is not, you cannot in any way alter it. now a certain general foundation of character, of fundamental feeling, must always be conceded; but this is not what these theorists mean when they say that arguments can never alter feeling. "of what use would it be to argue with my child and tell her that this or that act of hers is selfish," said a man to me not long ago of his three-year-old daughter; "if she is selfish, arguing with her will not make her less so; showing her that she is selfish will never have any effect upon her selfishness; you may change opinions by argument, but not feelings." the theory reminds us of the old idea of the will as something above other phases of nature and so supreme above their influence; it replaces this theory of the uncaused nature of the will by one of the like absolute independence of feeling. and yet, strange to say, this theory is oftenest advanced by just those who assert the variability of will in accordance with law, under the influence of the environment, and unite with these already incongruous theories the wholly contradictory one that it is feeling which furnishes the motive to will. to appeal to any one except through the medium of thought is certainly impossible; the feelings cannot be influenced except by representation and argument. feeling cannot be taken by itself and so influenced. but the person endeavoring to convince does not desire to arouse indefinite feeling; he invariably wishes to excite it with regard to some definite end. to change opinion is also to change feeling in some degree. whether an appeal to another is successful or not depends on the nature of the appeal and upon the consciousness of the individual to whom the appeal is made; but this means that not the nature of consciousness alone decides the result. in any excitation by the environment, the result is conditioned, not by the one factor alone but by both; and no excitation can leave the individual entirely unchanged; the multiplication of infinitesimal single excitations constitutes the whole of evolution. a first appeal or argument may be felt only as disagreeable interference; but an accumulation of appeals at first disagreeable and met only with rebuffs may eventually result in total change of both ends and feelings. the amount of appeal necessary differs with the person appealed to; it may be large or small, excessively large or excessively small, but the general fact remains, that feelings vary as thought widens, and that an accompanying change of ends takes place. thought and feeling are not two separate and independent things, but are, on the contrary, vitally united. we may put our old familiar question with regard to cause and effect in a new form in respect to the development of thought, feeling, and will. in considering the process of evolution, will, and, therefore, the conscious exercise of function, is ordinarily treated as the effect of pleasure; but our course of analysis identifies function and its exercise and rather brings function into the foreground, though the assertion of precedence in importance has been avoided. the course was chosen partly because it affords an opportunity of propounding the following questions: is lapse of time, amount of exercise, or pleasure, the cause of habit? or is habit the cause of function? or is pleasure the cause of continued exercise of function? or is function the cause of pleasure? or is a minimum of interference the cause of pleasure and of function in a particular direction? or is not, rather, continued exercise of function the cause of the absence of interference wherever and as far as it exists? we find all these various suggested theories advocated, by direct statement or by implication, in the treatment of the evolution of function by different authors, and indeed we frequently find several of the theories included, by implication, in the work of the same author. the vital connection of unimpeded function and pleasure is apparent, and the necessity of the time element in the development of function may also be asserted; but there is not, according to our theory, any reason for introducing the concept of cause into the relations. our analysis of the development of thought, feeling, and will, has an important bearing on the teleological argument. if all habit comes, in time, to be pleasurable, if pleasure merely follows the line of exercise of function, _whatever that line may be_, and ends are thus mere matters of habit, and habit, exercise, is a matter of the action and reaction of all conditions, then it is evident that the force of the teleological argument is at once destroyed. we cannot pass beyond nature, by this route, to the inference of a transcendental cause. man's action being a part of nature and the result of all conditions as much as is the motion of the wind or the waves, the results he produces, like theirs, only change and never creation, the only inference we could make from his will to other will must be an inference to will that is a part of nature, a result if also a condition, a link in the chain of nature, its ends coördinate with habit but not the cause of it, and no more determining than determined. footnotes: [ ] see avenarius' formulæ of "complete vital maintenance": f(r) = -f(s); f(r) + f(s) = o, "kritik der reinen erfahrung." [ ] "problems of life and mind," ser. ii. p. . [ ] see essay by petzoldt above considered. [ ] "biologische probleme," p. ; "erfordern." [ ] "methods of ethics," th ed. p. . [ ] "biologische probleme," p. _et seq._ chapter v egoism and altruism in evolution carneri, in consistency with his scepticism as to feeling in animals, remarks that, with man, the struggle for happiness is added to the struggle for existence. wallace and others regard man as comparatively withdrawn from the struggle for existence and the operation of natural selection. much depends on definition in any statement; but it may be repeated that the analogy of nervous organization does not permit us to suppose the absence of pleasure and pain in many species, and that man is no exception to the rule that the disharmonious is the unstable, and doomed, by its nature, to destruction. however, analogy does not, as we have seen, carry us far in deciding upon the presence or absence of consciousness, or in determining the exact nature of the ends it posits even where we may suppose it to be present and conscious of ends. if, then, we apply the terms "egoism" and "altruism" to the action of plants or even of other animal species, meaning, by these terms, that, in the action referred to, such ends are sought and willed as render human conduct what we call altruistic, we may be falling into error. however, in considering egoism and altruism in their relations to human development, it may be useful to note their prototypes, as far as external form is concerned, in life on lower planes, without making any assumption as to the internal meaning of these prototypes, except in so far as, in special instances, we may be warranted by further particular examination of facts. it is evident that the action of animals is of a sort that has as its immediate and most prominent result their own protection and preservation, and that they show themselves generally hostile to other kinds and even, in many cases, if not hostile, at least indifferent, under most circumstances, to their own kind. yet a certain amount of mutual support may occasionally be observed even among lower species. one of the forms of such aid most common in the whole range of animal species is the care of the parent animal for its offspring. this care is more usual on the part of the female than on that of the male, and where it is exercised it is not the exception, but rather the rule, that the mother will sacrifice life itself in the defence of her young. such care and self-sacrifice, especially marked in mammals and birds, are too well known to need illustration here. mutual aid between the sexes is not so common or so strongly marked as the care of parent animals for their young. there is often no companionship at all between the sexes, and even at the time of mating male and female may show themselves hostile to each other. it often happens with certain _epeiridae_ the males of whom are smaller than the females, that, after copulation or sometimes even before, the female seizes upon the male and makes a meal of him. sometimes, also, during the battle of two males for the possession of a female, the latter throws her web about both and devours them.[ ] female deer wandering in the company of a male have been observed to watch with indifference the contest of the latter with some newly arrived male, and on his death to lick the wounds of their new suitor and follow him as they before followed his predecessor. the relations of male and female among the birds, especially among some sorts of birds, have, on the other hand, often been made the theme of the poet. but mutual aid among the animals is not confined to the relations of parents and offspring, and male and female. whether or not we explain the societies of animals as merely huge families, as some authors are inclined to do, the fact of the association remains, and it continues to be true that, in this association, much mutual assistance is given. in this connection, however, may be cited the experiments of lubbock, showing the exceeding irregularity and apparent caprice with which such assistance is rendered among even such creatures as the ants, with whom organization is generally regarded as having arrived at an unusual degree of development. lubbock found that, wherever a regular battle was in progress, the ants gave aid to each other, but that where a single ant was attacked by an enemy, the others of the nest generally took no part in the matter. in many cases, they passed by wounded or helpless members of their own colony, leaving them to perish where a very small amount of help would have saved them. in some cases, they cared for the slightly wounded; but those who were severely wounded they threw from the nest. in their hostility to their enemies, they were merciless and more persistent than in their help of friends.[ ] lubbock, arguing from such facts as these, differs in opinion from grote, who regards it as necessary to the maintenance of any society that some moral feeling should exist. indeed, that which carneri asserts with regard to the care of offspring might be claimed in this case, namely, that the assistance reaches exactly so far as is necessary for the preservation of species. the implication is that all this apparent altruism is mere automatism. in support of a view similar to this, benno scheitz quotes the following case,[ ] "which dr. altum relates from his own experience": "'in the gens d'armes market in berlin, i saw several larks and a robin in a cage; the former cowered sorrowfully, with somewhat roughened feathers, in a corner, but the robin was in full activity. it ran to the food-cup, seized as many ant-larvæ as it could grasp in its bill, and hastened with these to the nearest lark. the latter, however, did not honor the solicitous robin and its food with as much as a look. but scarcely had the robin offered its disdained food than it let this fall and hastened after fresh food, offered this, let it fall, fetched fresh again,--only to begin the same performance anew. as long as i watched this interesting spectacle, the robin was thus employed, and very soon the greater portion of the ant-larvæ had been carried from the food-vessel and lay scattered before the different larks. and what was here the motive of the redbreast in permitting itself no nourishment (i did not see that it ate a single one of the ant-larvæ itself), but carrying it all to its fellow-prisoners,--sympathy and love for the larks, who disdained all food, and who could have taken the same food for themselves, in the same manner, and with exactly the same amount of trouble? the redbreast had been caught and carried away from its young; the impulse to feed was strongly awakened and had before been strongly active, but not satisfied; the bird was obliged, therefore, to continue to bring food, although there was no longer anything to feed.'" the care which female animals of many species, when deprived of their young, often show for the young of other animals of the same or other species that come in their way is well known. among domestic animals, the cat appears particularly susceptible in this respect, though comparisons here are perhaps scarcely fair, since, of all domestic animals that are habitually deprived of their young, the cat is about the only one that has the chance of coming in contact with young animals near the size of its own kind. the cat has been known to adopt young rats, chickens, puppies, ducks, and will generally, during the time of suckling, take up readily with kittens of another litter. galton, in his "inquiry into human faculty," mentions that the records of many nations have legends like that of romulus and remus, these being surprisingly confirmed by general sleeman's narrative of six cases where children were nurtured for many years by wolves, in oude. the working ants of certain species show as great care for the slave-larvæ robbed from other nests as do many parent animals for their own offspring. again, the care for their eggs shown by many animals who give no care to their young may be cited as evidence in favor of the theory of automatism. in the vegetable world also, similar protection is afforded flower and fruit, the most wonderful instances of such protection being, perhaps, those of the insectivorous plants. but to all these arguments in favor of automatism may be answered: ( ) that functions which are preserved and inherited must evidently be, not only in animals and plants, but also and equally in man, such as favor the preservation of the species; those which do not so favor it must perish with the individuals or species to which they belong; ( ) that it cannot, indeed, be assumed that a result which has never come within the experience of the species can be willed as an end, although, with the species, function securing results which, from a human point of view, might be regarded as ends, may be preserved; but ( ) that, as far as we assume the existence of consciousness at all in any species or individual, we must assume pleasure and pain, pleasure in customary function, pain in its hindrance; and ( ) that, as far as we can assume memory, we may also feel authorized to assume that a remembered action may be associated with remembered results that come within the experience of the animal, some phases of which may thus become, as combined with pleasure or pain, ends to seek or consequences to avoid. there is no reason to be given why care for the young should be more pleasurable than care for eggs; the one may be as pleasurable to some species as the other is to other species. if we assume consciousness in dr. altum's robin, we may assume pleasure in the care of its young and also, as a possibility, pleasure in the results of such care, the preservation and prosperity of the young; whether the consciousness of the robin includes abstract concepts of preservation and prosperity, is another question. the human mother, too, is wont to be peculiarly tender to children in general, but we do not for that reason infer that her kindness towards them is mere automatism. there is no necessary opposition between reason and instinct, and certainly none between emotion and instinct. to the very functions from which we derive the most pleasure we are impelled by an irresistible innate tendency. in any particular case, it may be very difficult to determine the amount of reasoning power possessed by the animal, the exact relation of ends to means in its consciousness; but it may be remarked that there are human mothers who reason little with regard to the preservation of the species or other so-called ends secured by the care they give their offspring; the care is spontaneous, but may not be the less a matter of warm affection. it appears strange, therefore, that exactly that constancy and strength of tendency, with need of satisfaction by other channels if the usual ones fail, which we use as proof of extreme mother-tenderness in the case of human beings should, in the case of other species, be turned into an argument to disprove the existence of this feeling. it is sometimes argued that the feeling of the parent animal in the care of its young is, in any case, merely one of pleasure in the activity, and has no connection with the good of the offspring. in such a case as that of the robin, where the effects of the care come within the experience of the mother, this is a mere arbitrary assumption, although direct proof of the contrary may be impossible. naturally, in the case of an animal which cares for its eggs, but never comes in contact with the offspring that are hatched from them, it would be impossible to suppose any affection for the offspring as such; their existence does not come within the range of the animal's experience. with regard to an animal whose connection with its young is constant, the theory that pleasure in their care has no reference to their welfare, has no evidence to support it and is unjustifiable. if we cannot directly disprove it, we have, at least, the evidence of many facts unfavorable to it. the distress manifested not only by many mammals (who might be supposed to find physical discomfort merely in the absence of the means of relief of the milk-glands), but also by other animals and notably birds, in the loss of their young and even in any danger that threatens them,--the indescribably mournful sounds at deprivation, the after depression, and the capacity for self-sacrifice in their defence, would lead us naturally, from an unprejudiced standpoint, to a belief in something very like what we term mother-love in human beings. from letourneau's "sociology based upon ethnography,"[ ] i quote the following: "a female wren, observed by montagu, spent sixteen hours a day in looking for food for her little ones. at delft, when there was a fire raging, a female white stork, not being able to carry away her young ones, allowed herself to be burnt with them.... j. j. hayes tells us of a female white bear forgetting the esquimaux dogs, the huntsmen, and her own wounds, in order to hide her own little bear with her body, to lick her and to protect her. in central africa, a female elephant, all covered and pierced with javelins, hurled at her by the escort of black men attending upon livingstone, was all the while protecting her young one with her trunk which her own large body enabled her to cover.... in sumatra, a female orang-outang, pursued with her little one by captain hall and wounded by a gunshot, threw her infant on to the highest branches of the tree on to which she had climbed, and continued, until she died, exhorting her young one to escape. in brazil, sphix saw a female of the stentor niger who, wounded by a gunshot, collected her last remaining strength to throw her young one on to one of the branches close by; when she had performed this last act of duty, she fell from the tree and died." in romanes' "animal intelligence," occurs the following quotation from dr. franklin:[ ] "'i have known two parrots,' said he, 'which had lived together four years, when the female became weak and her legs swelled. these were symptoms of gout, a disease to which all birds of this family are very subject in england. it became impossible for her to descend from the perch, or to take her food as formerly, but the male was most assiduous in carrying it to her in his beak. he continued feeding her in this manner during four months, but the infirmities of his companion increased from day to day, so that at last she was unable to support herself on the perch. she remained at the bottom of the cage, making, from time to time, ineffectual efforts to regain the perch. the male was always near her, and with all his strength aided the attempts of his dear better half. seizing the poor invalid by the beak or the upper part of the wing, he tried to raise her, and renewed his efforts several times. his constancy, his gestures, and his continued solicitude, all showed in this affectionate bird the most ardent desire to relieve the sufferings and assist the weakness of his companion. but the scene became still more interesting when the female was dying. her unhappy spouse moved around her incessantly, his attention and tender cares redoubled. he even tried to open her beak to give her some nourishment. he ran to her, then returned with a troubled and agitated look. at intervals, he uttered the most plaintive cries; then, with his eyes fixed on her, kept a mournful silence. at length his companion breathed her last; from that moment he pined away, and died in the course of a few weeks.'" moreover, care of animals for other animals shows itself often where neither the relation of parent to offspring, nor the relation of sex, nor even that of species, furnishes the basis. aside from the friendship and self-sacrifice of domestic animals for man, friendships, under domestication, between individuals of all manner of ordinarily most hostile species are reported. such friendship is not at all infrequent between dog and cat. in the family of a relative of my own were once a quail and cat who were most devoted to each other. they would spend hours playing together, and were often left alone together for long periods. the cat never manifested any tendency to regard the bird in the light of food; she seemed, however, well aware of the danger it might be under from other cats, and invariably drove these away when they endeavored to approach the house. this cat was also friendly to a tame robin which preceded the quail as pet in the same family. and furthermore, assistance is frequently given spontaneously where there has been no association before the act. there are a number of instances on record, and supported by good authority, where dogs have brought suffering individuals of their own kind to places where they had themselves received aid. romanes cites from mr. oswald fitch the story of a domestic cat who "was observed to take out some fish-bones from the house to the garden, and, being followed, was seen to have placed them in front of a miserably thin and evidently hungry stranger cat, who was devouring them; not satisfied with that, our cat returned, procured a fresh supply, and repeated its charitable offer, which was apparently as gratefully accepted. this act of benevolence over, our cat returned to its customary dining-place, the scullery, and ate its own dinner off the remainder of the bones."[ ] romanes says further: "an almost precisely similar case has been independently communicated to me by dr. allen thomson, f.r.s. the only difference was that dr. thomson's cat drew the attention of the cook to the famishing stranger outside by pulling her dress and leading her to the place. when the cook supplied the hungry cat with some food, the other one paraded round and round while the meal was being discussed, purring loudly." "mr. h. a. macpherson writes me that in he had an old male cat and a kitten aged a few months. the cat, who had long been a favorite, was jealous of the kitten and 'showed considerable aversion to it.' one day the floor of a room in the basement of the house was taken up in order to repair some pipes. the day after the boards had been replaced, the cat 'entered the kitchen (he lived almost wholly on the drawing-room floor above), rubbed against the cook, and mewed without ceasing until he had engaged her attention. he then, by running to and fro, drew her to the room in which the work had taken place. the servant was puzzled until she heard a faint mew from beneath her feet. on the boards being lifted, the kitten emerged safe and sound, though half-starved. the cat watched the proceedings with the greatest interest until the kitten was released; but, on ascertaining that it was safe, he at once left the room, without evincing any pleasure at its return. nor did he subsequently become really friendly with it.'" i cite still one other instance of animal affection from romanes: "one of a shooting-party under a banian tree killed a female monkey, and carried it to his tent, which was soon surrounded by forty or fifty of the tribe, who made a great noise and seemed disposed to attack the aggressor. they retreated when he presented his fowling-piece, the dreadful effect of which they had witnessed, and appeared perfectly to understand. the head of the troop, however, stood his ground, chattering furiously; the sportsman, who perhaps felt some little degree of compunction for having killed one of the family, did not like to fire at the creature, and nothing short of firing would suffice to drive him off. at length he came to the door of the tent, and finding threats of no avail, began a lamentable moaning and by the most expressive gesture seemed to beg for the dead body. it was given him; he took it sorrowfully in his arms and bore it away to his expecting companions. they who were witnesses of this extraordinary scene resolved never again to fire at one of the monkey race."[ ] as to the changeable and capricious appearance of the assistance rendered in animal associations, by one member to another, it may be said that any being of a different species who could look into our towns and cities might easily find as great problems of caprice here as among the ants and bees. we, too, leave our fellows to perish unaided; we, too, kill off, by neglect and hard usage, often not only or chiefly our drones, but even some of our most industrious, useful members of society. with us, too, there is very often greater hostility towards enemies than kindness towards friends. many savage tribes, that we certainly concede to be endowed with intelligence, could learn of the ants, rather than teach them, with regard to the duties of mutual aid. with regard to other species than his own, even so-called civilized man is often eminently selfish and cruel. among the savages the most extreme cruelty is often shown. bain, in an essay entitled "is there such a thing as pure malevolence?" cites from a book, "siberian pictures," together with mention of the pleasure shown by onlookers in the drowning of a man, an instance where boys seemed to find a genuine and peculiar delight in slowly roasting a dog to death.[ ] and bruce describes in his travels the feasts of the abyssinians, where the flesh was cut from an ox alive and bellowing with pain. but our police courts frequently bear witness to the possibility of the most wanton cruelty performed by people within our own most enlightened societies, although we may claim that cruelty is not so general in civilized societies. i personally have known of a case where, a horse becoming suddenly ill and falling upon the road, it was prodded by its owner with a pitchfork until it died of its wounds; and of another case where a man fastened to a tree a harmless kitten that had wandered into his yard, and deliberately stoned it to death. surely we have very little right to criticise the slaughter of animals by other species, while we ourselves name the taking of life "sport." our criticism of the play of the cat with the mouse as "cruel" is humorous--if there can be any humor connected with cruelty--as long as we ourselves find delight in the prolonged struggle of the trout and the torture of the fox-chase. perhaps the cat may be under the impression that the mouse takes pleasure in being played with; certainly we can believe that this is possible, when beings who claim to possess so much higher intelligence can gravely assert that the fox enjoys the chase. amongst so-called civilized human beings, too, the care of parents for offspring is by no means universal, and mothers are known whom not even the fear of the law can hinder from sacrificing their children by the slow torture of starvation for the gain of a few pounds or for even simple relief from the trouble of their rearing. the reports of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children show that not strangers but parents are the most frequent sinners against the child. nor is infanticide and neglect confined to the poorer classes. i repeat, if a being of some other species enabled to obtain only such external knowledge of us as we have of other species, some being beholding us, for instance, from distant planets, should endeavor to form a theory of our inner egoism and altruism, of sentiment and motive, he might be as puzzled as we are when we study the conduct of bees and ants. even the helplessness of the ant species, _polyergus rufescens_, at which we often wonder as stupidity, has its parallel in some of the former slave-owners of the southern states of north america, who live in the utmost poverty and ignorance because they have lost the habits of industry and consider work beneath them. mother-love is certainly the rule amongst us; but it is not more constant or self-sacrificing than with some other species, though it, in general, accompanies the child farther in his career. this rule is not, however, universal. human mothers of a lower type, who show fondness for their children when they are little, often exhibit little or none for them after they have grown out of arms. it is claimed that altruism was, in its origin, egoism. everything depends, in theory on this point, on our definition of the terms "origin" and "altruism." if we regard the life of animals in general or the life of any particular species as having been non-social before it was social, and as having become social through increase of numbers, the "chance" association which arose naturally in this way being favored by natural selection, we must assume function fundamentally advantageous to self without regard to the results to other beings to have been primary, whether or not we call this function egoism. with regard to animal life in general, we cannot avoid adopting some such view as this, since we find few species forming lasting bonds of association, a large number forming only exceedingly short ones, and some forming none at all, and since we must furthermore suppose a scarcity of living individuals to have preceded their multiplicity. moreover, we cannot suppose consciousness to have been absent, in the case of many of the animal species, during the whole of this development. and where there is consciousness, pleasure must be a concomitant along the line of development, and customary forms of action come to present ends, whether or not the individual has the abstract concept of "ends." but we need to remember that even the human race has not yet arrived at perfection, and that even moral altruism (for not all altruism is necessarily moral) is not yet absolutely attained in any species. our ordinary use of the term is progressive; that which is altruistic at one period of history is often looked upon, at a later period, as merely a higher form of egoism. this fact should be borne in mind when, in ethics or political economy, we inquire whether man was, in the beginning, altruistic. what do we mean here by "altruism," and what by "beginning"? a similar criticism may be made on the rather more usual question as to whether man was, in the beginning, social; what is the beginning of our species, and what degree of association is necessary in order that the individuals associating may be termed "social"? the question is a difficult one to answer from any point of view. while the majority of human beings, even the most savage, show some degree of gregariousness, there appear to be some tribes that are even less social in their habits than the most of our ape-cousins. mr. dalton says of the savages of inner borneo that they live in the most perfect state of nature, do not cultivate the earth or live in huts, do not eat either rice or salt, and do not associate with each other, but wander like wild animals in the forest. "the sexes meet in the jungle, or the man carries away a woman from some campong. when the children are old enough to shift for themselves, they usually separate, neither one afterwards thinking of the other."[ ] as to just what form the development of altruism from egoism may have assumed in the case of any particular species, or how the individuals of the species may first have been led to association, the state of science does not, at present, enable us to say. most authors, indeed, incline to class all social development as having its origin in some one form of family relation. rolph, for instance, refers it to the necessary association of the sexes, at certain times, for the purpose of copulation. others regard the care of the female for its young as the primary form from which all social organization has developed. inasmuch, however, as the line of ascent from primitive protoplasm to man cannot be regarded as straight, but has very many branches, it is quite conceivable that the development may have taken place in different ways in different branches or different species; and the very various forms which social organization shows in different species is direct evidence in favor of such a supposition. thus it is not, for instance, in some species, the mother animal, but the male, who cares for the young, and again, in other cases, affectionate relations of the sexes are not a prominent feature of the social structure. the attitude of a swarm of bees towards the queen, her progeny, and the drones, presents aspects entirely different from those of ant-nests or human tribal or state organization. in some species where the female exhibits considerable care and concern for her eggs or offspring, there is no especial friendliness between the sexes, and in other cases, where no care is given to offspring, there is still apparently some degree of friendliness, or at least of physical attraction, between male and female. it is not only conceivable that the habit of association may have been developed by different means in different species, but it is also conceivable that, in some cases, several forms of family relation may have assisted equally, and in other cases have united, even if not in equal measure, in producing the result. the association of parent with offspring, for instance, is in most cases impossible without some degree of association between the offspring. however we may suppose social relations to have originated in the case of any particular species, whether through the sexual or the parental relations or through both combined, and whether we trace these relations themselves back, in the one instance, to the original union of the sexes in the individual, and propagation as self-division, in the other to the unity of mother and offspring before the individual life commences, or whether we simply begin with some non-hostile contact of individuals as already existent, it is evident that, with increasing competition, coöperation must be to the advantage of those coöperating. those individuals whose single strength is supplemented by the aid of others must succeed best in the struggle for existence. moreover, with the exercise of altruistic forms of action, we must suppose pleasure in its exercise to increase, in so far as we suppose any consciousness at all in the animal performing the action. the greater the degree of exercise, the greater the pleasure connected with the action, and the more readily the organism will respond to conditions permitting its accomplishment; while repetition, again, must increase tendency to repetition. this is true not only of exactly the same form of action, but also of similar forms, that is, of forms having some like elements. the conditions of action are never exactly the same; the environment is continually changing; but the animal tends to choose, among possible forms of action, that which corresponds most nearly to most exercised and pleasurable forms. at just what period we are to regard the altruistic forms of action as becoming in spirit altruistic depends, as has already been said, on our definition of the degree of disinterested feeling necessary to altruism proper, aside from our theories of the existence and form of consciousness in the case of any particular species at any particular point of development. in the case of even disinterested human action, the altruism is not generally, or at least in very many cases, wholly unmixed with _any_ thought of self, though this thought may not hold first place. if self-sacrifice be the test of altruistic feeling, then we must suppose the latter to exist, in some relations, even far down in the scale of being. in this case, just as in other cases where choice is necessary, the stronger tendency conquers even with the result of pain of disappointment in some other direction. the case of altruistic action is hence not unique in this respect, and it might perhaps be argued that such self-sacrifice would therefore be possible without any consideration or consciousness of the good accruing to others through its performance. but if we analyze the development of any habit, we find that the pleasure of the act speedily connects itself with all the constant results of the act that come within the experience of the performer of the act and are recognized as its results. any result at first unpleasant must, if it is constant, either lead to the discontinuance of the act or else, with time, lose much of its quality of unpleasantness. either the expected pain of this one factor is sufficient to counterbalance the pleasure awaited in the act, and a repetition of the act is thus avoided, or, as in all other cases of habitual experience, the pain or discomfort gradually diminishes, until, if the habit be long enough continued, pleasure takes its place. the pleasure of others must be a constant result of action that secures their welfare, and if this result comes within the conscious experience of the performer of the action, we can scarcely avoid supposing that, even if his action is in the beginning purely selfish, the pleasure of those benefited must come in time to play a part in the pleasure of the performer. the part it plays will not be, in the beginning, naturally, a very important one, but its importance will increase with time. if this is true in a measure even of the individual, it is doubly true of the species. wherever, therefore, we may suppose the existence of sufficient intelligence for the inference of pleasure from its outer signs in others, it must be admitted to be possible and even probable that constant habits of self-sacrifice and helpfulness to others will be accompanied by some measure of altruistic feeling. and even if we suppose an insufficiency of intelligence for such inference, it is still possible and even probable that the constant symptoms of pleasure in others will come to be a part of the conditions of the pleasure of the individual or the species in whom habits of self-sacrifice have become constant, although their inner significance is not recognized. it may be objected that, if actual altruistic feeling were present in animals which show a certain amount of helpfulness towards others of their kind, this altruism would not desert these others at the very time of their greatest need or when any great peril to self is involved, or that it would show itself in many other acts than just those which, as in the case of the ants, secure the preservation of a society, or in that of some other species give a certain protection to the female during breeding time. the argument is wholly inconclusive, and has already been answered. the action of natural selection in the preservation of those forms of tendency that secure the preservation of the species does not annul the action of the will or render the presence of strong emotion in the direction of the tendency thus preserved impossible; on the contrary, we must suppose all tendency, in man equally with other animal species, to be the result of natural selection. and in man, too, altruism that is sufficient for some degree of sacrifice is insufficient for a greater. in man, as in other species, altruistic feeling and altruistic action vary according to the particular directions in which habit in the species and in the individual has been cultivated. men and women who are not kind to each other will frequently be kind to little children. the average englishman is kind to his dog in spite of his total indifference to the pain inflicted on the very nearly if not quite as intelligent fox; and he will grow indignant to the verge of tears over abuse of a horse, while he will regard the like abuse with little or no emotion when it is inflicted on a miserable donkey. i doubt if the average englishman would shoot horses or dogs, even if they were good for food and useless otherwise, and abounded wild in great britain. but this is merely because association and habit have made him acquainted with the capacity of feeling in the horse and dog, and have accustomed him to humane treatment of them. an argument sometimes advanced against the theory of a derivation of altruism from egoism is that such altruism has no premises or reasons; if, say the advocates of this argument, a man performs an apparently altruistic act to-day from selfish motives, and performs the same act to-morrow without calculation of the benefit to self to be gained from it,--if such a change were possible,--then this man must simply have forgotten his motives for the act. but this is not altruism proper. such action is the result of a logical confusion, but it can never be altruism. altruism proper has a motive, and this motive is the desire to do good to others. with regard to this argument it may simply be said that it is wholly untenable from any evolutionist standpoint; it destroys at once the possibility of any moral progress. intended to defend altruism and moral principle in general from what is designated as degradation, it is itself degrading in its denial of the compatibility of natural and moral advance. it posits the assertion that nothing can ever become that which it was not from the beginning, an assertion utterly inconsistent with any theory of growth, whether evolutional or otherwise. it is contradictory, too, of the directly observed every-day facts of individual experience. the ends with which we perform our acts, and the same acts, certainly change from day to day. the adult would have reason for shame were the ends with which he performs certain acts the same with those with which he performed those same acts when he was a child. the emotions with which we regard life and its various relations alter every day. if the change from egoism to altruism could be pronounced logical confusion, then all mental evolution must constitute an increase of intellectual disorder, a continuous progress towards less instead of greater intelligence. where is the beginning of feeling and what was feeling in the beginning? of what nature were the motives of our ape-like progenitors, and of what nature the first motive that appeared in the universe? and how have we ever arrived at the possession of other motives than these? what a confusion worse confounded must be our present motives, and of what a chaos of thought and emotion must the human intellect consist! the origin of any such argument as this, intended to disprove the theory of a derivation of altruism from egoism, is probably in the failure to distinguish the fact that both altruism and egoism, as we know them, are comparative, not absolute. naturally, absolute altruism could not develop immediately from absolute egoism, that is, the one could not change immediately into the other. but there are very few human beings in whom some degree of altruism does not exist; and all we may note directly of change of motive in ourselves, as well as all we ever could note of change in external action in other species, is gradual increase in this direction. in the individual case it is quite possible for change to take place in the opposite direction of the development of greater egoism. in connection with the discussion of the development of motives, we may inquire what is the final end of action; i refer not to the ideal end but the actual end, although the two are not always distinguished in the answer to this question. the confusion of the two generally arises from forgetfulness of the fact that an end is the part of the result of an act particularly willed by the performer. the concept is again a teleological one, although often advanced, in some form, by persons of materialistic views. thus some authors, looking at the process of evolution as continual survival of the fittest, and observing that natural selection thus tends continually towards health, so that the action of existing species is, in a large and ever increasing measure, favorable to health, assert that the latter is the end of action. others, in like manner and from similar premises, argue that the preservation of the species is the end of action; or sometimes the logical inaccuracy involved in making health or the preservation of species the universal end of action is partly concealed by giving the assertion the form that one or the other of these is "the end attained" by action. to these statements may be answered: the health of the individual, although it sometimes appears as the end willed, is by no means the constant and universal end, but, on the contrary, rather an infrequent end. as to the preservation of the species, the concept has never been heard of by a majority of human beings, and a thing cannot be an end to those who have not heard of it. it is doubtful, moreover, whether even those to whom it is familiar often, if ever, make it the end of action. with regard to pleasure, it has already been said that special calculation of the pleasure to accrue to self is by no means a necessary part of the motive to action. attention may again be called to the fact that it is not the future pleasure that decides the will to action in the case of struggle of conflicting tendencies, but that it is the more pleasurable representation, and that it is present pleasure which decides in any case. or, rather, it is not the pleasure, the feeling alone, that decides, for feeling is never found alone; it is always combined with thought-images. the strength of pleasurable feeling is the "tone" in which the intensity of the function manifests itself, and according to which it tends to further expression in action. in the imagination of action and its results, or the thought of it, reflection may linger especially on any one of its elements,--on any part of the action or its results as inferred from the analogy of past experience; the pleasure to self is not necessarily the element on which the mind lays stress, and the pleasure to others may be the element with which thought is particularly occupied and which turns the scale of choice; just as, also, in the actual action and its results, the pleasure in pleasure or benefit accruing to others may more than counterbalance the pain which some other inevitable phase of the action or its results brings with it. much that has been said of the development of egoism from altruism still holds true of the individual, even if the idea of a progress in altruism through heredity be surrendered. the consideration of the question of heredity is, however, necessary to any complete or wide-reaching theory of moral progress. hitherto, the actuality of the inheritance of altruistic tendency has been assumed on the strength of previous considerations with regard to heredity in general, according to which we could not conceive all the multifarious differences which appear in all the species and varieties of animal nature to have been present in simplest primal organisms, or all the differences of the different species and varieties which have arisen through sexual propagation from common ancestors to have been present as inherent potentialities in the germ-plasm, as such, of their common ancestors, and so cannot consider the lesser variations which go to make up the larger ones as due merely to the germ-plasm. it remains for us to examine the facts more particularly with respect to this special form of tendency. stephen says: "an unreasoning animal can only adapt itself to new circumstances, except within a very narrow range, by acquiring a new organization; or, in other words, by becoming a different animal. its habits and instincts may therefore remain fixed through countless generations. but man, by accumulating experiences, can virtually alter both his faculties and his surroundings without altering his organization. when this accumulation extends beyond the individual, it implies a social development, and explains the enormous changes wrought within historical times, and which define the difference between the savage and the civilized man."[ ] "briefly, society exists as it exists in virtue of this organization, which is as real as the organization of any material instrument, though it depends upon habits and instincts instead of arrangements of tangible and visible objects."[ ] "children, no doubt, start with infinitely varying aptitudes for moral culture, as they start with stomachs of varying strength of digestion; but, in every case, the action of the social medium is an essential factor of the result."[ ] now, in the first place, objection may be made to the term "unreasoning animal," in that, whatever we may think with regard to inorganic matter and plant-life or even with regard to the lower forms of animal-life, the whole theory of evolution is opposed to the supposition that reason suddenly arises in man; and in that we have, moreover, in the case of many of the higher species, very conclusive evidence of the presence of some degree of reason. mr. stephen does not elsewhere make any positive assertion of the entire absence of reason in animals; yet to his remark that "it may be that germs of this capacity [_i.e._ the capacity to learn by experience and impart this knowledge to others] are to be found in the lower animals" he adds, "but we shall make no sensible error if we regard it, as it has always been regarded, as the exclusive prerogative of humanity."[ ] that is, we make no sensible error if we regard the progress of other animal species than our own to be wholly "organic," that of our own species, on the other hand, to be wholly an accumulation of common knowledge. the division between man and the rest of the animal kingdom is thus made a very distinct and absolute line. it may be noticed, second, that the third quotation of the three cited consecutively above contains a very different statement from that of the first quotation. and it may be said, third, that the second quotation, while seeming to bear out the first, is in reality a contradiction of it, since it makes social organization dependent upon "habits" and "instincts." exactly what is it that is meant by the alteration of organization which is pronounced unnecessary to the "virtual" alteration of human faculties? from the modern spiritualistic, the materialistic, the positivistic, or any modern standpoint at all, it is difficult to perceive how mental alteration can be supposed without the assumption of an exactly corresponding physiological change. in view of the exceedingly minute structure of the nervous system, which is chiefly affected by such change, we may suppose this change to be so fine as to be imperceptible to sense-perception, but, since it must, in any case, be exactly coördinate with the psychical change, i fail to see how we can scientifically regard the one and at the same time ignore the other and pronounce it of no significance. and if we suppose any fixation of psychical alteration, we cannot avoid likewise supposing an exactly coördinate fixation of physiological alteration. of course the question remains as to the extent to which fixation takes place in either case, and this question we have yet to consider. the weakness of mr. stephen's position lies in his assumption of fixation on the one side and his denial of it on the other. how far are the moral qualities acquired in one generation inherited by the next? inasmuch as all development is by inappreciable increments, all change of organization gradual, or, in psychical terms, inasmuch as character varies only slowly from the grooves of established habit, there is a general truth in the statement that all habit prominent enough to be noticed as such can generally be traced farther back than the next generation only. nevertheless, here are a few cases for the weismannites:-- "gall speaks of a russian family in which the father and grandfather had died prematurely, the victims of taste for strong drink. the grandson, at the age of five, manifested the same liking in the highest degree." "trélat, in his work 'folie lucide,' states that a lady of regular life and economical habits was subject to fits of uncontrollable dipsomania. loathing her state, she called herself a miserable drunkard, and mixed the most disgusting substances with her wine, but all in vain; the passion was stronger than her will. the mother and the uncle of this lady had also been subject to dipsomania." "charles x----, son of an eccentric and intemperate father, manifested instincts of great cruelty from infancy. he was sent at an early age to various schools, but was expelled from them all. being forced to enlist in the army, he sold his uniform for drink and only escaped a sentence of death on the testimony of physicians, who declared that he was the victim of an irresistible appetite. he was placed under restraint, and died of general paralysis." "a man belonging to the educated class, and charged with important functions, succeeded for a long time in concealing his alcoholic habits from the eyes of the public; his family were the only sufferers by it. he had five children, only one of whom lived to maturity. instincts of cruelty were manifested in this child, and from an early age its sole delight was to torture animals in every conceivable way. he was sent to school, but could not learn. in the proportions of the head he presented the character of microcephalism, and in the field of intellectual acquisition he could only reach a certain low stage, beyond which further progress was impossible. at the age of nineteen he had to be sent to an asylum for the insane." "a man of an excellent family of laboring people was early addicted to drink, and died of chronic alcoholism, leaving seven children. the first two of these died, at an early age, of convulsions. the third became insane at twenty-two, and died an idiot. the fourth, after various attempts at suicide, fell into the lowest grade of idiocy. the fifth, of passionate and misanthropic temper, broke off all relations with his family. his sister suffers from nervous disorder, which chiefly takes the form of hysteria, with intermittent attacks of insanity. the seventh, a very intelligent workman, but of nervous temperament, freely gives expression to the gloomiest forebodings as to his intellectual future." "dr. morel gives the history of a family living in the vosges, in which the great-grandfather was a drunkard, and died from the effects of intoxication; and the grandfather, subject to the same passion, died a maniac. he had a son far more sober than himself, but subject to hypochondria and of homicidal tendencies; the son of this latter was stupid, idiotic. here we see, in the first generation, alcoholic excess; in the second, hereditary dipsomania; in the third, hypochondria; and in the fourth, idiocy and probable extinction of the race."[ ] it is the general testimony of authorities that mental disease may thus appear in one generation as general tendency to excess, in another as homicidal mania, in another as microcephalism, etc. here we have examples of the hereditary character of what we recognize as nervous disease, which yet has its moral as well as its intellectual side. there are few who do not recognize the power of the parent, through injury to his own health, to affect the health of his children; and yet that which we call disease is not more physical than that which we call moral characteristic. however, the physical side of that which we call normal moral characteristic is more withdrawn from observation; that which is recognized as mental disease forms, in this respect, a link between what we term ill-health and mental characteristic. the physical features of what we term ill-health attract our attention especially because of the weakness and incapacity or the distinct physical pain involved; the physical side of insanity comes also more or less distinctly to our notice, but the physical accompaniments of normal characteristic attract less attention. and yet all these three conditions have each a psychical and each a physiological side. it is therefore difficult to understand how the possibility of the inheritance of ill-health from want or excess can be acknowledged and yet the possibility of the inheritance of psychical characteristic acquired by the parent be doubted; the latter has its organic side as much as the former. and no better illustration of this fact can be found than in just such cases as those above cited, where that which appears in the first place as mere excess, that is, moral characteristic as we ordinarily term it, takes finally the form of microcephalism, idiocy, or insanity. man's early existence as an individual is distinguished by the length of duration of a condition of helplessness, at the beginning of which, beyond the fundamental so-called organic action, only a few simple activities manifest themselves. the human being is born with almost everything to acquire, and the earlier years, during which habits are slowly accumulating, appear peculiarly adaptive or formative. the human child is peculiarly susceptible, as regards mental and moral acquirements, to the nature of his surroundings. but this fact does not necessarily mean any more than what stephen asserts in the last of the three quotations above cited, namely, that the social medium is an essential factor of the result; it does not necessarily exclude the inheritance of moral or immoral tendency acquired under civilization or even by near ancestors. even in cases of the inheritance of the most extreme passion for alcohol, we cannot suppose that the taste would ever have manifested itself, had alcohol never come within the reach of the inheriting individual. the young kitten that has never tasted meat will snatch at a piece as soon as it scents it; but we cannot suppose that the evidently inherited taste for flesh would ever appear, did flesh never come within the range of its sense-perception. since a suitable environment must always be conceived as essential to the development even of the most inveterate inherited qualities, and since man's mental and especially his moral superiority has been developed in connection with social conditions, it is conceivable that, these conditions failing, his mental and moral development may show a lack coördinate with the degree of such failure. and here is an answer to those who, in contesting the theory of any moral inheritance, state their views in the final form that if any inheritance at all can be claimed, it can only be as a certain degree of readiness in responding to the conditions of civilization; _no_ inheritance can ever be anything more than this; the existence, to a sufficient degree, of complementary conditions in the environment is always necessary to the development of tendency. it is, therefore, conceivable that the child of civilized parents of a higher type of morality, if carried off, in infancy, by savages, might fail to exhibit the high character of its parents, just as it is conceivable and more than probable that it would fail to exhibit their higher intellectual gifts. it is also conceivable that the child of moral parentage may inherit the capacity of high moral development and yet fall into crime, if circumstances afford him no education save that of association with hardened criminals. we might only with reason expect to find, in the case of the supposed child abducted by savages, a certain mental acuteness applied to savage affairs and some greater degree of humane feeling, dominated, however, by savage conceptions; as also greater ease in the acquirement of civilized ideas and customs in case of a return to higher surroundings before maturity; and we might only expect to find, in the case of the child brought up among criminals, a greater degree of that primitive honor and faithfulness which may exist among criminals. modern reformatories have testified to the possibility of the redemption of a large number of criminals from their evil life, but they have shown, nevertheless, that there is a lust of cupidity, a love of meanness, and an animality from which rescue is almost if not quite impossible. the reaction of men whose past opportunities have been about equal, upon effort for their reform, exhibits also very different degrees of readiness. the testimony of reformatories for the young is especially of worth on this point; and i once heard mrs. mary a. livermore, whose interest in reformatories and prisons is well known, describe the faces of many of the children to be found in a certain institution of this sort, as bearing fearful witness to the fact that they had been "mortgaged to the devil before they were born." i remember a number of cases cited by the matron of a certain orphan asylum showing that children taken from their home at too early an age to have learned the sins of their parents by imitation may yet repeat those sins. out of three children of the same parents, the one of whom was a drunkard and prostitute, the other a thief, one developed, at a very early age, a tendency to dishonesty, another an extreme morbid eroticism, and the third child appeared to have escaped the evil inheritance; but he was still very young when i last heard of him. the two children did not exhibit these evil traits at their entrance to the home, but developed them later. and here it may be noticed that the fact of the unformed character of the infant does not prove that the tendencies which make their appearance in later life are wholly the result of the environment. it has been remarked by biologists and pathologists that inherited characteristics tend to appear at an age corresponding to that at which they appeared in the progenitor. the caterpillar does not undergo metamorphosis with a less regularity because it is not, in the beginning, a butterfly, and the beard does not the less appear in the adult human male because he was not born bearded. diseases of the brain often develop, for several generations, at nearly the same age, and there seems to be no reason why we should not suppose the like to be true in the case of many normal characteristics. ribot cites from voltaire the following case: "'i have with my own eyes,' he writes, 'seen a suicide that is worthy of the attention of physicians. a thoughtful professional man, of mature age, of regular habits, having no strong passions, and beyond the reach of want, committed suicide on the th of october, , leaving behind him, addressed to the council of his native city, an apology for his voluntary death, which it was not thought advisable to publish, lest men should be encouraged to quit a life whereof so much evil is spoken. so far there is nothing extraordinary, since instances of this kind are everywhere to be found; but here is the astonishing feature of the case: his father and his brother had committed suicide at the same age as himself. what hidden disposition of mind, what sympathy, what concurrence of physical laws, caused this father and his two sons to perish by their own hand and by the same form of death, just when they had acquired the same year of their age?'"[ ] ribot continues:-- "since voltaire's day, the history of mental disease has registered a great number of similar facts. they abound in gall, esquirol, moreau of tours, and in all the writers on insanity. esquirol knew a family in which the grandmother, mother, daughter, and grandson, committed suicide. 'a father of taciturn disposition,' says falret, 'had five sons. the eldest, at the age of forty, threw himself out of a third-story window; the second strangled himself at the age of thirty-five; the third threw himself out of a window; the fourth shot himself; a cousin of theirs drowned himself for a trifling cause. in the oroten family, the oldest in teneriffe, two sisters were affected with suicidal mania, and their brother, grandfather, and two uncles, put an end to their own lives.'... the point which excited voltaire's surprise, viz. the heredity of suicide at a definite age, has been often noticed: 'm. l----, a monomaniac,' says moreau of tours, 'put an end to his life at the age of thirty. his son had hardly attained the same age when he was attacked with the same monomania, and made two attempts at suicide. another man, in the prime of life, fell into a melancholy state and drowned himself; his son, of good constitution, wealthy, and the father of two gifted children, drowned himself at the same age. a wine-taster who had made a mistake as to the quality of a wine threw himself into the water in a fit of desperation. he was rescued, but afterwards accomplished his purpose. the physician who had attended him ascertained that this man's father and one of his brothers had committed suicide at the same age and in the same way.'... "a woman named olhaven fell ill of a serious disorder, which obliged her to wean her daughter, six weeks old. this complaint of the mother began by an irresistible desire to kill her child. this purpose was discovered in season to prevent it. she was next seized with a violent fever which utterly blotted the fact from her memory, and she afterwards proved a most devoted mother to her daughter. this daughter, become a mother in her turn, took two children to nurse. for some days she had suffered from fatigue and from 'movements in the stomach,' when one evening as she was in her room with the infants, one of them on her lap, she was suddenly seized by a strong desire to cut its throat. alarmed by the horrible temptation, she ran from the spot with the knife in her hand, and sought in singing, dancing, and sleep, a refuge from the thoughts that haunted her. hardly had she fallen asleep when she started up, her mind filled with the same idea, which now was irresistible. she was, however, controlled, and in a measure calmed. the homicidal delirium recurred, and finally gave way, only after many remedies had been employed." these are only a few out of the many instances that might be given of recurrence, at the same age or under the stimulation of similar conditions, of so-called pathological states. science has hitherto given more study to such cases than to the inheritance of healthful conditions, though the line between healthful mental conditions and mental disease is very difficult to draw, and the assumption that all suicides are more insane than many of the people who are regarded as sane is unwarranted; of course if one starts with the premise that suicide is always a symptom of insanity, then the conclusion follows naturally that all suicides are insane; but this is a mere argument in a circle. as far as the inheritance of healthy or normal mental characteristics is concerned, we do know at least, from general observation, that a child often exhibits, as it develops, more and more rather than less and less the characteristics of some progenitor; and this, moreover, in many cases where the possibility of imitation is excluded. observations might possibly be made here in a line with former reflections on man's adaptability and haeckel's theory of the prenatal existence of the individual as repeating the history of his species. in the case of postnatal as well as in that of prenatal existence, the action of the environment can no more be left out of account than can that of heredity; and the influence of favorable or of unfavorable conditions at corresponding periods of development may explain the exaggerated growth or, on the other hand, the dwarfed character or non-appearance of tendencies associated in their development with these periods. but at present such observations can be little more than speculation. we may at least say, however, that mr. leslie stephen's statement of the case, namely, that children "start with infinitely varying capacities" but that the environment of civilization is that which finally makes them what they become morally and mentally, should rather be reversed; for it is rather true that children are born into the world on about the same level mentally and morally (for we observe but little difference in the faculties of new-born babes), but that they by no means react, in development, upon the same or a similar environment in a similar manner. the case of the athenian baby, whose probable equality with the modern infant is used by mr. stephen as an argument that the human race has made no progress as far as innate qualities are concerned, would therefore scarcely be a case in point, even if it were capable of proof,--as it is not. but it cannot be called a case in point in any sense, the english baby with which mr. stephen compares the athenian infant not being of athenian descent. any comparison of this sort, to be of worth in the discussion of the element of heredity in human progress, must be between the baby of the primitive savage briton and the modern british infant. the athenians arrived at a high degree of social development; but the very fact that neither their civilization nor even that of rome was acquired by the less civilized races who were their conquerors is rather testimony in favor of the theory of the hereditary, organic character of the habits and capacities acquired in the course of civilization. nor have the athenians transmitted their type unmixed; there is no pure athenian or greek race at the present day with which we could compare the ancient greeks, even if we desired to affirm so great an independence of circumstances as would assure to such a race the unimpaired faculties of their ancestors in spite of all the changes in their environment which history records. not only the environment was changed and mixed; the stock, also, of that race which once regarded all strangers as barbarians became equally impure. and assuredly the comparison of the "average child of to-day" with an archimedes or a themistocles is anything but a fair one.[ ] taken with the qualification of the predicate which mr. stephen cautiously introduces in asserting that the innate qualities of the average modern child are not "radically" superior to those of the greatest ancients, it leads us to suspect that mr. stephen is not, himself, very thoroughly convinced of what he attempts to prove. we may agree with mr. stephen that "if homer or plato had been born amongst the hottentots, they could no more have composed the 'iliad' or the 'dialogues' than beethoven could have composed his music, however fine his ear or delicate his organization, in the days when the only musical instrument was the tom-tom"[ ]; for certainly no one can reach the same heights under an unfavorable environment that he might have attained under a favorable one; and that homer could have expressed, in the ruder poetry which he might still have composed among hottentots, the sentiments of the "iliad," or beethoven have produced his sonatas with the assistance of the tom-tom (provided that remained the only instrument after the appearance of an individual of such musical capacity as a beethoven), cannot be conceived. but it is also inconceivable that a beethoven, a homer, or a plato, could be born among the hottentots, if "to be born among them" means to be born of their stock. in order to make any direct comparison between the capacities of the descendants of civilized parents and those of uncivilized progenitors, we ought to be able to compare average results obtained in savage infants removed, in earliest infancy, to the advantages of civilization, with the average mental and moral acquirements of individuals born under those influences. we need to compare averages, i say, and not one or two individual cases alone; for, in order to assert the organic and hereditary character of human progress up to and under civilization, we are by no means compelled to prove a like advance in all parts of a nation or people, or even advance at all in every part. it is conceivable, and wholly in accordance with the general course of evolution, that types should remain stationary while other types are advancing, that lower types should continue to exist side by side with higher ones that have developed out of them, and even that, in some lines of descent, retrogression should take place while the species or a society as a whole is progressing. but our data for comparison of averages are not, by any means, as satisfactory as could be wished; for nowhere are the direct descendants of uncivilized races given equal advantages with those of the descendants of peoples already civilized. galton's comparison of the negro with the white man is, for this reason, too extreme in its conclusions as to the hereditary character of intellect. yet some general facts may be noted. and perhaps no better field for comparison is afforded us than the united states, where the white population is not the mere offshoot and tributary of a nation the great majority of whose better representatives inhabit a distant land, but an independent and successful nation, and where the negro race, while yet untutored, was suddenly endowed with a liberty nominally as great as that of the white man, together with a part in the government and a right to state education. this liberty may be, indeed is, in many parts of the south, a mere pretence, though even there toleration is gradually being acquired; but in the north the negro is treated on very nearly the same footing with the white man, the indignities offered him having their origin, for the most part, with former slave-holders, not with the born and bred northerner. negro children have free access to the northern schools, where they may often be seen sitting side by side with white children; and the best of american universities are open to negro students. if, then, the average of opinion, even in the north, maintains a certain amount of condescension towards the african, this condescension is no greater in degree than that maintained by the aristocracy of europe towards the so-called lower (not the lowest) classes, and in spite of which many have risen to prominence from those classes. indeed, the measure of condescension is rather less than the average manifested by master to underling in many european countries not so democratic as england; it would compare favorably with the attitude of the petty german officials to the ordinary citizen of the less well-to-do classes. it may mean discouragement, but there is no reason why it should, in all cases, mean failure. yet, as a fact, very few of pure negro blood have risen to any prominence whatever, and the average of intelligence appears comparatively low; the large majority of those who have risen to eminence have had some admixture of the blood of the white race. the american indian appears to be more capable of cultivation; but he has enjoyed fewer advantages than the negro. the indian children at the schools provided for them do not, however, appear to exhibit the degree of intelligence possessed by white children. on the other hand, the mixture of white and indian blood seems to produce, sometimes, rather more than the average of intelligence. the writer is acquainted with two cases of this kind. the first was that of the daughter of an ignorant indian father, who lived entirely by hunting and fishing, and of an almost as ignorant white mother. the child, who had at first no advantages save those afforded by a primitive district school, nevertheless early developed an insatiable love of study, gained access to a higher school, and finally to what was, in her time, the highest school for women in the country. here she did housework, during a course of four years, in order partly to pay her expenses, supplying the remaining sum for tuition afterwards out of her earnings as a teacher. by clothing herself, summer and winter, in cheap prints, she also saved enough to buy the time of a sister who had been bound out, assisted in the education of the rest of the family, and taught a school whose excellence is remembered and praised to this day. but the indian is commonly supposed to be of higher stock than the african negro; he certainly exhibits, even in his uncivilized state, a cunning, a courage, and a persistence, of a higher type than that of the african; and the superiority of a mixture between this alert type and the intelligence of the white man is thus explained. i repeat, though the subtle results of many minute accumulating influences of individual environment must undoubtedly be taken into consideration in our judgment of different races, the difference of opportunity does not seem to account fully for the great difference of attainment. it must be noticed, too, that, in comparing the negro with the white man in the united states, we have not compared a wholly savage people with a civilized one; for the negro has been, for several generations, in contact with civilization, and must have gained something from this contact. it is to be greatly doubted whether the infants of those siberians of whose pleasure in the suffering of other beings an instance was given above would, even under the best of influences, develop into individuals of much real benevolence. the average child of civilized society is somewhat callous to the sufferings of animals, partly because he does not realize the reality of those sufferings; yet i have seen lost kittens tenderly cared for by ragged little street urchins; and i have more than once heard small boys, playing in the gutter, exclaim at the beating of a donkey or a horse. the child repeats, perhaps, to some extent, the history of his race's origin in savagery. yet it is to be seriously doubted whether the children of the savages described as delighting in cutting their meat from living animals would attain, even under the most careful training, the average spontaneous humanity of the lad of civilized progenitors, or would ever become truly humane men and women. it is conceivable that superior mental and moral capacity may remain comparatively undeveloped, proper environment lacking, but we begin to see the fallacy of concluding, from such cases, the non-hereditary character of capacity when we suppose such cases as those above, of the rearing of savage infants under civilization. it must be added of the very isolated cases--of which much is often made--in which the children of civilized parents have been stolen by savages, at an early age, ( ) that it is not, and cannot be, maintained that all the descendants of civilized progenitors are endowed with superior mental and moral tendency; and ( ) that such instances are too few in number to furnish, alone, the basis of any theory. the evidence furnished us by the general results of neglect in the midst of civilization is more to the point; but, even in these cases, it must be shown that the children came of good parentage in order that the evidence may be admitted as telling against the theory of heredity. every breeder of animals counts with the greatest confidence upon the action of the laws of heredity; and no reason can be given why these laws should not work in the case of man, why he should be the one species exempt from them. it is impossible to cross the dog with the wolf without perceiving the result of the crossing, in the mental as well as the physical characteristics of the offspring; and the dog does not differ more from the wolf than does civilized man, in the most advanced nations, from the savage. even his physical characteristics, the contour of the head and face especially, the form of the features as well as the expression, are different and imply a higher type. and, in discussing lower types in the midst of civilization, we cannot do better than give some consideration to dugdale's remarkable book on the jukes, which has already been mentioned. in this book is traced the history of five hundred and forty persons belonging to seven generations of descendants of five sisters, there being much intermarrying among them. out of two hundred and fifty-two juke women, whose history is traced, thirty-three were illegitimate, eighteen were mothers of bastards before marriage, twelve the mothers of bastards after marriage, fifty-three were prostitutes (the cases of eight being unascertained), thirteen were barren, eleven kept brothels, thirty-seven had syphilis, forty-five received, at some time, outdoor relief, the total number of years amounting to two hundred and forty-two, twenty-four received almshouse relief, the time reaching a total of thirty-five years, and sixteen were committed for crimes for a total of one and three-fourths years, the number of offences being twenty-four. out of two hundred and twenty-five juke men, forty-nine were illegitimate, twenty were prostitutes, one kept a brothel, fourteen were afflicted with syphilis, fifty received outdoor relief, the time being, in total, two hundred and seventy years, twenty-nine were in the almshouse for a total of forty-six years, and thirty-three were committed for crime for a total of eighty-nine and a half years, the number of offences being fifty-nine. the lines with which the jukes cohabited or intermarried were naturally of a low moral type, but they do not show nearly as high a percentage of crime and pauperism; thus among the marriageable women of the jukes, we find the percentage of harlotry to be . , among those of the intermarrying or cohabiting lines only . . of the stock of ada juke, known to the police as "margaret, the mother of criminals," nine offenders were sent to prison for a total of sixty years, their crimes constituting fifty-four per cent of all the crimes against property recorded of the jukes, and including burglary, grand larceny, and highway robbery; besides one murder and three attempts at rape. dugdale thus describes his first acquaintance with the "jukes." "in july, , the new york prison association having deputed me to visit thirteen of the county jails of this state and report thereupon, i made a tour of inspection in pursuance of that appointment. no specially striking cases of criminal careers, traceable through several generations, presented themselves till ---- county was reached. here, however, were found six persons, under four family names, who turned out to be blood relations in some degree. the oldest, a man of forty-five, was waiting trial for receiving stolen goods; his daughter, aged eighteen, held as witness against him; her uncle, aged forty-two, burglary in the first degree; the illegitimate daughter of the latter's wife, aged twelve years, upon which child the latter had attempted rape, to be sent to the reformatory for vagrancy; and two brothers in another branch of the family, aged respectively nineteen and fourteen, accused of an assault with intent to kill, they having maliciously pushed a child over a high cliff and nearly killed him. upon trial, the oldest was acquitted, though the goods stolen were found in his house, his previous good character saving him; the guilt belonged to his brother-in-law, the man aged forty-two above-mentioned, who was living in the house. this brother-in-law is an illegitimate child, an habitual criminal, and the son of an unpunished and cautious thief. he had two brothers and one sister, all of whom are thieves, the sister being the contriver of crime, they its executors. the daughter of this woman, the girl aged eighteen above-mentioned, testified, at the trial which resulted in convicting her uncle and procuring his sentence for twenty years to state prison, that she was forced to join him in his last foray, that he had loaded her with the booty and beat her on the journey home, over two miles, because she lagged under the load. when this girl was released, her family in jail, and thus left without a home, she was forced to make her lodging in a brothel on the outskirts of the city. next morning she applied to the judge to be recommitted to prison 'for protection' against certain specified carnal outrages required of her and submitted to. she has since been sent to the house of refuge. of the two boys, one was discharged by the grand jury; the other was tried and received five years' imprisonment in sing sing. "these six persons belonged to a long lineage, reaching back to the early colonists, and had intermarried so slightly with the emigrant population of the old world that they may be called a strictly american family. they had lived in the same locality for generations, and were so despised by the respectable community that their family name _had come to be used generically as a term of reproach_. "that this was deserved became manifest on slight inquiry. it was found that out of twenty-nine males, in ages ranging from fifteen to seventy-five, the immediate blood-relations of these six persons, seventeen of them were criminals, or fifty-eight per cent; while fifteen were convicted of some degree of offence, and received seventy-one years of sentence.... the crimes and misdemeanors they committed were assault and battery, assault with intent to kill, murder, attempt at rape, petit larceny, grand larceny, burglary, forgery, cruelty to animals." but this book of dugdale's, which traces so clearly and thoroughly long lines of criminal descent, makes manifest, also, the influence of environment. we find, for instance, in the line of the illegitimate posterity of ada juke, generation five, the case of a male descendant, who was sentenced to sing sing for three years at the age of twenty-two, but who, leaving prison at the expiration of his sentence, abandoned crime and settled down to steady employment. a second case is that of another male descendant of ada, who assisted his brother in burglary at the age of twelve, and served probably some thirteen or fourteen years in prison, but later reformed and took to stone-quarrying, having learned, says dugdale, industrious habits in prison. a brother of this man, who had also served sentences in jail for assault and battery, and a term of two years at sing sing for burglary (the term beginning at the age of twenty-two), moved at the age of thirty-one into the same county as his brother, and went into the business of quarrying. a female descendant in the illegitimate line of ada, generation five, who seems to have followed a dissolute life up to the age of fifteen, at this point married a german, a "steady, industrious, plodding man," and settled down into a reputable woman. in the legitimate line of ada, again, generation five, we find the case of a girl "said to have been born in the poorhouse," who "was adopted out from there into a wealthy family, and is doing well." in all these cases, the reform was the result of contact, during the earlier period of life, with new elements inducing industry and sobriety. such cases might lead us to doubt the conclusions we should otherwise feel justified in drawing with regard to the action of heredity, and must certainly render us cautious not to impute the whole character of the individual to heredity alone. but the complicated nature of _all_ social relations should restrain us from laying all stress upon any one element in those relations, in any case. here, again, we recur to the conception of conditions and results in distinction from that of cause and effect. if statistics such as these of the jukes included minute and careful statements as to mental and physical characteristics and resemblances, they would undeniably be much more reliable basis for conclusions as to the hereditary nature of character. nevertheless, incomplete though this evidence be, it is by no means such that it can be logically disregarded. it is to be said of such cases of reform and respectability as those noticed under favorable influences ( ) that we are not informed as to its exact extent and motive and have no means of knowing what these were; ( ) that, if reversion to ancestral types is possible in the sense of deterioration, there is no reason why it should not be possible in the opposite sense also,--no reason why better characters should not, through, perhaps, some favorable prenatal influence at exactly the right period of development, occasionally crop out in a line of general baseness;[ ] and ( ) that the admixture of a strain of somewhat better blood may produce, or some especial crossing be favorable to, the development of higher character in a part, though not necessarily all, of the offspring. "when the domestic pig and the wild boar or the wolf and the dog are crossed," says ribot,[ ] "some of the progeny inherit the savage, and others the domestic instincts. similar facts have been observed by girou in the crossing of different races of dogs and cats." we know quite well that the same law governs the transmission of character in human beings. in a family of children, some will inherit the characteristics of the father, some those of the mother. mr. jenkins of the bureau of police of brooklyn, n.y., related to me a case that had come under his notice. of a family consisting of father, mother, two sons, and a daughter, the mother was a hard-working, honest washerwoman, while the father was depraved in his tendencies; and of the three children the daughter resembled the mother in character, the sons, on the other hand, their father. one of the sons was sentenced to prison for a bad case of burglary, and was shot while attempting to escape; and on the same day on which his picture was removed from the rogues' gallery, his brother's was hung in its place, the latter having, with calm deliberation and preparation, murdered a girl with whom he had some relation. a similar case is recorded by gall, where the mother represented the good, the father the evil stock, and of five children three were condemned to severe penalties for thieving, the other two lived correct lives. it is to be noticed that, of the three cases of better character among the jukes cited above, the two reformed characters were brothers. it is by no means proved by these cases that all or a majority of the jukes were capable, even under the best of influences, of a like betterment of character. on the contrary: the general characteristics of extreme licentiousness attaching to the whole family, on which dugdale lays special stress,--a licentiousness extending even to cohabitation and marriage with the negroes at a time when the latter were yet in slavery and regarded as little more than animals,--as well as the exceeding viciousness and inhumanity exhibited in some of the crimes (witness the attempted rape on the niece of twelve and the pushing of the child over the cliff), show a tendency of character much below the average. nor was the prison discipline which accomplished the reform of the two brothers the only opportunity of steady industry, or the prison the only reformatory environment afforded. dugdale mentions an "extensive employer of labor, located near the original settlement of the jukes," who "employs several members of it," treating them "with firmness and unvaryingly scrupulous fairness," interposing his authority and checking them in incipient crime. he acts as their banker and, as school trustee, arranges, "where widows depend upon their boys for support, that they shall work for him and go to school alternate weeks." if, indeed, the family is located, as it seems to be, in the rather sparsely settled districts of northern new york, it is scarcely likely to suffer great isolation, as it might in the midst of a city, or to be excluded from means of honest livelihood. dugdale mentions, indeed, that this employer "has not taken up this work as a 'mission,' but strictly as a business man, who, finding himself placed where he must employ the rude laborers of his locality, deals with them on the sound and healthy basis of commercial contract, honestly carried out and rigidly enforced." unfortunately, dugdale does not furnish us with any exact information as to the result of this very humane course of treatment. we can only revert to his remark that, though the jukes had lived in this neighborhood for generations where work was evidently not lacking nor kind and judicious treatment absent, their name was used generically, by the reputable community, as a term of reproach. we have already noticed some inconsistencies in stephen's theory of human progress as merely that of an accumulation of knowledge. but he practically contradicts, elsewhere in his work, this view of advancement. on page of the "science of ethics," he says distinctly: "as men become more intellectual, sympathetic, and so forth, they gain fresh sensibilities, which are not simple judgments of consequences hitherto improved, but as direct, imperative, and substantial as any of the primitive sensibilities." even if this statement were meant to apply to the individual alone, a great difficulty must lie in the way of any theory that sensibilities so inherent, sensibilities "as direct, imperative, and substantial as any of the primitive sensibilities," will not affect the character of descendants through inheritance, in the same manner as these primitive sensibilities are acknowledged to affect it. but elsewhere stephen remarks: "an instinct grows and decays not on account of its effects on the individual, but on account of its effects upon the race. the animal which, on the whole, is better adapted for continuing its species, will have an advantage in the struggle, even though it may not be so well adapted for pursuing its own happiness." he is careful to use the word "happiness" here, but the division under which the sentence appears is headed, "social and individual utility," and he distinctly states, on the preceding page, that the social instincts may be a disadvantage to the individual in the struggle for existence. he writes, in this connection: "the process by which the correlation of pernicious and painful states is worked out is one which, by its very nature, must take a number of generations. races survive in virtue of the completeness of this correlation."[ ] this is darwinism applied to humanity; and, surely, since the human race has existed in the social state for very many generations, we must suppose, according to the theory thus stated, continuous organic advance, even if we did not consider the passage in connection with the assertion of the gain, with increasing intelligence and sympathy, of sensibilities as direct, imperative, and substantial as any primitive ones. again mr. stephen writes: "it is true, generally, that each man has certain capacities for moral as for every other kind of development, and capacities which vary from the top to the bottom of the scale. no process of education or discipline _whatever_ would convert a judas iscariot into a paul or john."[ ] then education, the environment of civilization, is not the only factor in the production of character. nor is it, according to mr. stephen's own words, the only important factor. if capacities vary from the top to the bottom of the scale, then surely this variation cannot be an unimportant element of development. as a matter of fact, mr. stephen himself lays especial stress upon inherited characteristic as the basis of character. he says, for example: "the character is determined for each individual by its original constitution, though the character is modified as the reason acts.... but, after all, we start with a certain balance of feeling, with certain fixed relations between our various instincts; and, however these may change afterwards, our character is so far determined from the start. again, it is plain that this varies greatly with different peoples and gives rise to different types."[ ] surely the formation of types at least cannot be a matter of the individual alone. furthermore, mr. stephen distinctly asserts a growth of intelligence in the savage--which we cannot suppose to stop short with the beginning of civilization--while he especially emphasizes the fact that the emotions develop concomitantly with the intellect. he says also: "we assume an organic change to occur--no matter how--in certain individuals of a species, and that change to be inherited by their descendants; and thus two competing varieties to arise, one of which may be supplanted by the other, or each of which may supplant the other in a certain part of the common domain. some such process is clearly occurring in the case of human variations. everywhere we see a competition between different races, and the more savage vanishing under the approach of the more civilized. certain races seem to possess enormous expansive powers, whilst others remain limited within fixed regions or are slowly passing out of existence. so far as human development supposes an organic change in the individual [?], we may suppose that this process is actually going on and that, for example, the white man may be slowly pushing savage races out of existence. i do not ask whether this is the fact, because for my purpose it is irrelevant. we are considering the changes which take place without such organic development, not as denying the existence of organic developments, but simply because they are so slow and their influence so gradual that they do not come within our sphere. they belong, as astronomers say, to the secular, not to the periodic changes. confining ourselves, therefore, to the changes which are, in my phrase, products of the 'social factor,' and which assume the constancy of the individual organism,"[ ] etc. the passage is of importance as acknowledging the reality of organic progress; but it is full of the self-contradictions which we have already noticed. it starts with the darwinian assumption that organic change occurring in _individuals_ is directly inheritable by their descendants; this assumption, having done its office, however, is discarded, and we are told that any organic change cannot be that of individuals but must be that of societies, or at least that it must be of such sort that we have not only no need to consider it with regard to the individual life, but even no need to consider it in the study of the whole development of a society under civilization, or rather that we have no need to study it at all as soon as we have the "social medium" to fall back upon for an explanation of progress; and finally, in direct contradiction to the assumption first made, a constancy of the individual organism is asserted. this assertion is also in direct contradiction to the assertion before noticed that character is determined by original constitution and that original capacity differs "infinitely"[ ] in different individuals. we are indebted to mr. stephen for a very minute analysis of the influence of even smallest details of circumstance upon character; surely, while we are thus emphasizing the delicacy of nervous organization that answers, with the sensibility of a gold-leaf electroscope, to the slightest variations in the environment, we cannot logically leave out of account the results of such variation in inheritance because these, too, are minute. and surely we cannot conceive that an organism so sensitive to the influence of environment is yet so inflexible and unalterable as far as the transmission of its changes to offspring is concerned. on any sound physiological theory, we cannot avoid supposing that all these minute changes in character which stephen refers to the action of the social environment are accompanied by exact physiological equivalents. then either these changes of organization are not inheritable,--in which case the organism does not propagate itself but something different from itself, and we have no alternative but to resort to some such theory as that of weismann,--or else these changes are inheritable (subject, of course, to all the variations which individual circumstances of development must induce), in which case their inheritance must be of quite as much importance as their origin to any theory of social progress. as we have said, weismann has gradually come to admit _some_ influence of the environment on the germ-plasm. we can indeed conceive of the representation of all previous development of the species in the individual, and of the determination of the degree of importance assumed, in the organism, by any particular acquirement or tendency by the coincidence of circumstance, but we can scarcely conceive logically of a propagation of organization that does not represent all the influences which have made that organization what it is. even from stephen's standpoint, it is difficult to understand how the organization of society, which he admits to be no organization on the plane of the higher animal, but of a much lower type, can be of so much importance in the advance of mankind, its variations the condition of progress, and yet the much more interdependent organization of the animal body be supposed to remain constant and take no part in this progress. it is difficult to comprehend how so much stress can be laid on the mere external influence of the units of society on each other, and, at the same time, the far more intimate and direct influence of parents on their offspring can be deemed of so little importance as to warrant our disregarding it altogether. it is especially difficult to understand how it is that heredity can be disregarded, not merely in its influence on the individual or even on the generation, but in all its manifold, intricate, and prolonged workings since man first extended family life to tribal organization; and this, too, in spite of the acknowledgment that progress through heredity is real if slow. it is strange that there should always be a tendency to draw a distinct line between social man and all the rest of the animal kingdom, as if, when society began, all former laws ceased from operation. thus it is sometimes said that natural selection no longer acts on the individual because it acts on societies as wholes also; as well say that it cannot act on inner organization because it acts on the organism as a whole. as a matter of fact, it affects society through individuals, and the individual through, or rather in, his organization. if it is true, as stephen asserts, that change of social tissue is primary and fundamental to all external social change, it is not the less true that change of individual organization is fundamental to all change of external action. no theory of development which goes beyond the individual life and considers the progress of society as a whole can scientifically disregard the element of heredity in this progress. footnotes: [ ] i am indebted for these facts to dr. auguste forel. [ ] "ants, wasps, and bees," chap. v. [ ] "zur psychologischen würdigung der darwin'schen theorie." [ ] pp. , , translation by henry m. trollope. [ ] eng. ed. internat. scientific ser., p. ; quoted from "the zoölogist." [ ] "mental evolution in animals," p. ; cited from an article in "nature," . [ ] "animal intelligence," p. . [ ] "mind," vol. viii. [ ] lubbock: "the origin of civilisation," pp. , . [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. , . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ribot: "heredity." here we have examples which show that disease, as well as healthful organization and function, are subject to variation; and it may occur to us to wonder that no one has thought of referring these variations to some supernatural interference or special inner spontaneity; that theories which assume some transcendental agency or some spontaneously acting vital principle as the cause of normal, healthful variation have yet either left the variations of disease out of consideration or else simply referred them to influence of the environment. the reason for this, as far as transcendental interference is concerned, is evident; any theory of teleology in such cases must point to malevolent not benevolent design. [ ] "heredity," pp. , . quoted from the "dictionnaire philosophique," article "caton." [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. , . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] see previous observations on this subject, p. . [ ] "heredity," engl. trans., p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. , . [ ] ibid., p. . the italics are mine. [ ] ibid., pp. , . [ ] p. . [ ] see above, p. . chapter vi. conscience the exact circumstances which led, in any particular line of descent, to the final production of self-conscious altruism we cannot know. we may, perhaps, as has been hinted, trace the whole development to the original union of the sexes in lower, asexual species, and of mother and offspring; and we may suppose the final self-conscious altruism to have been led up to gradually by habit, in any case, the history of all function being gradual evolution. thus we may suppose it possible that, in some cases, the care of offspring may have been preceded by a habit of care, on the part of the female animal, for her eggs, which, as habit, was pleasurable, but was connected with no consciousness of the offspring produced from the eggs until some new circumstance of environment brought them within ken. of the development of habit in general and of pleasure in it, we have plenty of illustrations in our own individual experience, and we can even watch, in our own case, the process of the increase of altruism along old lines as well as its growth in new directions; and we may thus gain a conception of what must have been the general nature of its earliest development, in any case. in volume iii of "mind," paul friedmann has an interesting essay on "the genesis of disinterested benevolence," in which he relates the following: "a man had to throw away some water and, stepping out of his house, threw it upon a heap of rubbish, where some faded plants were nearly dying. at that moment, he paid no attention to them, took no interest in their pitiable state. the next day, having again some water to throw away, the man stepped out at the same place, when he remarked that the plants had raised their stems and regained some life. he understood that this was the result of his act of the day before, his interest was awakened, and as he held a jar with water in his hand, he again threw its contents over the plants. on the following day the same took place; the benevolent feeling, the interest in the recovery and welfare of the plants augmented, and the man tended the plants with increasing care. when he found, one day, that the rubbish and plants had been carted away, he felt a real annoyance. the feeling of the man was in this case real disinterested benevolence. the plants were neither fine nor useful, and the place where they stood was ugly and out of the way, so that the man had no advantage from their growth. nor had the man a general wish to rear plants, for there were a number of other plants sorely in want of care, but to which the man did not transfer his affections. he had loved these individual plants." friedmann says further: "formerly rather hostile to dogs, now that i have a dog myself, i feel well inclined towards the whole canine species, but most to that part of it which has some characteristic feature in common with my favorite." features of the first quotation may remind us of some former considerations of ours in which attention and interest were found to run parallel. we may take exception, however, to friedmann's definition of the extension of benevolent feeling from an individual of a class to the whole of the class or to beings resembling them in any way as "a sort of logical confusion." this view has already been criticised. the adult being at least does not confuse individuals, or even if he may occasionally do so, such confusion is not at all the distinguishing feature of progress in altruism; it is merely an accident, not anything that is characteristic. the recognition of old features in new objects is the opposite of confusion; it would rather indicate a logical confusion, a lack of intelligence, if we failed to remember that which has formerly given us pleasure, and to find, in similar objects, some renewal of that pleasure. it would have been just as logical, for instance, and more truly benevolent, if the man who tended the plants had cared also for the other plants mentioned as "sorely in want of care," and which he seems to have left to perish. we may often notice the growth of altruistic from egoistic as well as of egoistic from altruistic motives, in ourselves; for retrogression as well as progression in altruism is possible with the individual. if we feel bitterly towards some human being, for instance, the best and surest remedy is to perform some act of kindness towards him. we may contemplate and carry out the deed with merely a sense of gratification and egoistic elation at our own generosity, but we are more than likely to experience some degree of change of feeling before we have finished. on the other hand, our heart often seems to harden and fill with greater animosity towards those we have injured, the longer we continue this course of injurious action and the more positive the injury inflicted. a certain degree of generosity must, it is true, already exist in order that we may be able to show kindness to an enemy, just as hostility must also be present in order that we may be able to commence a course of injury or unkindness; but both kindly feeling and animosity increase constantly with their exercise. we are never exactly the same after our deeds that we are before them. says george eliot: "it would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives."[ ] and again: "the creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet, bruised and lost by the wayside--how we watch and fence it, and dote on its signs of recovery."[ ] whatever the particular circumstances that led, in the particular line of animal descent by which the species we distinctively term human finally came into existence, to the extension of temporary to life-long association, and whether this life-long association began only with man, or earlier with his ape-like progenitors, certain it is that increase of numbers must finally condition society. the internal, like the external process, is a gradual one, an evolution; and we cannot, therefore, suppose society as life-long association to have begun with the existence of no altruistic feeling whatever. in so far, darwin's assertion that the social instinct led men to society contains a measure of truth; but it is to be remembered that the social instinct at the beginning of social life cannot have been the same with the social instinct of present civilization, which is the product of long development; pleasure in function, its ends, and objects, increases _concomitantly with_ exercise. darwin's statement is, hence, liable to misconstruction. there is a similar truth in rolph's criticism of spencer's theory that men adopted social life because they found it advantageous, on the ground that men must first have had experience of the advantages of association before they could have been aware of them. but the experience which continually leads to a step in advance may not be, at every point, for every step, the experience of the individual or individuals taking the step; it is quite possible that some steps may be taken from the observance of the experience of others; at least this is possible if we suppose any degree of intelligence and reason in the individuals taking the step. the introduction of the idea of a calculation of advantages is, furthermore, exceedingly useful. for, while the "social instinct," the desire for and pleasure in all the various function connected with association with other beings, may be of assistance in bringing about any advance in association, the selfish instinct, already in existence before the evolution of any considerable degree of altruistic impulse, may influence and induce the advance, where the social instinct is not, alone, of sufficient strength. at the beginning of social life, as at every later point of advancement, motives are mixed, and selfishness may prepare the way for unselfishness. at any point of evolution, there must be, among contending species or individuals, some who are stronger or who have, through some circumstance, the advantage over the others; given even a moderate number of individuals, and it is hardly possible that all should be defeated and destroyed in any struggle, like the famous cats of kilkenny. this being the case, and change of organization being continually conditioned by contact with new elements of environment, advancement, evolution, becomes a necessity, no natural catastrophe occurring to destroy all life. there is no mystery about evolution in this sense. advancement in society is still more comprehensible to us by the fact of the element of reason involved in it; from the beginning of life-association among human beings or their immediate progenitors, the existence of some more intelligent individuals than the rest, who will perceive the advantages of association, may be assumed. and thus at each step, as the growing density of population continually renders increasing coöperation increasingly advantageous, we may suppose the vanguard to be composed of the more intelligent and the more social. sympathy prompts not only to the conferring of pleasure, it prompts also to the prevention of injurious conduct, on the part of others, towards the being or beings with whom sympathy is felt. a conception of the advantage of mutual aid may assist as a motive in this. the earliest mutual aid was, to a great extent, one of coöperation against enemies. in one way and another, this mutual defence must have extended to the compulsion of positive beneficial conduct, on the part of others, towards the being or beings with whom sympathy was felt. such compulsion may be exerted by different tribes, or by different members of the same tribe, on each other; the means of compulsion are revenges of different sorts, benefit, assistance of some sort, being, on the other hand, often the reward of ready compliance. this compulsion may be felt as greater or less according to the degree of reluctance to perform any form of action required under pain of the penalty. if the thoughts are occupied with the possible reward, and not with the punishment, then no outer compulsion is felt, but a choice of advantage is made. this choice again may not be wholly one of selfish calculation; some altruistic feeling may be involved. a form of action at first chosen with reluctance, and merely because of the fear of punishment or revenge, may come to be performed later without hesitation, and more under the hope of reward than the fear of punishment; and this same form of action may come to be performed finally with sympathy as the prominent feeling, the hope of reward becoming more and more secondary. each increase of sympathy, again, reacts upon the environment as represented by other individuals, and thus the relations and influence of men on each other become more and more complicated. any habit of cruelty or hostility which has been, at former stages, united with prosperity may thus become, through the action and reaction of increasing altruism, a disadvantage to the individual member of any society; or it is also conceivable that a formerly advantageous egoistic form of action may become disadvantageous through the advent of some new influence from outside the particular society in which it is practised. father phil, in lover's story of "handy andy," relates an anecdote of an engagement in spain, in which the dragoons of a regiment, retreating under hot fire, paused at the crossing of a river to take up behind them some women of the camp-followers, who had difficulty in crossing, and thereupon found themselves followed by cheers, instead of shots, from their french foes. i do not intend to intimate that the motive for the deed was self-interest; but it is easy to conceive similar instances in which humanity might become an advantage and be practised at first from self-interest, not by individuals merely but by a whole tribe; this must be frequently the case when less civilized peoples come in contact with more civilized peoples. and this leads us to remark that habits of sympathy and justice exercised within a people will be likely to manifest themselves in relations with other peoples also, in degree as the sympathy is real and the benevolence inward. but the attitudes of different peoples towards each other remain long hostile, since the partial surrender of tribal or national interests necessary to compact often involves too great sacrifices to be acquiesced in at an early stage of development. and the individual is necessarily influenced, to a great extent, by the feelings of those among whom he is born, with regard to the hostile nation. but this is retracing our analysis. altruism is thus increased directly by the perception and choice of coöperation as advantageous, by the spread of altruistic feeling and the compulsion of the social environment, as well as by the higher means of persuasion and affection, in which altruism itself affects the increase of altruism; and it is also increased indirectly by the aid of natural selection between individuals, families, neighborhoods, and groups of all sorts, coöperation becoming more and more advantageous with the increased density of population. it is scarcely necessary to remark that natural selection acts also with regard to the egoistic or personal virtues; for these have regard, primarily, to the preservation of the individual in the best condition for labor and cheerfulness. it is evident that in this direction also the moral must continually gain the advantage. either the injurious is perceived and avoided, or the individual failing to perceive and avoid it suffers physical injury and deterioration, and, unless a different course is adopted in time, brings at last destruction to himself or to his stock. but our analysis goes further; for the egoistic virtues are evidently not purely egoistic; and society will come with time to insist on this fact, and to render these virtues still more advantageous and their neglect still more disadvantageous; while the growth of the altruistic feelings will infuse the individual with the desire to perform his duty to others in this respect also. the purely egoistic character of so-called personal virtues, for the assertion of which so much has been written, is a myth. no man can make a sot of himself or indeed injure himself in any way without reducing his power to benefit society and harming those nearest to him. self-preservation and the preservation of one's own health may conflict with altruistic virtues at times; that is to say, virtues both of which are altruistic, though the altruistic character of one is more direct than the other, may conflict; in which case, choice is necessary. and it is strange to note, at this point, that just those systems which lay most stress on individual welfare, that is, emphasize the fact that the preservation of individual health and the development of individual capacity are advantageous to society, are the very ones that also defend the freedom of the individual to practise so-called personal vice. the two theories do not well accord; surely, if the individual is of so much importance to society, his vice cannot be without injurious results to it. only when egoistic care for health has become infused with the higher altruism, does it become truly virtue; then care for self ceases to be the mere means to isolated pleasure, and becomes the means to the happiness of others where it was often, before, the means to their misery, and even their destruction. in the evolution of higher animal forms from lower, the lower do not necessarily pass out of existence with the development of the higher; in society, however, the contact is close and continuous, and the competition unremitting; there is, therefore, some elimination, though a very gradual one, of lower types. the lower forms may exist for a long time beside the higher; in other words, society as a whole progresses slowly on account of the immense complication of relations within it. we find it including many grades of altruistic and egoistic virtue, and can testify only to a progress that renders the extremes of vice and cruelty less and less the rule and more and more the exception. and this brings us to the further consideration of a point not long ago touched upon, namely, the high degree of civilization attained by certain ancient peoples. not the whole race of man, it is evident, advances together to higher grades of civilization, as not all individuals or all lines of descent in the same society fall under the same influences and advance at a like rate. at the present date, the greater part of africa as well as portions of other countries are inhabited by rude and savage tribes, the rest of the world, not classed as savage, representing very many different grades and phases of progress. after the conquest of greece by rome and of rome by the tribes from the north, the higher degree of civilization of the conquered nations was partly lost by them and partly acquired by their conquerors; that is, nothing was really lost, but two different forces met and partly neutralized each other; the resultant represented, in this case as in all others, the complication, the algebraic sum, of the two. in the essay before referred to, dr. petzoldt calls attention to the extremely unique character of the productions of inner-african tribes before they have come in contact with white men, and cites bastian's testimony that even one short visit from a white man is often enough to destroy the peculiarity of the type. "new tendencies are introduced, and the stability is immediately diminished, though only to progress gradually to a newer, higher form." the comparative sparsity of the human race in ancient times rendered it possible for single isolated peoples to attain to a high degree of culture while the greater part of the earth was inhabited by the uncivilized; and the increase of the species since that time, though necessitating wider contact and closer relations, and so rendering the newer civilization necessarily a wider one, has yet not been sufficient to make isolated savagery in lands not reached by the spreading circle, impossible. the ancient civilization was lost, but not lost in the sense that its force ever perished; it found its full representation--but no more--in the result that arose from blending with a lower grade. the same process is being repeated wherever civilized man, on the borders of civilization, comes in contact with savage or half-civilized man. the two races may dwell side by side, separated from intimate association, but their contiguity is yet marked by a certain amount of change on both sides,--a change the greater the greater the degree of association and the greater the isolation of those on the border-lands from the rest of the civilized world, and the longer this state of things persists. we are here reminded particularly of fechner's formula of the process of evolution, in which the concepts of isolation as favoring the steady advancement of the process on its own peculiar lines, and of new contact as new disturbance from which issues new development, are most prominent. if we regard especially the ethical features of this contact at the borders, it may be remarked both that savages gain gradually more humanity from contact with civilized nations, and that white men, on the other hand, lose, in constant contact with savages, some of the humanity which they have displayed in the midst of their own nation. they grow used to sights of cruelty, much of which it is impossible for them to prevent; they are roused to anger, hatred, and retaliation by acts of deception, treachery, and cruelty, and they find, moreover, that kindness is often mistaken for weakness by the bloody and revengeful people with whom they have to do, who are often used to respect only or chiefly the brute force which can compel obedience. i do not intend here to represent the white man as the incarnation of sympathy and humanity; even in the midst of society, as we have already sufficiently noticed, his apparent altruism may be, to a large degree, the outcome of selfish motives, natural tendency being restrained through fear of punishment or hope of gain of some sort. there are grades within societies as well as grades represented by societies as wholes. but several things are to be taken into account in the comparison of the white man with the savage under circumstances of contact. in the first place, we have to remember that, while the white man is, to a great extent, withdrawn from the control of the society to which he belongs, secure from their judgment for the time being and with the prospect, often, of probable security from it for all time, since reports of his actions may never reach the ears of more civilized societies, the individual savage is still restrained by whatever of law and moral sentiment exists in his own tribe; his vengeance, whatever it is, is to a great extent under the control of his chiefs. again, the power of the savage to inflict injury is not so great as that of the white man, who has all the implements of advanced coöperation at his disposal. the mere love of power always presents a temptation, and pleasure in demonstrating superiority is a common human emotion. furthermore, it must be considered that the opportunities for selfishness afforded on the borders of civilization are likely to attract, in the majority, just those men whose social ties and social instinct are weakest, whose greed perceives here the opportunity of unscrupulous gratification, and is drawn by it. and lastly, it is to be noticed that not by any means all the individuals belonging to more advanced societies who come in contact with savages use them with inhumanity, or even retaliate on treachery and injury. the great differences exhibited, under such circumstances, by persons whose opportunities have been very similar is a strong argument in favor of inherent, innate grades of altruism, and so of hereditary character. the same is true of the fact that the greeks and romans did retain much of their culture even in contact with lower grades of civilization, handing it down, in a degree, to this day; and that their conquerors only in the lapse of many generations pulled themselves up to this level, which was attained, at last, rather in countries removed from direct contact with it and so, we may argue, to a great extent, through their own natural evolution. the general analysis of the amalgamation at the borders of civilization still remains true in the long run, however individual savages and individual white men may represent exceptions to it. mr. stephen's analysis of the development of altruism from egoism, while in the main true and one of the most minute analyses on this subject that we possess, opens, through its ambiguity of terms, the way to inaccuracy of thought and to errors of theory into which i am not at all sure that the author does not himself fall at some points. starting with an implied definition of sympathy as actual "feeling with" other sentient beings through the intellectual comprehension of their emotions, and acknowledging that sympathy in this sense may not lead directly to altruism, he uses the same word also, later in the analysis, in the higher sense, and at some points appears to confound the two meanings; so that, as there is a similar ambiguity in the use of the word "idiot," or "moral idiot," in the same connection, his theory seems to fall into the mistake of asserting the normal association of intellectual comprehension with altruism. he writes:-- "it is not more true that to think of a fire is to revive the sensations of warmth than it is true that to think of a man is to revive the emotions and thoughts which we attribute to him. to think of him in any other sense is to think of the mere doll or statue, the outside framework, not of the organized mass of consciousness which determines all the relations in which he is most deeply interesting to us." "the primary sympathy is, of course, modified in a thousand ways--by the ease or difficulty with which we can adopt his feelings; by the attractiveness or repulsiveness of the feelings revealed; by the degree in which circumstances force us into coöperation or antagonism; and by innumerable incidental associations which make it pleasant or painful to share his feelings. _if by sympathy we mean this power of vicarious emotion, it may give rise to antipathy, to hatred, rivalry, and jealousy, and even to the diabolical perversion of pleasure in another's pain._"[ ] "the pain given by your pain may simply induce me to shut my eyes. the pharisee who passed by on the other side may have disliked the sight of the wounded traveller as much as the good samaritan. indeed, the sight of suffering often directs irritation against the sufferer. dives is often angry with lazarus for exposing his sores before a respectable mansion, and sometimes goes so far as to think, illogically perhaps, that the beggar must have cultivated his misery in order to irritate the nerves of his neighbors. to give the order: 'take away that damned lazarus,' may be as natural an impulse as to say: 'give him the means of curing his ailments.'"[ ] "to believe in the existence of a sentient being is to believe that it has feelings which may persist when i am not aware of them. a real belief, again, implies that, at the moment of belief, i have representative sensations or emotions corresponding to those which imply the actual presence of the object. again, a material object has an interest only so far as it is a condition of some kind of feeling, and, when the sympathies are not concerned, of some feeling of my own, whether implying or not implying any foretaste of the future. to take any interest in any material object, except in this relation, is unreasonable, as it is unreasonable to desire food which cannot nourish or fire which cannot warm. i want something which has by hypothesis no relation to my wants. the same is true of the sentient object so long, and only so long, as i do not take its sentience into account. but to take the sentience into account is to sympathize, or at least the sympathy is implied in the normal _or only possible_ case. the only condition necessary for the sympathy to exist and to be capable therefore of becoming a motive, is that i should really believe in the object, and have, therefore, representative feelings. to believe in it is to feel for it, to have sympathies which correspond to my representations, less vivid as the object is more distant and further from the sphere of my possible influence, but still real and therefore effective motives. systematically to ignore these relations, then, is to act as if i were an egoist in the extremest sense, and held that there was no consciousness in the world except my own. but really to carry out this principle is to be an idiot, for an essential part of the world as interesting to me is constituted by the feelings of other conscious agents, and i can only ignore their existence at the cost of losing all the intelligence which distinguishes me from the lower animal."[ ] a similar use of the word "idiot" occurs in the following passage with regard to the relations of moral action to conviction: "it is a simple 'objective' fact that a man acts rightly or wrongly in a given case, and a fact which may be proved to him; and, further, though the proof will be thrown away if he is a moral idiot, that is, entirely without the capacities upon which morality is founded, the proof is one which must always affect his character if we suppose the truth to be assimilated, and not the verbal formula to be merely learned by rote."[ ] "_to learn really to appreciate the general bearings of moral conduct is to learn to be moral in the normally constituted man._" here the author adds, however, "though we must always make the condition that a certain aptitude of character exists."[ ] again he writes: "but it remains to be admitted that there is apparently such a thing as pleasure in the pain of others--pure malignity--which we call 'devilish' _to mark that it is abnormal and significant of a perverted nature_."[ ] and in the same connection--where he is, at first, seemingly intent on proving only the normal connection of pain with the sight of suffering, admitting that this sympathetic pain may lead to brutality instead of altruistic action towards the sufferer--he says: "sympathy is the natural and fundamental fact. even the most brutal of mankind are generally sympathetic so far as to feel rather pain than pleasure at the sight of suffering. the scum of a civilized population gathered to pick pockets on a race-course would be pained at the sight of a child in danger of being run over or brutally assaulted by a ruffian, and would be disposed to rescue it, or at least to cheer a rescuer, unless their spontaneous emotion were overpowered by some extrinsic sentiment."[ ] and finally: "_the direct and normal case is that in which sympathy leads to genuine altruism, or feeling in accordance with that which it reflects_."[ ] the terms in these passages are thus evidently very loosely used, and the charge above made is, i think, substantiated,--that the author himself finally falls into the error following upon a confusion of the various meanings, and comes to assert what he elsewhere distinctly denies, namely, the normal connection of intellect and morality, of the comprehension of suffering with that form of sympathy which issues in altruistic action. the problem is an interesting one, and it may be well for us to look into it a little further. during the last few years a number of books have been written in which the attempt has been made to prove the general physical, and especially the cerebral, and so the intellectual inferiority of a large number of criminals. there may be a difference of opinion as to the value of exact weights and measures except in so far as they demonstrate an actual nervous deformity of some sort; and it may be said that the cases examined for distinctly cerebral defect are too few to admit of the formation of any universal, definite, theory or law. but some degree of importance must assuredly be attached, by the unprejudiced reader, to the more purely psychological evidence obtained in many cases, as well as to the evidence of the tendency to brain-disease often found in the direct line of descent. indeed, in the case of some of the photographs issued with lombroso's "l'homme criminel," not more than a glance is needed to convince one that the possessors of such heads and faces cannot be normal men and women. to this testimony from the criminologists may be added that of many eminent specialists in mental diseases, whose evidence goes to show the degeneration of the moral sense in cases of brain-disease. maudesley says, for instance, of moral feeling: "whoever is destitute of it is, to that extent, a defective being; he marks the beginning of race-degeneracy; and if propitious influence do not chance to check or to neutralize the morbid tendency, his children will exhibit a further degree of degeneracy, and be actual morbid varieties. whether the particular outcome of the morbid strain shall be vice, or madness, or crime, will depend much on the circumstances of life." "when we make a scientific study of the fundamental meaning of those deviations from the sound type which issue in insanity and crime, by searching inquiry into the laws of their genesis, it appears that these forms of human degeneracy do not lie so far asunder as they are commonly supposed to do. moreover, theory is here confirmed by observation; for it has been pointed out by those who have made criminals their study, that they oftentimes spring from families in which insanity, epilepsy, or some allied neurosis exists, that many of them are weak-minded, epileptic, or actually insane, and that they are apt to die from diseases of the nervous system and from tubercular diseases."[ ] to the history proper of the jukes, dugdale has appended a series of tables giving further information as to the stock, environment, and present condition of some two hundred and thirty-three criminals committed for various crimes, each of which crimes heads a separate list. these lists are decidedly interesting, particularly as affording us some considerable information with regard to psychological characteristics and environment, under the headings: "neglected children," "orphans," "habitual criminals," "first offenders," "reformable," "hopeless," etc. from the table of percentages we remark that, in the "neurotic stock," the highest percentage ( · ) is reached in arson and the crimes against persons, or crimes of impulse, as dugdale terms them, while · is the percentage of neurotic stock in the whole number of criminals examined. "this close relationship between nervous disorders and crime," says dugdale, "runs parallel with the experience of england, where 'the ratio of insane to sane criminals is thirty-four times as great as the ratio of lunatics to the whole population of england, or, if we take half the population to represent the adults which supply the convict prisons, we shall have the criminal lunatics in excess in the high proportion of seventeen to one.'" dugdale further quotes from dr. bruce thomson, surgeon to the general prison of scotland, the following words: "on a close acquaintance with criminals, of eighteen years' standing, i consider that nine in ten are of inferior intellect, but that all are excessively cunning." dr. thomson says also: "in all my experience, i have never seen such an accumulation of morbid appearances as i witness in the post-mortem examinations of the prisoners who die here. scarcely one of them can be said to die of one disease, for almost every organ of the body is more or less diseased; and the wonder to me is that life could have been supported in such a diseased frame." but with regard to this last quotation, it may be remarked that, although many modern students of crime tend to look upon the general diseased condition of body among criminals as the cause of their criminality, it is generally, as a matter of fact, a cumulative growth, vicious acts appearing now as condition, now as result, in its increase. vice is directly connected with disease, and crime against others, even where it does not itself directly involve vice, is still likely to be connected with it, since the man who is immoral in one direction is not likely to be restrained from immorality in what is ordinarily considered a direction of lesser wrong; and the self-gratification of vice always presents a temptation to the man of coarser fibre. dugdale notices that pauperism often appears in the younger members of a family where crime appears in the elder branches, his explanation being that crime is a sign of comparative vigor, pauperism of greater physical weakness. we have found some connection between intellectual incapacity and moral lack in the shape of crime, but the cases are extreme ones. the question is not: are the extremes of criminality connected with mental incapacity? but, is the power of intellectual comprehension, is intelligence, always associated with sympathy and altruism? is the connection of these two general? or, conversely: is lack of sympathy and altruism in general a sign of mental incapacity, of the power of comprehension for another's suffering? the individual may be supposed to be naturally endowed with a certain basis of tendency, which, as coördinate with a nervous organization that, as organization, is of definite nature, is also definite. i do not intend, here or elsewhere, to lay especial stress on the physical, as distinguished from the psychical; merely, it is convenient for reference. the individual character and life must be the continual progressive issue of this basis of tendency or capacity and the developing and modifying factors of environment. individuals will, therefore, _but in very different degrees and manners_, reflect the moral standard of the society as organization, the class, and the family, to which they belong, the importance assumed by the class or family relations being according to the closeness and duration of association, and the natural aptitude of the individual for one or another sort of influence. aside from altruistic considerations, the individual will find it to his advantage to conform to the standards of these environments, at least in a considerable degree. the standards may, however, conflict, so that there is also a conflict of advantages. moreover, circumstances may arise such that conformity to all or any of these standards presents much greater disadvantage than advantage, involving great sacrifice, which may reach even to personal destruction. but while a single anti-social act to avert personal destruction may involve greater advantage to the individual, as life represents an advantage over death, and while such an act is more an advantage and less a disadvantage as it involves less conflict with social standards (if it is the theft of food, for instance, rather than murder), any continued course of crime in so-called civilized society must be attended with many risks to the evil-doer, and present gain may mean future loss of a much higher degree. deeds conflicting with general social standards are punished by penalties which are larger as the conflict is greater in the eye of the state. the individual who lays himself liable to legal punishment or social ostracism is foolish as well as, in very many cases, bad; of course, it is possible that his conduct may rise above the moral standards as well as that it may fall below them. but we are now considering cases where it is, by the assumption, supposed to fall below them. it is easy to perceive, from this standpoint, that great and persistent criminals are likely to be of inferior intellect, as well as wanting in moral aptitude, although, whatever reasoning capacity they possess being developed in the line of their own interest in their accustomed occupation, they may appear to the more moral, who are not practised in this direction, to possess a high degree of cunning. the honest man has generally a better chance than the habitual criminal, however small his chance may be. further, education of any sort, which is also intellectual elevation, gives the individual better chances of earning his own living honestly, and so renders the advantages on this side greater, and also endows with the power of perceiving these advantages. but these are only general truths, applying, again, to extreme cases. there may be cases in which there seems, at least, to be no choice left between crime and a life continually on the verge of starvation; and though the crime means also continual risk, and higher risk as the crime is greater and so, in general, more lucrative, the advantage may still be reckoned by the individual as on its side. in this case, the individual may discover, in the end, that his calculation was mistaken; but the mistake may not be so great, the balance of disadvantage on the side of conformity with social standards so excessive, as to prove him below the average of intellect in his mistaking. the wisest men make many mistakes in calculating the results of their action. again, the cleverer a man is, the greater is his power to cope with the risk of detection and to avoid it. it may be objected that the single individual cannot hope to compete continually with the organized action of all society, and that the criminal must, at times, submit to some degree of punishment, even if escaping its worst phases. but if he feels no shame at the disgrace of the punishment, it may not mean to him the greater disadvantage. but here we come round to the altruistic and moral emotions, for shame is present only where the individual has a desire to please, and is pained at the disapproval of others; that is, shame implies and requires, in the degree in which it exists, social and altruistic capacity. furthermore, when we come to examine the concept of "advantage," we find that it is as relative as that of "end," and will be judged according to the individual predilections; to the non-sympathetic, shameless man it is an advantage to "get on" at whatever cost to others; to the moral man no gain appears an advantage at the expense of principle. and, as there are all degrees of altruism in the bases of character of different individuals, so the advantage, in any particular case, will lie at very different points according to the individual mind reflecting on it. only the general truths may be asserted, that, even to the man of less than the average moral aptitude, great punishment must appear a disadvantage, while even to the man of considerable moral principle death for the sake of his convictions is a thing to be hesitated at. we may return to view the question in the light of the general facts of social evolution. we found that only the general assertion could be made, that the advantages of coöperation, the disadvantages of strife and discord, increase with the closer relations of men, and that the adoption of coöperation follows this line of advantage by individual choice, and by the disadvantage under which the less social as the less fit, labor, the latter tending gradually to disappear leaving the field to the more social. thus the whole progress is the result of the will of the human being, as well as of the other forces of nature; it is only as the individual chooses, that progress is possible. but lower types survive long beside the more progressive, higher ones. the individual is not so reasonable that he always perceives his own more enduring advantage, or always chooses it even when he perceives it; he may choose momentary gratification at the acknowledged risk, and even with the certainty, of great future loss. nor can it be averred that the individual always suffers seriously from action at variance with even the average standard; simply, the line of survival gradually changes in favor of altruism, so that escape is less frequent and less probable; and the lines of greatest deviation from the altruism demanded at any period by the line of advance tend to disappear; but the altruism demanded by any line of advance is not, up to the present time, an absolute altruism, nor do all deviations from it result in destruction to the individual even in extreme cases. the fact of the growing disadvantage of selfishness, and its destructive tendency, remains, nevertheless. it may be expressed in another form in the statement that power of all sorts is increased by civilization, and where a coördinate increase of self-restraint does not accompany the increased power, it must lead to destruction, either in the case of the individual, or if not so abruptly, then in the case of his descendants. the closer contact of human beings and increased knowledge and coöperation mean growing opportunity of good or evil, to self and others. the destructive forces lie as well in the workings of social organization, in the will of man, as in nature outside man. legal justice, public opinion, and the opinion of the smaller circle of personal friends and acquaintances, all have their part. any degree of social instinct developed in the course of social evolution only assists in rendering social punishments of all sorts the more felt; and thus each increment of advance assists in further advance. men who persist in action antagonistic to social demands, action which they themselves acknowledge to be immoral, may yet feel the condemnation of society so much, that, even while yet persisting, they destroy their vitality by alcoholism or other excesses to drown regret and remorse; habit chains them, in many cases, where the condemnation of others reaches them only late. but the whole process of social evolution is one of very gradual assimilation, and neither in the world as a whole, in the nation or race, or in the tribe, clan, family, locality, or class, is it one of equal advance on all sides. the coöperation adopted may be, at different points, that of individuals against individuals, of tribes against tribes, of nations against nations, or of classes against classes. from still another point of view, we may look upon the evolution of man as an intellectual as well as a moral one. we may count the continual gain of new experience, and the variation of thought, feeling, and will in accordance with knowledge, as adjustment to new elements of the environment, and so, as organic progress. since, indeed, knowledge and the application of knowledge to more and more distant and more and more complex and general ends is just what we designate as higher reason in man as compared with other animal species, we cannot logically regard the further progress of this same sort in the human species itself as other than an increase of reason. here, again, it is strange that an exact line of division between the human species and the rest of life should so often be drawn; that, although we acknowledge the necessity of an intellectual evolution having taken place from the lower species up to man, and recognize this intellectual evolution as the concomitant of wider adaptation, and although we recognize also man's continuing adaptation or experience as coördinate with progress in knowledge, we yet should be able to regard the human race as stationary as far as reason, intellect, is concerned. evolution no more stands still in man than it did before his "advent" (if we may still use a word denoting a definite beginning, of the evolution of a species). and the reality of an intellectual evolution at the same time with the moral evolution being acknowledged, it follows that the two must to some extent coincide.[ ] but we have again to remember that the evolution is not on exactly the same lines in all individuals or parts of society, that not all lines of descent may be called also those of progress. sympathy is a progressive term; there are numberless degrees of it represented by the different individuals who form society, at their different periods of development and in their different moods. nor can we distinguish between natural sympathy and "extrinsic sentiment" which may interfere with it; since feelings are no separate entities, all sentiment that bears on a subject is intrinsic, and the final sympathy or non-sympathetic feeling is a fusion and not a mere mixture of the various emotions which go to make it. we cannot assert that "genuine altruism" is the normal case, even of the present period of social development, and certainly not when we are considering morality as an evolution. we may hope that the standard of future generations will come to be as much superior to our present standard as that standard is superior to the savage standard; but it is scarcely to be expected that the men of that better time, although they may look back at this age with as much horror as that with which we regard the savage children roasting their dog for sport, will pronounce it one of general idiocy or even of "moral idiocy." the virtue of stephen's analysis lies in the especial notice it takes of the different degrees and phases of that which we term "sympathy"; its fault lies in not sufficiently distinguishing between these phases, by definition, throughout the argument; and this fault leads, as we have seen, to a final confusion of the different meanings, the substitution of the one for the other, and so the proving of the higher meaning by the lower. it is scarcely true, even in civilized society, that a comprehension of the feelings of others is naturally associated with a "feeling with" them, even in the lower sense; and it is certainly not true that it is naturally associated with genuine altruism. the assertion that, in ignoring the sentience of living beings in thought about them, a man is ignoring a thing of importance to himself, is coördinate with the assertion that, in so doing, he is ignoring "an essential part of the world as interesting" to him; for that which appears of importance to a man is that which interests him; and it is true that interest and attention are coördinate. but one thing may appear to one man important, another to another. we generally consider a thing in the relations and phases which interest us, but not all its relations or phases always interest us. we do not follow out all the possible lines of thought connected with a thing, we do not regard it in all its aspects every time we think about it; we think more or less by symbols or parts; and stephen says that we feel by symbols also.[ ] it is by no means true of all men, or true of any man at all times, that others are most deeply interesting to him in their relations of thought and feeling; there are many cases where they would be quite as interesting if they were mere automata, provided only that they could be depended on to perform the same actions. and it is perfectly possible to regard them in the light of their actions and the significance of these for us, leaving quite out of account the psychical meaning of the actions, and this also without at all "losing all the intelligence which distinguishes one from the lower animal." nor is sympathy coördinate with interest in the thoughts and emotions of others; revenge is very normal, yet it rejoices in just the fact that the living being can be made to suffer. the irritation noticed by stephen, as sometimes directed against others whose suffering is a source of pain, is of especial interest as bearing on the habit of some animals--wild cattle, for instance--of setting with fury on a wounded comrade, and putting him to a violent death. a recent writer has attempted to explain this habit as a frantic and unintelligent endeavor to render some assistance to a suffering friend; but the explanation seems improbable, especially as we find a corresponding impulse to cruelty even in human society of a higher type. in the action of the animal, there is the possibility and even the probability of still another impulse--that excitement and exhilaration which seems to possess many species at the sight and smell of blood, and which finds its counterpart in the peculiar pleasure that many men of coarser sensibilities derive from bull-fights, prize-fights, cock-fights, etc., and that doubtless comes down to us from a time when the struggle for existence was continually a bloody one. just how the two instincts may be related in the animal, it is difficult, from a human standpoint, to say. our analysis has hitherto omitted all definition of morality and conscience. the words should properly, for some reasons, have been defined before this. but any definition must have assumed that which could logically be asserted only at the end of the preceding considerations. the definitions are involved in these considerations. it is evident that morality, as we ordinarily define it, has a very intimate connection with the relations of individuals to each other; and though we may conceive of a morality of the individual passing an entire existence in solitude on a desert island devoid of animal-life, we become aware, when we reflect on the condition of such an imaginary personage, that many of the ordinary grounds of moral action, and moral judgment of action, are wanting in his case. such a person cannot, by our assumption, beget others who may inherit his psychical and physical qualities, and cannot injure man or beast directly or indirectly. he has only his own welfare to consider, and if he chooses rather an animal indulgence in such pleasures as may be within his reach, we may possibly disapprove of his conduct, but we cannot find especial grounds for asserting that he has not a right to his choice. it may be said that this case is only imaginary, and that, in all actual cases of such isolation there is no certainty that the individual may not, at some future time, come in contact with other living animals or with human beings. but this being admitted, we immediately come back again to the conception of morality as dependent upon our relations to others. in spite of all that has been said in favor of egoistic morality, of duties to self as the source and reason of morality, it becomes evident that altruism is a most important element of even that which we term egoistic or personal morality. in fact, we find difficulty in distinguishing, on a higher plane, between the duties of egoism and those of altruism; in both we have to consider others as well as ourselves. and we begin to suspect that we are making a mistake in separating, in a definition, things which must be indissolubly united in actual practice; and we surmise that such a mistake may lie at the root of the many disagreements as to whether the preference is to be given to egoism or to altruism in ethics. in all evolution, the results of former adaptation are not lost in new; merely the old assumes a higher form. so egoism is not lost in altruism, but assumes a higher form; the care for self becomes identical, according to the degree of altruism, with the care for others. this fact has been utilized for the assertion that all altruism is merely egoism. the argument commits the fallacy of using the word "egoism" in two senses, the one of which, the higher sense, is used to prove the other. we need to remember that the fact of development implies degrees, and that neither egoism nor altruism is an absolute term. a certain care of self, physically and mentally, is necessary to cheerfulness, health, sympathy, and the due performance of labor and kindnesses; just as, conversely, in society, the health and happiness of the individual are dependent upon the aid of others. the antagonistic character of the two principles is gradually modified in evolution and disappears altogether in some cases of action; in the contemplation of the ideal, it vanishes completely. care for self gains a new significance in the light of love or affection for any other being, and in the action and reaction of character in human society, this newer significance gradually spreads, leavening the whole of mankind. our analysis is unable to trace its workings and significance in all the complicated relations of men. in like manner it is difficult to decide, in any particular case, what the exact course is, which, in view of the far-reaching results of an act through the action and reaction of these relations, is the right one. the moral decision must be reached through a consideration which should be nearer the ideal, the nearer it comes to a consideration of all results, a due allowance being made for the uncertainty of distant results. this uncertainty must, other things being equal, diminish the influence of considerations of the far future on the decision, and should properly do so; although relative importance may, again, render the mere possibility of some one result a sufficient reason for choosing or abstaining from an act in the face of all other certainties and probabilities. again, the power of calculating distant results is increased with the growth of knowledge, and man comes, thus, to obtain greater and greater power to shape the world about him and mould his own life to the attainment of his ends. with this power responsibility is also increased; the adult thief who rears children to theft bears the chief responsibility in the beginning of their career, and a very large share of it later on; the experienced man of the world, who understands whither he is tending, is much more responsible than the ignorant girl whom he seduces. the highest morality demands, therefore, careful judgment. the factors to be considered are the complicated relations of men in the society of which the judge and actor himself is a member; morality may thus be identified with justice in the highest sense of the word. the decision is always a difficult one on account of the great complexity of the factors concerned; this every man perceives who endeavors, with unbiassed mind, to discover exactly what the most moral course is in any particular case. some one course may be evidently immoral; but that does not necessarily decide what the moral course is, for there may be very many courses open to choice, or there may be at least more than one other as alternative to the manifestly immoral one. moreover, the necessity for action forbids that we spend all our time in reflection and choice. moral responsibility demands, however, that we never cease from the endeavor to discover where justice lies. a certain constancy in the constitution of society, and the necessity for constancy or consistency in the action of the individual, give rise to certain general rules of conduct that develop and change somewhat as society changes; special rules of conduct which supplement these general rules change constantly. in the societies of a primitive sort, held together by only the loosest of bonds, personal retaliation is in vogue and is considered moral. revenge is a duty. in societies of a higher sort retaliation is taken from the hands of the individual in all matters of importance, at least as far as the revenge consists in definite action, the motive of which can be demonstrated. the englishman may still knock down the man who insults him, but he may not avenge a murder. not only the negative morality of abstinence from violence is demanded of the citizen of a so-called civilized society, a certain reliability in the relations of coöperation is also necessary for the general welfare, and thus honesty comes to be encouraged and dishonesty to be discouraged by legal punishment and social contempt. dishonesty in word is not so often punished directly by law as dishonesty of act, but there are many cases where it is impossible to distinguish between the two, and other cases where the lie is directly punishable because of the consequences which it involves. beyond this, society begins early to discourage lying in some sort, though the love of and respect for truth obviously grows with social development. coördinately with the development of coöperation and mutual dependence, constancy in all the multifarious directions and complex relations of that coöperation and dependence, becomes more and more desirable. but constancy is not to be secured as an outward fact except as it becomes a part of the inward character of men, a constant habit. the man who lies occasionally is in at least some danger of developing a habit in the direction of lying, as he is also in danger of destroying the confidence of others if they discover that he sometimes lies; for they have no means of knowing to exactly what extent untruthfulness is, or is becoming, a habit in his case, or in what instances it may manifest itself, in what not. moreover, the distrust so engendered may lead to anticipatory deception on their side, and so the circle of distrust and untruthfulness spreads until it is met somewhere by determined truth that demands truth in return. thus, in spite of all that is said in favor of the occasional lie, we instinctively feel the danger of it, though we may not be able, until after much consideration, to assign the exact reason for our feeling. we may admit that there are occasions when the lie may be justifiable; but we feel that these occasions must, then, be very exceptional. in general, it is desirable to discipline ourselves to as close an approach to the truth as possible. if i lie in a dozen instances, in what i consider a good cause, i am very likely to lie again when the temptation of some merely personal gain presents itself. the habit of truth or falsehood is, further than this, one of the most subtle and intricate relations in our character: nothing is more difficult than the facing of the exact truth with regard to ourselves; cowardice and self-deception with regard to our own traits and motives are very common, and only the most earnest and constant effort can enable us to gain that moral courage that is the first requisite of self-knowledge and so self-control. any weakening of the will in the contrary direction is dangerous. truth is not an easy thing; it is as difficult as justice; in fact, that which is justice in action and the judgment which leads to action, is truth in the premises of which the judgment is the issue. we have most of us known persons who had so accustomed themselves to lying that they seemed no longer able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, facts and mere impressions. certainly where matters of high importance which deeply concern the public welfare are at stake, we cannot admit falsehood to be desirable for the sake of any personal gain; and even though we may find excuses for the failure of human courage in the face of mortal danger, there are those of us who will still continue to think a bruno's defiance of death for the sake of his conviction the nobler and better choice. i have heard it argued that this philosopher might have contributed more to the world through a continuation of his life than he did through his death. but surely it was one of the highest services that he could do mankind to show a superstitious and dogmatic age that high moral purpose and steadfastness were not necessarily associated with this or that religious dogma. his death drew the attention of thoughtful and good men as nothing else could have drawn it. but beyond this consideration, and even leaving out of account the desirability of the habit of truth and the necessity of its action in the single instance, it is doubtful whether there is any other benefit we can confer on our fellow-men so great as just the assurance that they can rely on us. the bitter cry of human nature everywhere repeats the faithlessness of those on whom trust has been staked; and the rescue of many a man from despair and waste of life has been through the discovery of some one soul whose truth and constancy were steadfast and unchangeable. belief in others is belief in our own possibilities; and distrust of others is distrust of self, at least for the most thoughtful and introspective men. the examples of such men as socrates and bruno stand to the world as pledges of the power of faithfulness in humanity. they are the rocks on which pessimism must shatter, and the betrayed and sorrowful may build their faith. this is, i believe, the secret of our veneration for such men as these, who died, not in an ecstasy of religious emotion or under the hope of especial glory as a reward for martyrdom, but faithful to a calm conviction, and sustained only by the love of truth and their fellow-men. and this brings us to a consideration of the sacrifice of the individual. the cases may be few where the highest standard can demand of a man such entire and final sacrifice as the instances we have just noted, even though it may look upon this sacrifice as the highest. but it is evident that some degree of self-sacrifice is often necessary to the welfare of society, and however important we may consider the welfare of the individual, it cannot be regarded as more important than the welfare of the whole of society as an aggregate of many individuals, or even as more important than the welfare of a large number of other individuals, a considerable portion of society. the legitimate degree of sacrifice, where interests conflict and choice is necessary between the sacrifice of the single individual and the sacrifice of many, is a question that can be decided only according to the particular circumstances of the case. everything depends upon the number of individuals on both sides, whose interests conflict, on the nature of the sacrifices necessary, and the results of these sacrifices to the society as a whole, as well as, in some cases, on the character of the individuals concerned. it is often denied that the nature of the individuals whose interests conflict, between whom choice must be made, can ever affect that choice if it is made under principles of justice. and in general, doubtless, there is danger of injustice in distinctions between individuals; but it is scarcely to be doubted that, if it were necessary to choose between the life of a great philanthropist and that of a persistent and hardened criminal, if, for instance, both were drowning and it were possible to save only one, the choice of most would fall, and fall rightly, on the philanthropist. the fact that moral choice must take different directions under different circumstances is sometimes construed into an argument against any fixity of moral commandments, an argument for a narrow expediency. it certainly establishes the rule that obedience to any rule of action should never be blind. nevertheless, if our preceding considerations be correct, the uniformities in social relations admit of the establishment of certain general rules which the moral man will follow under most circumstances. we come finally to the definition of conscience. in humanity as a whole, and in the single societies of which it is composed, a certain moral evolution may be perceived which we have found reasons for believing to be internal as well as external, a matter of heredity as well as of instruction. in this internal sense, conscience, as innate capacity, or tendency, may be said to be an instinct. we may not be able to explain how the inheritance takes place in this case any more than we are able to explain how it is possible that the chicken just from the shell may pick at his food without instruction, and just what psychical process, if any, accompanies the first performance of the act; or to explain how it is that the sexual instinct appears in later life as an inheritance of species, and why it acts uniformly. we can only say that, the proper conditions of stimulation (which are always necessary in the case of any instinct) being present, the action takes place. we are unable to analyze the earliest appearance of sympathy, benevolence, and the sense of obligation, in our individual experience, the power of self-analysis appearing much later in life. that which, when we become capable of reflection, we term conscience, consists in pleasure in forms of action furthering the welfare of society--forms gradually moulded to habit with the development of social relations,--and in a corresponding pain at the realization of having failed of such action; the knowledge of the demand, by society as a whole or by a part of society, of action in accord with the general welfare, and the sense of the justice of this demand, constituting the feeling of obligation and duty. this feeling is early nourished in the family, the obligation we acknowledge being towards our parents first and foremost. we have found motives to be often of a mixed character; and this is often also the case with remorse, the pain we experience at having failed in our duty. it may contain an egoistic element of regret or dread at having rendered ourselves liable to punishment or loss of some sort. our whole analysis of the course by which conscience is developed tends to show the truth of that which darwin claimed, namely, that the moral instinct is a development and organization of many special instincts. but there are those who claim conscience to be a special sense, and who generally mean much more than merely that it is, at present, an organization of subordinate instincts. a dim analogy of the special sense organs generally has part in their conception, and religious reference is often made to "the original constitution of man." but evolution knows nothing of an original constitution of man; it knows only of a gradual development of the human. and it must be remembered that, in evolution, that may become inherent which was not so before. any theory which regards even an organization of special instincts as a special sense may, moreover, be objected to on the same grounds on which the old idea of special faculties of thought, feeling, and will was criticized. the old argument, used to prop the belief in conscience as an original, higher gift, and so, in the original creation of fixed species,--the argument that the same fundamental rules of moral conduct are to be found in all societies,--has already been answered in the demonstration that uniformities of human nature and necessary similarities in all social constitution render the fundamental rules of forbearance, aid, honesty, and truth necessary to all societies alike; while our analysis of the course of development by which social organization grows more and more complex, shows the necessity as well as the reality of progress in outward and inward observance of these rules. du prel argues that even life on any of the heavenly bodies, supposing such to exist, must have some points of resemblance to our own, although the differences due to different planetary conditions may be great; but resemblances must assuredly be considerable where there is a common basis of species. the utilitarians are doubtless right in asserting that all rules of morality may be traced to utility. however, there is considerable ambiguity about the word "utility." mr. spencer's earlier objections to utilitarianism, given in "social statics,"--namely, that we cannot make the greatest good of the greatest number our object because it is impossible to perceive, without omniscience, where the greatest good lies, and because the standard of utility is a changing one, cannot be regarded as apposite, for we might as well say that a man cannot endeavor to secure his own health, or that it is not well for him to do so, because he does not possess a knowledge of all the intricate workings of the organs of his body and so may make mistakes, or that he cannot seek it to-day because the conditions necessary to secure it will have changed by to-morrow; but mr. spencer's later objections to utilitarianism touch an important truth. he says, for instance, in his "recent discussions in science, philosophy, and morals": "utility, convenient a word as it is from its comprehensiveness, has very inconvenient and misleading implications. it vividly suggests uses and means and proximate ends; but very faintly suggests the pleasures, positive or negative, which are the ultimate ends, and which, in the ethical meaning of the word, are alone considered." stephen has another pertinent criticism of utilitarianism, namely that the utilitarian, in his anxiety to have his feet on solid earth, and to assign definite and tangible grounds for every conclusion, is likely to favor the prosaic rather than the poetical, and to leave out of account, or rank as of little importance, finer sorts of pleasure.[ ] the utilitarian is, in fact, liable to fall into a similar error to that already noticed on the part of those who claim that egoism is the foundation of all morality, present as past. while accepting the theory of evolution, the utilitarian fails to perceive, in many cases, that this lends to his terms a progressive and increasingly complex meaning. the error has its source, doubtless, in the fact that the utilitarian school represents a recoil from the older, superstitious intuitionalism, which not only defended a doctrine of conscience as a sort of supernatural or half-supernatural instinct, on a plane above ordinary instinct, but, relying upon it as of such character, practically denied to reason any authority in matters of morality. in the strong reaction from these ideas, and under the fear of ceding any ground of advantage to the enemy, utilitarianism has gone to an equally inadmissible extreme of disregarding "mere impulses" of sympathy, and has tended to reject all conceptions of morality where it was not possible to unravel, beyond the criticism of opponents, the intricate web of social conditions. it is for this reason also that utilitarianism is often egoistic; in the endeavor to analyze back to tangible grounds of action, it was much easier to adopt the evidently original basis of sympathy and altruism--that is, egoism--as the present basis also, than to trace out later developments in the many-sided organization of society. in rejecting instinct, it was but consistent and natural to overlook also the significance of habit in matters of morality; and thus the poet, the moral enthusiast, the martyr, and the rigid adherent of truth, came to be looked at askance. i do not mean to aver that all utilitarianism has fallen into these errors, though the tendency is distinctly in this direction; neither the connection of a theory of utility with a disregard of the finer sorts of happiness, and the more distant and complex workings of social forces, nor the connection of a theory of moral instinct with superstition, is a necessary one. a re-reaction against this bald utilitarianism has set in; but some of the forms which it takes on can no more be indorsed by the consistent evolutionist than can the system from which it is a revolt. when sidgwick defends intuitionalism with the argument that the rightness of some kinds of action is known without consideration of ulterior consequences, we may answer that it is true that tradition furnishes us with many rules that we may follow without consideration of the consequences of our acts, but that it is very doubtful whether we act with the highest degree of morality in so doing. as to the "knowing" of the rightness of the acts, this is surely a matter of judgment, must, therefore, involve the considerations of consequences in some form, though the course of reasoning followed to the attainment of what is often termed "knowledge" in this sense may not be elaborate, and may, indeed, go no farther than a reflection on the approval and disapproval of society. the terms "higher" and "lower" have been used in our previous considerations with regard to pleasures. the legitimacy of their use in this connection has often been questioned. from an evolutional standpoint, however, either they are legitimate here, or else objection may be made, on similar grounds, to their application to man as distinguished from the brutes or even from the original protoplasmic cell with which evolution began. the later developments of the desires, the newer social ends, are as much higher as the human species is higher than the species from which it has been evolved through continued adaptation. as, in the attainment of altruism, egoism is not lost in the sense that the individual no longer seeks that which is most pleasurable to him, but simply reaches a higher plane, so the fundamental animal desires and instincts still move us, but in a quite different form, being closely interwoven, in their later development, with all the ideals and aspirations with which social life has supplied us. the advocates of a "return to nature" make, therefore, a fundamental mistake in theory. human development is also natural. the same mistake is made when we are told that we must be animals in practice because we are animals by nature, or that we must "copy nature" because we are a part of it. the former assertion ordinarily commits the fallacy of using the word "animal" in two senses. the latter assertion involves the fallacy of first making man a part of the nature, which he is to copy, in order, then, to prove that he must regard himself as something outside nature and must, therefore, slavishly follow. but if man is himself a part of the nature he must copy, one may question why he may not simply copy himself rather than any other part; for obviously he is unable to copy all parts, there being many antagonisms in nature. i have heard the argument used in defence of cruelty to animals; nature is cruel, therefore man must be cruel. but as a matter of fact, there is no more reason why man should copy any other part of nature, than there is reason why the horse should imitate the habits of the hog, or turtle-doves take example by the tiger. necessity may sometime compel a choice between two cruelties, to which there is no third alternative; but this is a different argument; let us say, in this case, that we are so compelled (if, indeed, there is no other alternative; for this argument, like the other, is often used as a convenient excuse for mere selfishness, where there are alternatives); let us not employ a wholly fallacious and misleading argument which opens the way to the free exercise of selfish disposition. objections are often made to theories of the development of higher moral qualities from egoism, on the ground that such a derivation is degrading to that which is best in man. some color is lent to this view by arguments like that just noticed. but we may question whether facts can be logically chosen or rejected according to their agreeableness, or even their moral utility, in any case. and, again, some of us may fail to discover any degradation in this theory of evolution. the flower may grow from carrion, but we do not find it the less beautiful, the less pleasing to our various senses. and we should have exactly as good reason to regard the carrion as elevated by its office as to regard the flower as degraded by the source of its life. as a matter of fact, we merely find the flower pleasing and the carrion abhorrent. we are used to this particular connection of the pleasing with the abhorrent, and accept it as we accept much that may be to us disagreeable in our own physical organization; but we have not yet accustomed ourselves to the ideas of mental and moral evolution, and our recoil from them is an illustration of the displeasing character of the wholly new. the same argument of degradation was at first brought forward also against the theory of an evolution of the human form from that of lower species, and of the "purely intellectual faculties" from the animal mind. the question as to whether struggle is an essential element of virtue has been so thoroughly answered by gizycki, stephen, and others, that it would be superfluous to say much about it here; however, our analysis would not be complete without some consideration of it. "the man is the strongest," writes stephen, "who can lift the heaviest weight or who can lift a given weight with the greatest ease. but (and it is a proof of the loose argument which has often been accepted in ethical disputes) the two cases have sometimes been confounded. it would plainly be absurd to say, 'the man is strongest who lifts the greatest weight, therefore the man who makes the greatest effort; therefore the man who makes the greatest struggle to lift a given weight.' but it has occasionally been said that a man is most virtuous who resists the greatest temptation; therefore the man who has the greatest struggle; therefore the man who has the greatest difficulty in resisting a given temptation. though the fallacy does not occur in this bare form, it is not infrequently implied in the assumption that the effort, taken absolutely, is the measure of merit.... we are thus led to excuse a man for the very qualities which make him wicked. true, he committed a murder, but he was so spiteful that he could not help it; or he was exceedingly kind, but he is so good-natured that it cost him no effort."[ ] the difficulty lies in the fact that the struggle arising in any particular case may result from any one of several general conditions of character, between which it is often difficult to distinguish. an absence of struggle may mean simply a general weakness of character which makes a man ready to yield to any and almost all momentary influences, good or evil; the agreement with another's argument may signify absence of the power to reason for oneself; but, on the other hand, it may mean the highest intellectual power of unbiassed judgment; the act that follows such agreement as its result may mean will-power, or it may mean vacillating weakness that, if led by a good influence at the present moment, will be as easily or nearly as easily swayed by an evil one, the next. we are all acquainted with persons who invariably agree with all sides, and shilly-shally in a corresponding manner in their action, accomplishing little or no positive good in any direction, though often positive evil. for the reason of this frequent weakness of character in what we call the "good-natured" person, the term "good-natured" has come to have a certain idea of mental and moral inferiority connected with it. in a similar manner, some men who are generally called "good" are swayed to a greater extent by tradition and lack of courage to act for themselves than by strong desire to know and do the right, and thus, very unfortunately, the excellent word "good" even comes to be looked upon with a certain degree of disdain. on the other hand, a man may find much difficulty in doing right in a certain instance, because of the strength of emotions that would be, under ordinary circumstances, morally desirable and are, in themselves, admirable even in the moment of his temptation, although a yielding to this temptation would, nevertheless, involve great wrong. no one could blame the agony and struggle of the switchman who, in the moment when he is about to rescue a passenger-train from imminent collision by switching it to another track, suddenly perceives his baby-girl seated upon the rails. strong and ennobling love between man and woman may involve, under certain conditions, temptation and struggle; even the best of our impulses may not always be followed, if we desire to act morally. few, if any persons could refuse admiration and respect to the love between phillip tredennis and mrs. amory in mrs. burnett's "through one administration." but not all strong feeling is of an admirable nature; the revengefulness of the murderer, the vicious lust of a joseph phillippe, the impatience of the constitutionally belligerent man, are not to be praised, but condemned. stephen's argument, therefore, that struggle is adjudged an element of virtuous character in many cases because its absence would show "a defect in some faculty of enjoyment," includes too much; for jack the ripper, and others who especially delight in crime, possess faculties of enjoyment the entire absence of which in other men we do not look upon as a defect.[ ] stephen restates his position in another form, saying that "if a man resists any inducement because it has no charms for him, his act does not prove virtue unless the inducement be such as to appeal only to the wicked." it is only because, incidentally, those qualities moulded in human society, and therefore fundamentally good, may come into conflict with each other, that we fall into the habit of connecting the idea of struggle with morality; in face of the fact that readier response to moral stimulus must constitute all moral advancement. and these reflections lead us to remark on the common fallacy that strength of emotion means necessarily a lack of the moral direction of emotion, and that conversely moral self-direction argues weakness of emotional capacity. the direction of emotion is changed with evolution, as we have seen, but this does not mean that emotion is lessened in force. in the man of highest morality, the emotions are merely moulded to a greater harmony with social needs, a harmony that is not weakness but strength, not mere narrow reaction upon momentary impulse or one-sided sympathy with a few to the exclusion of the many, but, in contrast to this lower impulsiveness, an all-sidedness that is the result of reflection and choice. i say this all-sidedness is "the result" of reflection; for i do not mean to intimate that the moral man is less impulsive than the immoral man, or that he is obliged to consider long before every act. merely his impulsiveness is of a higher sort; in it both racial and individual adjustments to social needs find expression; and reason always stands, figuratively speaking, in the background, ready to suppress the spontaneity where the conditions are such that it ceases to be moral. it has been part of our whole analysis to show that reason and instinct, thought and feeling, are by no means antagonistic. simply, feeling may take one direction in one man, another in another; in the criminal, it is developed in the direction of anti-social acts; in the profligate, it takes the same direction, but in a less degree; the original savage is stronger in him than in the moral man, who belongs to a later and higher type, and finds his pleasure in acts in accordance with the welfare of his fellow-men and fellow-women. as the human being is a higher development than other species because he is adapted to a wider circle of nature, so just as truly the moral man is a higher human development, because function is, in him, adjusted to a wider circle of conditions--to complex social requirements which represent the happiness of his fellow-men. altruism is not, because a later development, "artificial," as barratt calls it, any more than man is artificial in comparison with the ape, or the ape is artificial in comparison with original protoplasm. nor can virtue consist, as barratt conceives, in a yielding to all emotions,[ ] as long as man has not yet attained the highest summit of morality where all emotions follow moral directions, without conflicts and without constraint. but neither can morality be distinguished as "a constraining power opposed to instinct and emotion in general,"[ ] as stephen at one point defines it. struggle and constraint are not necessarily elements of moral action; kind and moral action often follows upon impulse with no effort whatever; and, on the other hand, the basest characters may know struggle of an extreme nature when the directions of self-interest conflict. we have already noticed the origin of punishment in revenge, which is the outcome of a fundamental, egoistic instinct of self-defence; and we have traced its development up to the monopolization of its extremer forms by society as a whole through state organization. it is impossible for analysis to give any adequate representation of the workings of reward and punishment in society, except as we draw an exact line between legal and other forms. but such a distinction, however convenient for particular purposes, is obviously scientifically injustifiable in a general theory of social morals. the constraint of family disinheritance and social ostracism, of threats of all sorts, of vituperation, of disapproval and coldness, are only higher forms of revenge or punishment, by which men influence each other's action, as savages influence each other through physical suffering and the fear of it, in a more primitive and less humane manner; and state reward for services, praise, and approval, are all forms of encouragement, by which men similarly incite each other not merely to a negative abstention from undesirable acts, but to a positive performance of desirable acts. with the development of sympathy, punishment tends to become less brutal on the one side, while, on the other, the less brutal forms come to have as great influence as the more brutal ones formerly had. furthermore, the distinct calculation of the attainment of egoistic ends gives place to the impulsive reaction of the sense of justice on the one hand, and, on the other, to the readier response to disapproval and to the desires of others, through social predispositions and affections which are more altruistic than egoistic. but there are two diametrically opposed schools, neither of which perfectly agrees with the theory of will as stated in a preceding chapter of this work, and both of which may therefore take exception to the theory of recompense which follows naturally upon that theory. the one, the school which asserts free will not in a natural, but in a supernatural, or half supernatural sense, may object to the grounds for punishment assumed in our analysis; this school is answered by the demonstration of the actual course of development taken by reward and punishment. the other school maintains, on the ground that man is a part of nature, that there is no merit in conscientiousness, and that evil-doing, being as much dependent upon organization and social environment as disease, cannot, on scientific grounds, be punishable. it is to be noticed, however, that many of the advocates of the theory that state punishment is injustifiable yet inflict punishment upon their own children; and we may remind them, in this connection, that they can scarcely claim the will of the child to be freer or less the result of general social conditions than that of the adult, and that, moreover, they themselves are the most immediate links in the chain of conditions producing this will. furthermore, they are inconsistent in their practice if they visit any blame on evil-doers or criminals; they are logically restricted to, at most, an "i differ with you in opinion," to jack-the-ripper, to the cruelest of slave hunters, or to the chinese who are said to have regarded with indifference the burning of their fellow-men on the ship "shanghai," while they exerted themselves to secure the wreckage. nor, if punishment and blame are inadmissible, on the ground of the determination of the will, can they consistently show greater consideration to benevolent than to malevolent men, no matter how great the public benefits these men have conferred, or what aid they have given to the advancement of society? if it is unjust to punish criminals because their acts are determined, then it is also wholly unjust to the rest of mankind to praise a bruno, or a dying sir philip sidney giving the cup of water offered him to another. if good men might be criminals, had they the criminal organization, it is equally true that ordinary and selfish men might be brunos and sir philip sidneys if they had the organization of brunos and sir philip sidneys; why then do ordinary men the injustice of praising and admiring such nobility of character? nor can a theory of determinism which refuses to blame the individual consistently lay the blame of crime and badness on society as a whole, as it often does; for society as a whole is composed of individuals, all of whom are equally determined in their action. or, if we choose to regard society as a unit, then it may be said that it is as much the product of nature as a whole as the individual is its product. if it be objected that we do not blame nature as a whole because it is soulless, we may inquire what is meant by soulless; society has no composite soul, no soul except in its individuals. the real significance of the objection is that we cannot influence nature, by our blame, to the production of better characters; but it is also true that we cannot influence society except through the individuals composing it; and here we have, again, in a nutshell, the real reason and justification of punishment and blame. the socialists have been prominent of late in disclaiming the right of the state to punish, on the ground that society as a whole is responsible for the evil of individual characters. but it is not noticeable that all socialists refrain from blaming non-socialistic and conservative individuals, although it is obviously true that these are quite as much determined, and as irresponsible from a deterministic point of view, as are the criminals. moreover, even the mildest socialists advocate the measure of denying food to the man who can work but will not do so. by what right do these determinists make use of the expression "can but will not"? and what right have they, on their own showing, to administer this chastisement to the lazy man? surely sloth cannot be interpreted as preëminently a power of will, which no other man possesses; and surely sloth is, as much as criminality, the product of social conditions. if it be objected that this denial of food is no punishment but merely a letting alone, we may inquire whether the starvation which used to be inflicted on prisoners for some offences was not a positive form of punishment. and if it be said that the slothful man has it in his power, at any time, to escape starvation by beginning to work, we may answer that the state says to the criminal, also, that he has nothing to do with its penalties as long as he abstains from the acts for which they are imposed. why should the vindictive man, the joseph phillippes, the jukes, and eyrauds of the future receive sustenance, care, and kindness, in homes set apart for their especial use, while the man who is merely indolent is driven to solitude and the roots and herbs of the forest for the support of existence? perhaps, in such case, the indolent man may claim society's greater indulgence by taking to crime. these determinists are sometimes heard to make the assertion that the punishment of criminals is wrong, but that punishment of children must still be resorted to for their own sake as well as for that of society, since their character can be disciplined and bettered by it. when we arrive at this inconsistency, we get at the root of the whole objection to state punishment of criminals. there is a growing dissatisfaction with present methods of punishment, and this dissatisfaction, insufficiently analyzed, takes the form of objection to punishment altogether. benevolence is progressing beyond present laws, and demands their change; that is the gist of the whole matter. in the light of our analysis of the evolution of morality, we may repeat the inquiry, left unanswered at the beginning of this work, as to whether, in the province of morals more than in other provinces, we find a supernatural element or an element which, in any way, gives us an intimation of the supernatural or transcendental. the question must be replied to in the negative. if it be objected that we must not expect to find the supernatural in the natural, we may reply that that is just what we have not expected to do. the fallacy of such an expectation does not lie with us. nature gives us no intimation of a supernature, when we cease to see it with the uncomprehending eye of the untutored savage. nor can the gross, cruel, and superstitious savage be regarded as, in contrast to more social and humane man, better fitted to be the medium of spiritual truth. and this brings us to the discussion of the presence or absence of conscience in lower animal species. we have found that some species have social organization quite as elaborate as that of many savage tribes, and even more elaborate than that of some tribes. we are able to view these organizations only in their external features; we cannot, however, in most cases, suppose the species to be devoid of consciousness of some sort, and consciousness involves, in any case, pleasure in accustomed function and in its constantly experienced results; the two, action and experience of its results, are, in fact, both functional. the argument of inconstancy, and of inconstancy at points at which it is not found among men, has been shown to be absolutely valueless as directed against any theory of the existence of sympathy and "social instinct" among other animal species. we too are inconstant in our altruism; and habits of altruistic action do not necessarily take the same course with other species that they do with us, differences in social organization rendering differences of habit necessary. if other species fall below us in self-sacrifice for the community in some respects, they often surpass us in others. we may conclude, then, that habits of mutual assistance, habits which we perceive to be externally altruistic, must also be supposed to be connected in many cases with some internal corresponding feelings of the same nature as those which we term, in man, altruistic and social. i do not see how we can avoid this conclusion unless we deny all consciousness to other species; for consciousness must involve, on any plane, feeling as pleasure and pain. and on the supposition of memory, and of the connection in memory of those things and events which are constantly connected in experience, we must suppose the seeking of ends, also, though they are, probably, in most cases, much nearer ends than our human ones. it may be true, as professor morgan thinks, that animals have no general concept of ends and means; but a general concept of ends and means is not necessary to the recognition of the fact that this or that particular form of action will have this or that particular result. it is not necessary to apply the terms "ends" and "means" to events in order to understand their connection as following upon each other with constancy. moreover, we are accustomed to count only our own ends as ends proper, and so, only our own wisdom as wisdom; and thus we term other species stupid for not understanding just our wisdom and acting on a line with us; but certainly there are plenty of human beings whom we do not term wanting in reasoning powers who seek their own destruction or harm much more stupidly than many animals; and, on the other hand, there are many animals who act much more consistently for their own and others' welfare than a large number of mankind do. if the failure of other species to comprehend our language and understand our action is to be termed stupid, then what shall we term our failure to understand their methods of communication and motives of action? it is time for us to emancipate ourselves from this narrow anthropomorphism in which we are accustomed to live, and to realize and acknowledge that there may be other consciousness than our own, with quite other thoughts, feelings, habits, ends, and motives. it is a part of our customary egoism that we prefer to exalt ourselves; it is more gratifying to our vanity, as well as more convenient to our conscience, to regard other species as half-automatic and beneath our sympathy; we thus have excuse for using them as we like. so we call the tiger cruel because he is carnivorous as we ourselves are; we call the fox cunning and sly for lying in ambush for his prey; but when we go out to take, by similar means, our special prey, we call our action a triumph of superior reason. we term the fox a thief, too, when he takes again from us what we are continually taking, and what we took originally, from the beasts. what we regard as right and justifiable and even admirable in ourselves we regard as wrong, cruel, mean, selfish, underhanded, abhorrent, and worthy of all punishment in the animals. as for the faithfulness unto death displayed by many animals, we do not regard that as heroism or worthy our admiration, although we might often take pattern from it. how should we understand other species? we are not accustomed to associate this or that feeling of pleasure in ourselves with a pricking up of ears or a wagging of tail, or our deepest despondency and pain at repulse with this or that peculiar posture or animal cry. a faint trembling of the human hand from fear or pain will stir us with the most profound sympathy; but the sensitive quiver of the whole body in some helpless, hopeless animal, that cannot speak its fear or crave for mercy in the human tongue, touches but seldom an answering chord in our hearts. shame on our vanity and our hard-heartedness! the whole of our analysis has tended to lay emphasis on habit. and this leads us to comment on a certain disdain and contempt for habit and custom which is continually arising in some quarters. the whole history of mankind is the history of the formation, gradual change, and spread of the change, of habit, and of custom as the social form of the latter. with the progress of society, habits and customs grow old and must be discarded; but only careful consideration can show us when change is desirable. it is, therefore, both stupid and foolish to inveigh against a habit merely because it is habit or because it is of long standing. originality, intellectual superiority, does not consist in a contempt for custom merely as custom, but in the power to weigh all sides, to view a matter in all lights, without regard to its age or newness, and to decide on its worth according to its inherent merits or defects. in the rebellion from the slavery to tradition as such, the opposite, equally unreasonable extreme of denunciation of all existing custom is often reached. thus, some followers of socrates, adhering slavishly to the word of their master but failing to comprehend its inner meaning, dispensed with all the social usages of their nation, and despised its laws. of late patriotism is denounced as mere race-prejudice founded on habit and association. but all our affections are matters of habit and association. doubtless, patriotism may often involve narrowness and injustice; so also may a mother's love for her child, or any other of the forms of the preference of affection. however, it does not follow, therefore, that mother-love is to be denounced and rejected; what we need is not less mother-love, or father-love, but a counterbalancing sympathy for other human beings outside the family, also. and so too we do not want less love of country, but the infusion of it with a broader humanity and justice. the love of a mother need not render her less, but may, on the contrary, render her more, sympathetic; and the love of country may be combined with a wide-reaching regard for the welfare of other men outside the nation to which the patriot belongs. in fact, the mother who is incapable of peculiar love for her own child is not likely to be capable of deep sympathy with other human beings; and i am inclined to believe that there must be something lacking in a man's general moral constitution when he feels no peculiar regard for the land to which he belongs. if it is foolish, as is sometimes asserted, to love one country more than another, simply because we happen to have been born in it, then it is also equally foolish to love our mother simply because she happens to be our mother. there may be other lands as good as ours, and possibly there may be other mothers as good as ours; but affection does not reason thus. is social development the cause of an increase in sympathy, or is the increase of sympathy the cause of social progress and prosperity? or is increase of population the cause of both by forcing men to companionship? or is not, rather, increase of population the effect of prosperity? in his work on "recent discussions in science, philosophy, and morals," herbert spencer writes of the altruistic sentiments: "the development of these has gone on only as fast as society has advanced to a state in which the activities are mainly peaceful. the root of all the altruistic sentiments is sympathy, and sympathy could have become dominant only when the mode of life, instead of being one that habitually inflicted direct pain, became one which conferred direct and indirect benefits; the pains inflicted being mainly incidental and indirect;" and in an essay on "progress," the author writes: "social progress is supposed to consist in the produce of a greater quantity and variety of the articles required for satisfying men's wants; in the increasing security of person and property; in widening freedom of action; whereas, rightly understood, social progress consists in those changes of structure in the social organism which have entailed these consequences." the two paragraphs appear contradictory of each other, the first laying emphasis upon outer conditions as cause of inner change, the second seeming to emphasize inner conditions as cause; but the terms of the second quotation are somewhat ambiguous. as to the first, to do mr. spencer full justice, he corrects this a little farther down, where he says that "sympathy is the concomitant of gregariousness, the two having all along increased by reciprocal aid." the root of the whole difficulty, with regard to our theories of cause and effect in social development, as with regard to our theories of cause and effect in other parts of nature, lies in our desire for unity and simplicity. instead of attempting to unravel the intricate web of the conditions, we fix our attention on some one feature or side of the process, and regard the whole development as revolving round this pivot. it is easy to find examples, in the history of science and opinion, of the errors into which the concepts of cause and effect have led men, and of the repeated recurrence of uncertainty to which the unveiling of these errors in the further march of knowledge, has led. for instance, we find some writers on nervous diseases adhering to the view that insanity is sometimes the effect of a weak yielding to a violent disposition; more contending that the violence is itself the effect of incipient insanity; and still others opining that both violence of disposition and insanity are the effect of a general diseased state of the system. ancient schools of medicine traced all diseases to the blood, and so drained off the fluid; and the patent medicines of to-day generally select some one organ as the source of all disease. i once heard the assertion that a certain woman had died with grief contested by a physician on the ground that the cause of her death was consumption; he added that deaths from sudden mental shock were known to medicine, but the cases were rare; another medical man suggested that the system might not have been in a perfectly healthy condition at the time of the shock, in those cases; and the first man seemed a little puzzled when a third person suggested that there was doubtless a physical basis in every case. footnotes: [ ] "adam bede." [ ] "daniel deronda." [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. , . the italics are mine. [ ] ibid. pp. , . [ ] as above, pp. , . the italics are mine. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . the italics are mine. [ ] ibid. p. . the italics are mine. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . the italics are here also mine. [ ] "the pathology of mind," _et seq._ [ ] in this general and limited sense, but only in this general and limited sense, does spencer's assertion that more moral conduct shows a greater adjustment of means to ends, correspond to the facts. [ ] see "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. , . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] see part i, this book, p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . chapter vii the moral progress of the race as shown by history the necessity of the constant assimilation of savage tribes, of the peopling of thinly inhabited areas, renders social evolution as a whole exceedingly slow. nor can there be, even in isolated peoples, any sudden leap from savagery to civilization; in other words the term "civilization" is not of absolute but of comparative, progressive, import. nor can we suppose the social evolution to have been only outward; we cannot suppose that our cave-dwelling, man-eating, rude ancestors, if they could have been suddenly transported, in infancy even, into the midst of modern civilization by means of a carlylean wishing-cap, or by some method of projection in time similar to that by which men promise to "knock each other into the middle of next week," would have been able to equal modern men in mental and moral attainment. we may gain some idea of the gentle manners and moral character of our early progenitors from the customs of savage peoples of the present day; although a very large number of these stand upon a higher plane than did the ancient savages known to geology. i insert a few extracts from lubbock:-- "mr. galbraith, who lived for many years, as indian agent, among the sioux (north america), thus describes them: 'they are bigoted, barbarous, and exceedingly superstitious. they regard most of the vices as virtues. theft, arson, rape, and murder, are among them regarded as the means of distinction; and the young indian from childhood is taught to regard killing as the highest of virtues. in their dances and at their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds of theft, pillage, and slaughter, as precious things; and the highest, indeed the only, ambition of a young brave is to secure "the feather," which is but a record of his having murdered or participated in the murder, of some human being--whether man, woman, or child, it is immaterial; and after he has secured his first "feather," appetite is whetted to increase the number in his cap, as an indian brave is estimated by the number of his feathers.'"[ ] "'conscience,' says burton, 'does not exist in eastern africa, and "repentance" expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime. robbery constitutes an honorable man; murder--the more atrocious the midnight crime the better--makes the hero.'"[ ] "in tahiti, the missionaries considered that 'not less than two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents.' mr. ellis adds, 'i do not recollect having met with a female in the islands, during the whole period of my residence there, who had been a mother while idolatry prevailed, who had not imbrued her hands in the blood of her offspring.' mr. nott also makes the same assertion. girls were more often killed than boys, because they were of less use in fishing and in war."[ ] "williams tells us that 'offences, in fijian estimation, are light or grave according to the rank of the offender. murder by a chief is less heinous than a petty larceny committed by a man of low rank.'"[ ] "among the khonds of central india, human sacrifices prevailed until quite lately. 'a stout stake is driven into the soil and to it the victim is fastened, seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric, decorated with flowers, and _worshipped_ during the day by the assembly. at nightfall the licentious revelry is resumed, and on the third morning the victim gets some milk to drink, when the presiding priest implores the goddess to shower her blessings on the people. after the mock ceremony, nevertheless, the victim is taken to the grove where the sacrifice is to be carried out; and to prevent resistance, the bones of the arms and legs are broken, or the victim drugged with opium or datura, when the janni wounds his victim with the axe. this act is followed up by the crowd. a number now press forward to obtain a piece of his flesh, and in a moment he is stripped to the bones.' "an almost identical custom prevails among the marimos, a tribe of south africa much resembling the bechuanas.... schoolcraft mentions a... sacrifice to the 'spirit of corn' among the pawnees. the victim was first tortured by being suspended over a fire. 'at a given signal, a hundred arrows were let fly, and her whole body was pierced. these were immediately withdrawn, and her flesh cut from her bones in small pieces which were put into baskets and carried into the cornfield, where the grain was being planted, and the blood squeezed out on each hill.'"[ ] "human sacrifices occurred in guinea, and burton saw 'at benin city a young woman lashed to a scaffolding upon the summit of a tall blasted tree, and being devoured by the turkey-buzzards. the people declared it to be a "fetich" or charm for bringing rain.'... "captain cook describes human sacrifices as prevalent among the islanders of the pacific, and especially in the sandwich group.... war captives were frequently sacrificed in brazil."[ ] "the lowest races have no institution of marriage. true love is almost unknown among them, and marriage in its lowest phases is by no means a matter of affection and companionship.... in north america, the tinné indians had no word for 'dear' and 'beloved'; and the algonquin language is stated to have contained no verb meaning 'to love,' so that when the bible was translated by the missionaries into that language it was necessary to invent a word for the purpose."[ ] "the position of women in australia seems, indeed, to be wretched in the extreme. they are treated with the utmost brutality, beaten and speared in the limbs on the most trivial provocation. 'few women,' says eyre, 'will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head or the marks of spear-wounds upon the body. i have seen a young woman who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear-wounds.'"[ ] "collins thus describes the manner in which the natives about sydney used to procure wives: 'the poor wretch is stolen upon in the absence of her protectors. being first stupefied with blows, inflicted with clubs or wooden swords, on the head, back, and shoulders, every one of which is followed by a stream of blood, she is then dragged through the woods by one arm, with a perseverance and violence that it might be supposed would displace it from its socket. this outrage is not resented by the relations of the female, who only retaliate by a similar outrage when they find an opportunity.'"[ ] "indeed," says lubbock, "i do not remember a single instance in which a savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost the only case i can call to mind, in which a man belonging to one of the lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was right, was when mr. hunt asked a young fijian why he had killed his mother."[ ] we have direct evidence, in many present or recent customs, of so-called civilized or half-civilized nations, that the barbarous customs described in "the origin of civilization," and in the books of many travellers, are not the original and special inventions of modern savages merely, but that similar customs prevailed among our progenitors. lubbock notices many of these. the marriage ceremonies of many peoples are particularly suggestive of a time when violent capture was the means of obtaining a wife, and cruelty of treatment was her usual portion.[ ] human sacrifices were common among many peoples of ancient europe; and the cancellation of responsibility for murder with fines (often nominal in the case of the murder of a man of lower rank) was a widely spread custom. "in russia," writes lubbock, "as in scandinavia, human sacrifices continued down to the introduction of christianity. in mexico and peru they seem to have been peculiarly numerous. müller has suggested that this may have partly arisen from the fact that these nations were not softened by the possession of domestic animals.[ ] various estimates have been made of the number of human victims annually sacrificed in the mexican temples. müller thinks is a moderate estimate; and in one year it appears to have exceeded , ." "in northern europe, human sacrifices were not uncommon. the yarl of the orkneys is recorded to have sacrificed the son of the king of norway to odin in the year . in , hakon yarl sacrificed his own son to the gods. donald, king of sweden, was burnt by his people as a sacrifice to odin, in consequence of a severe famine. at upsala was a celebrated temple, round which an eye-witness assured adam of bremen that he had seen the corpses of seventy-two victims hanging up at one time."[ ] a peculiar confusion as to the definition of morality sometimes gives rise to such vagaries of theory as the defence of murder committed by savages, and other cruelties practised, on the ground that these things are not considered sins in the moral code of the peoples among which they are practised; murder is thus excused on the plea that _wrecking is also looked upon as permissible_;[ ] and wallace thinks that savages live up to their "simple moral code" as well as civilized human beings to their elaborate one, so that they are, in reality, as moral as these latter. it should not be forgotten, however, that the moral code is itself the product of the tribe and represents its moral sentiment. lubbock remarks that if a man's simple moral code permits him to rob and murder, the code is at least an unfortunate one for the victims.[ ] on the other hand, lubbock himself defends human sacrifice as the result of "deep and earnest religious feeling."[ ] but if sympathy were strong, such sacrifices would be impossible, and the religious code would be altered just as the religious code of christians is altered to keep up with social progress. opinion and feeling are not two separable things, one of which may advance while the other remains behind; when feeling becomes strong enough, the opinion arises that this or that custom before practised is wrong. as long as man is cruel by nature, however, conscience will not torment him for cruelty, and it is possible for him to regard it as wholly justifiable. but i am of the opinion that moral progress has been made not only since the time of our savage ancestors, but even also since the time of the great ancients, in spite of the obstacles to such advancement presented in the necessity of the moral assimilation of immense races of savages,--the leavening of the whole of europe. i believe that modern civilization has caught up to and surpassed the ancient. the knowledge we have of ancient peoples is necessarily most imperfect; nevertheless, we may, i believe, discover considerable evidence of general moral inferiority to the present day. any advance that has been made will be likely to be most observable in those general virtues which lie at the foundation of all social coöperation--truthfulness in word and honesty in act, and the gradual widening of concepts of justice from individual and class privilege and race prejudice, to the inclusion of mankind as a whole. and the growth of sympathy will be most noticeable in the treatment of those classes of beings which possess least physical means of compelling respect for their rights--animals, children, women, the poor, and ignorant, and sick, and aged. we may begin with the children. the lacedemonian custom of giving over the weak and defective children to destruction is familiar to us all. before solon, children were often sold by athenian parents for debt; and even during the ages of greatest culture, the exposure of children seems to have been a common athenian practice, regarded with little or no disapproval by the general public. mahaffy writes: "the cool way in which plato in his republic speaks of exposing children, shows that, as we should expect, with the increase of luxury, and the decay of the means of satisfying it, the destruction of infants came more and more into the fashion. what can be more painfully affecting than the practice implied by socrates, when he is comparing himself to a midwife (theæt. b.). 'and if i abstract and expose your first-born, because i discover that the conception you have formed is a vain shadow, do not quarrel with me, _as the manner of women is, when their first children are taken from them_. for i have actually known some men ready to bite me when first i have deprived them of a darling folly.'"[ ] that the exposure of children is generally mentioned only incidentally by greek writers, is perhaps the strongest argument of all that the custom was regarded with indifference by the majority. a considerable number of the exposed children seem to have been rescued to be brought up as prostitutes, but many must have perished miserably. we have reason for doubting whether the average greek would have shown an equal sympathy to that of mr. stephen's modern pickpockets, in the supposed case of danger to a child on the race-course;[ ]--unless, indeed, the child were an especially fine bit of animal flesh. the same narrow sort of expediency in morals which permitted the exposure of children is exhibited, again, in the lack of regard for the aged shown by the athenians at all periods of their history;--in sparta the old men were treated with some considerable respect. says mahaffy: "the strongest case against the periclean greeks, and one which marks their parentage most clearly from their homeric ancestors, is the treatment of their old men. for here it is no inferior class, but their equals, nay even those to whom they directly owed their greatness, whom they cast aside with contempt when their days of usefulness had passed by.... the greek lawgivers were accordingly most explicit in enjoining upon children the nurture and support of aged parents who could otherwise expect little from the younger generation. the attic law alone added a qualification, that the children were to be without responsibility if their parents had neglected to educate them." aristophanes describes the treatment of the aged in his "wasps,"--"where he declares that the only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so extorting homage from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. when he comes home with his fee, they are glad to see him, in fact he is able to support a second wife and younger children, as the passage plainly implies, whereas otherwise the father must look towards his son and his son's steward to give him his daily bread, 'uttering imprecations and mutterings lest he knead me a deadly cake,' a dark insinuation which opens to us terrible suspicions."[ ] the women of greece were comparatively well cared for, as might be expected in a nation and country peculiarly susceptible to the influence of grace and beauty; they were consequently of a comparatively admirable type. however, we are fond, i think, of indulging in this respect, our preference for believing the romantic; so that we usually select carefully the best instances and infer that the standard of all greece was on this plane. the reasons for this are manifold. we have the habit of imagining, from greek art, that all greek women were beautiful; and it is unpleasant to associate moral inferiority with great beauty, or to imagine its being treated with unkindness or disrespect. again, we are pleased at discovering examples of love and faithfulness even in the far-away ages, and the pleasure of the discovery exalts the few instances with which greek literature provides us to a disproportionate importance and significance. disappointed at not finding their perfect ideal in their own age and nation, men have pleased themselves with the imagination of perfection in an object belonging to another age, with regard to which no sordid reality of every-day relation and common, vulgar needs could intervene to check enthusiasm. furthermore, it is safer to admire those distant from us in time and place, since we are secure from any demand of faithfulness and self-sacrifice from their side. poets and artists have assisted us in this license of agreeable fancy. so we dwell, with special emphasis, on the beauty of penelope's character, which is not at all exceptionally faithful as measured by modern standards; we warm over the story of antigone while we pass by, without special enthusiasm, a thousand instances as admirable in our own day and within our own observation; and we read, with delight, the tale of the greek who encouraged his ignorant child-wife by gentle treatment until she overcame her timidity, became "tame and docile," and was persuaded to discard cosmetics and high-heeled shoes and devote herself to her household duties; though the most of us would regard the forced marriage of such a child, if it occurred in our own day, as no more than child-barter, and the conduct of the husband (doubtless not worsened by his representation of it) as but a moderate exhibition of common decency. mahaffy says of the greeks of the homeric age: "there is ample evidence that the lower-class women, the slaves and even the free servants, were subjected to the hardest and most distressing sorts of work, the carrying of water, and the grinding of hand-mills; in fact we see them standing to men-servants nearly in the same relation that the north-american squaw stands to her husband--over-taxed, slave-driven, worn out even with field-work, while he is idling, or smoking, or sleeping."[ ] the wives of athens of all periods were little more than a higher class of household servants, with almost no share, by education, in either the science or the art that was the delight of their nation and made its superiority. the position of the hetairai was better in some respects; but the apparently widely spread preference of the greeks of the cultured classes for what we term unnatural crime argues against any considerable degree of education even in their case. women were sometimes found in the greek schools of philosophy, but these were evidently isolated cases. the passage from the theætetus above quoted shows us the unhappy and subservient position of athenian women in one respect; and many other passages of plato throw an unfavorable light upon their lot; though we have, perhaps, to remember that the central figure of the dialogues had some personal reason for being a woman-hater. "the outcasts from society as we call them were not the immoral and the profligate, but the honorable and virtuous. accordingly, when we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history."[ ] human sacrifices were not unknown to the earlier greeks. of the later days, of athenian culture, mahaffy says: "plutarch tells us that themistocles was forced by the acclamations of the army to sacrifice three persian prisoners of distinction brought in just before the battle of salamis, though he was greatly affected at the terrible nature of the sacrifice, so that it appears to have been then unusual. but aristophanes, long after, makes allusions to what he calls [greek: pharmakoi], as still remembered at athens, if not still in use (ran. ), and which the scholiasts explain, chiefly from hipponax, as a sort of human scapegoat, chosen for ugliness or deformity (a very greek standpoint) and sacrificed for the expiation of the state in days of famine and pestilence, or of other public disaster. i think that aristophanes alludes to the custom as bygone, though the scholiasts do not think so; but its very familiarity to his audience shows a disregard of human life strange enough in so advanced a legal system as that of democratic athens."[ ] mahaffy calls attention to the exceeding cruelty practised by the greeks in the peloponnesian war, and adds: "it was not merely among corcyreans, or among thracian mercenaries, but among the leaders of greece that we find this disgusting feature. the spartans put to death in cold blood prisoners whom they took in platæa after a long and heroic defence.... but this is a mere trifle when we hear from plutarch that lysander, after the battle of Ægospotami, put to death prisoners (_alcib._ c. cp. the details in his _lysander_, c. ),... athenians, men of education and of culture.... the unfortunate athenian general, according to theophrastus (plut. _lys._ ), submits with dignified resignation to a fate which he confesses would have attended the lacedemonians had they been vanquished. "for the athenians, with their boasted clemency and culture, were very nearly as cruel as their enemies. in the celebrated affair of the mitylenæans, which thucydides tells at length in his third book, the first decree of the athenians was to massacre the whole male population of the captured city. they repented of this decree, because diodotus proved to them, not that it was inhuman, but that it was inexpedient." mahaffy argues, in opposition to grote, that there was no real sentiment of sympathy in the repentance of the athenians in this affair, for "how could the _imagined details_ of the massacre of men in _lesbos_ have been a motive, when the athenians did, at the same time, have the ringleaders executed _at athens_, and _they were more than men_ (thuc. iii. )." these were "_executed together, by the hands of athenians_, not with fire-arms but with swords and knives. a few years after, the inhabitants of melos, many hundreds in number, were put to the sword, when conquered after a brave resistance (thuc. v. ), and here, i fear, merely for the purpose of making way for a colony of athenian citizens, who went out to occupy the houses and lands of their victims."[ ] the practice of torturing witnesses in court was common in periclean athens. on this point, mahaffy writes: "our best authorities on this question are, of course, the early orators, especially antiphon, in whose speeches on cases of homicide this feature constantly recurs. it is well known that in such cases the accused might offer his own slaves to be tortured, in order to challenge evidence against himself; and it was thought a weak point in his case if he refused to do so when challenged. it is also well known that the accusers were bound to make good any permanent injury, such as maiming, done to these slaves. "but there were both restrictions and extensions of this practice as yet but little noticed. it was not the custom to torture slaves who gave evidence to a fact, but only if they denied any knowledge, or appeared to suppress it in the interest of their master (antiphon, tetral. a, [greek: g]). on the other hand, _it was common enough to torture female slaves and also free men_.... ... "almost all the orators speak of it as an infallible means of ascertaining the truth. demosthenes says it has never been known to fail."[ ] the restrictions on certain extremities of torture in court diminish in importance when we consider that the poor slave stood, in reality, in all cases, between two alternatives of suffering, that inflicted by the court and that likely to be inflicted by his master in case his evidence displeased the latter. that he was a piece of property of some value was doubtless no more a safeguard to the greek slave under the hands of his master than it has been in any modern slave-holding country; the greek was doubtless at least as liable as the man of to-day to forget ultimate loss in the rage of present anger and the malevolent pleasure of revenge. the condition of slaves among the greeks furnishes us, indeed, with one of our strongest arguments against their moral code. we do not need to mention the helots, whose name has become a synonym of degradation and misery. slaves formed the greater part of the working population of athens, and were much more numerous than the freemen. nor were they necessarily even of inferior race or education. not only did all prisoners taken in war become slaves, with their descendants forever, except as their masters chose to emancipate them (and the possession of such a superfluity sometimes rendered the athenians generous in this respect), but, until the time of solon, freemen might be sold into bondage for debt,--and not alone for a large debt, but also for a small one, and not merely until the debt was paid, but for all time. nor have we reason to suppose that freemen were treated, even in the days of athens' greatest culture, with great humanity. "at the opening of the euthryphro there is a story told which is not intended to be anything exceptional, and which shows that the free laborer, or dependent, had not bettered his position since the days when achilles cited him as the most miserable creature upon earth. 'now the man who is dead,' says euthryphro, 'was a poor dependent of mine who worked for us as a [free] field-laborer at naxos, and one day, in a fit of drunken passion, he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants [slaves] and slew him. my father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. meantime, he had no care or thought of him, deeming him a murderer, and that even if he did die, there would be no great harm. and this was just what happened. _for such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him_ that before the messenger returned from the diviner he was dead. and my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father.'"[ ] we have not much evidence as to the treatment of animals in ancient greece. race-horses are likely to have been well cared for,--as long as they were young and swift or beautiful. but it does not appear probable, from what we know of the greek attitude towards slaves and dependents, women and children, that a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals would have flourished in greece. when we come to inquire as to the moral status of the greeks with regard to honesty, truthfulness, and reliability in general, we find them particularly lacking. their failure to come up with modern standards in this respect "every schoolboy knows." ulysses is called the "man of many wiles," with evident intent to compliment. in the poems of theognis, favorites with the greek nobility, "it was openly recommended to fawn upon your enemy, to deceive him till he was in your power, and then wreak vengeance upon him. it is usual, among critics, to speak of this as the attitude of theognis, and of the special aristocracy to which he belonged. they forget that we find the same attitude in the moral pindar (_pyth._ ii. ). it is expounded by hesiod as proximate (*[greek: erg]. sqq.), by thucydides as universal, at a later epoch."[ ] mahaffy says of the greeks up to the time of thucydides, that they "had been often treacherous and cruel, generally dishonest and selfish; but, withal, often generous and gentlemanly, always clever and agreeable, and always carried away by a love of beauty more than by a respect for truth."[ ] at the time of darius, the milesians, who had involved that king in a bloody and expensive war, and burned his lydian capital, were yet treated kindly by him when taken prisoners, and settled in his own country. in return they were always trying to beg or embezzle the treasure of the king at susa. "there was, indeed, a single exception, scythes, tyrant of zancle--who asked leave to visit sicily, and returned to die in persia. 'him darius considered to be the most righteous of all those who had gone up to him from greece, in that he kept his promise to the great king.'" "what an evidence of greek dishonesty. we can well fancy the aryan barons of darius' court speaking in the tone of the roman juvenal. to them, too, the _græculus esuriens_ was but too well known,--with his fascination, his cleverness, and, withal, his mean and selfish knavery. i need hardly remind the greek scholar," continues mahaffy, "that all through the ionic revolt, and through the persian wars, this treachery and this selfishness were the mainstays of the persians; in fact, had they depended upon these more completely, the subjugation of greece would have been a mere question of time."[ ] "there was a certain glaucus at sparta, celebrated for justice, as well as in other respects, to whom a milesian, who had heard of his fame, came and entrusted a treasure, wishing as he said, to get the benefit of his justice, since ionia was disturbed. of course, such a temptation was too much even for this paragon of greek honesty. when the heirs of the milesian came with their tokens and claimed the treasure, he professed to know nothing of the affair," though when they had gone away, he consulted the oracle as to whether he might spend the money, and was so strongly rebuked, that he finally gave it back.[ ] this mahaffy mentions as an instance where the influence of the oracle was a moral one. there remains one general and especially significant criticism to be made on greek morals as a whole; the great mass of the people were little cared for and in a state of unfreedom. professor robiou of rennes aptly remarks that the democracy of ancient times, and that of athens in particular, had little in common with modern democracy. "the very large majority of the working population were slaves, and had, consequently, no rights of any sort, so that the 'laborers,' at whose political rights xenophon and aristophanes jest, were generally what we call _patrons_.... "as for the laborers and the inhabitants of the environs and villages, since political rights could be exercised only at the athenian pnyx and there was no idea of a representative system, it is clear that the presence of many of them in the assembly could be only an exception, in spite of the modest indemnity which was offered them; among the country people the large and middle-class proprietors alone were in a condition to take part regularly. that is to say, one has no difficulty in concluding that, in comparison with other times and other countries, _the athenian democracy was an aristocracy_."[ ] and we may add that, all things considered, the great mass of the people had less of liberty and privilege, were far more subject to the despotism and caprice of the few, than in most modern monarchies. in what modern country not inhabited by savages would a man be permitted, at the present day, to throw even a murderer into a ditch and leave him to perish of hunger and cold? the carelessness of the greeks in regard to the inner spirit of morals is often excused on the ground that it was at least combined with a large degree of tolerance; but this tolerance appears to be, to a great extent, mythical. the politics of athens ostracized men whose opinion was feared by the state, or rather by a certain number of citizens, and the greek religion stained its records with the death of socrates and the persecution of other philosophers. stilpo was exiled for doubting whether the athene of phidias was a goddess and the books of anaxagoras and protagoras were publicly burned. there was, moreover, an inquisitorial bureau at athens.[ ] however, it is true that the greeks were, as a people, too little in earnest and too superstitious to fall into doubt of the national mythology. we have less difficulty in showing the superiority of modern to roman civilization, and for the reason, partly, that we know more about roman, than we do about greek civilization. the romans were, from the beginning, a robust and warlike people, and the military discipline which made them conquerors extended into their social relations and even into their family life. the exposure of children appears to have been a common practice, and looked upon leniently even after direct infanticide was visited with some degree of general disapproval. parents were the absolute masters of their children, having the power to put them to death, or to sell them as slaves; and this was not only true of children in their younger years, but during the whole life of the father. livy and valerius maximus give numerous instances of parents who had put their children to death. it is recorded, however, that hadrian banished a man who had killed his son, and decreed that whatever a son might earn in military service should belong to himself; while alexander severus forbade the killing of adult sons, and diocletian rendered the sale of children illegal.[ ] lecky however remarks that "the sale of children in case of great necessity, though denounced by the fathers, continued long after the time of theodosius, nor does any christian emperor appear to have enforced the humane enactments of diocletian."[ ] human sacrifices occurred among the romans far more frequently than among the greeks, and continued even down to a late date, says mahaffy. "in the year b.c., cæsar sacrificed two soldiers on the altar in the campus martius. augustus is said to have sacrificed a maiden named gregoria. even trajan, when antioch was rebuilt, sacrificed calliope, and placed her statue in the theatre. under commodus, and later emperors, human sacrifices appear to have been more common; and a gladiator appears to have been sacrificed to jupiter latialis even in the time of constantine. yet these awful rites had been expressly forbidden b.c. ; and pliny asserts that in his time they were never openly solemnized."[ ] if, however, the direct sacrifice of human victims came in time to be forbidden, there grew out of it, at a comparatively early period, a custom very nearly if not quite as barbarous, which was practised on an immense scale and down to a late date; namely, the gladiatorial contests. the men who took part in these contests were either slaves, criminals, military captives, or men especially trained for the "profession." many of these last were exposed children who had been rescued for the purpose; their number being also recruited from other ranks. lecky seems to excuse the condemnation of military captives to these shows, saying that their fate "could not strike the early romans with the horror it would now inspire, for the right of the conquerors to massacre their prisoners was almost universally admitted."[ ] the argument is similar to that noticed and criticised above--one bad principle cannot be an excuse for another, though the two are, doubtless, in this case, coördinate. every criminal can give us a reason for his crime out of the uniformity of his own character. the question is, simply, whether we are considering the facts from a purely indifferent standpoint, as historical, or from an ethical standpoint; and if from the latter, then we must have some standard of measurement. we may choose to make this, in all cases, the average of the period and nation; though there will be, in that case, considerable difficulty in determining the average. or we may use some ideal standard, which, as ideal, does not vary with all variations of the society considered, but is constant. but we have no logical right, having assumed the one standard, to confuse it with the other, treating the two as interchangeable. the standard of any age by which men judged their deeds is also part of the morality of the age, by which we may judge it. as for the criminals who fought in the arena, they were sometimes pardoned, when victorious, so that society received back again its most muscular, or skilful and alert criminals. of all roman authors and rulers, lecky mentions only seneca, plutarch, petronius, junius mauricus, and marcus aurelius, who condemn the games.[ ] cicero is undecided on the subject; rather in favor of them. the great satirist, juvenal, though he repeatedly mentions, does not condemn them. and "of all the great historians who recorded them not one seems to have been conscious that he was recording a barbarity, not one appears to have seen in them any greater evils than an increasing tendency to pleasure and an excessive multiplication of a dangerous class." on the other hand, the attempt to introduce them into athens was unsuccessful.[ ] an immense increase of gladiators and gladiatorial shows took place in the earlier days of the empire, when the increase of slavery freed a large portion of the roman population from the necessity of labor, and men came to occupy themselves with amusements, on the one hand as a profession, on the other as means of passing the time. in the days of the republic, the slaves were comparatively few in number and probably treated with more care, though scarcely with much consideration; all things were permitted the master by law, says lecky, though probably the censor might interfere in extreme cases. "the elder cato speaks of slaves simply as instruments for obtaining wealth, and he encouraged masters, both by his precept and his example, to sell them as useless when aged and infirm."[ ] under titus and trajan probably occurred the greatest number of shows that "were compressed into a short time,... and no roman seems to have imagined that the fact of men having been compelled to fight under the one, and , under the other, cast the faintest shadow upon their characters."[ ] moreover, "the mere desire for novelty impelled the people to every excess or refinement of barbarity. the simple combat became at last insipid, and every variety of atrocity was devised to stimulate the flagging interest. at one time a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce contest along the sand; at another, criminals dressed in the skins of wild beasts were thrown to bulls, which were maddened by red-hot irons, or by darts tipped with burning pitch. four hundred bears were killed on a single day under caligula; three hundred on another day under claudius. under nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants; four hundred bears and three hundred lions were slaughtered by his soldiers. in a single day, at the dedication of the colosseum by titus, five thousand animals perished.... lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and serpents, were employed to give novelty to the spectacle. nor was any form of human suffering wanting. the first gordian, when edile, gave twelve spectacles, in each of which from one hundred and fifty to five hundred pair of gladiators appeared. eight hundred pair fought at the triumph of aurelian. ten thousand men fought during the games of trajan.... under domitian, an army of feeble dwarfs was compelled to fight, and more than once female gladiators descended to fight in the arena. a criminal personating a fictitious character was nailed to a cross, and there torn by a bear. another, representing scævola, was compelled to hold his hand in a real flame. a third, as hercules, was burnt alive upon the pile. so intense was the craving for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if he neglected the distribution of corn than if he neglected the games; and nero himself, on account of his munificence in this respect, was probably the sovereign who was most beloved by the roman multitude. heliogabalus and galerius are reported, when dining, to have regaled themselves with the sight of criminals torn by wild beasts. it was said of the latter that 'he never supped without human blood.'" moreover, the prince was most popular who, at the show of thumbs, "permitted no consideration of economy to make him hesitate to sanction the popular award."[ ] "even in the closing years of the fourth century, the prefect symmachus, who was regarded as one of the most estimable pagans of his age, collected some saxon prisoners to fight in honor of his son. they strangled themselves in prison, and symmachus lamented the misfortune that had befallen him from their 'impious hands,' but endeavored to calm his feelings by recalling the patience of socrates and the precepts of philosophy."[ ] the conquest of greece is alleged to have bettered somewhat the position of roman slaves, since it involved the introduction of many slaves who were the intellectual superiors of their masters. but whatever good this may have effected seems to have been counteracted by the increase in number of the slaves and the consequent diminution in value of the individual slave as a piece of property. on the whole, the position of the slaves of north america, before the war of emancipation, bad as it was in some cases, seems to have been, on the average, quite paradisiacal when compared with that of their roman forerunners. it has already been mentioned that cato urged his compatriots to sell their aged slaves. old and infirm slaves were constantly exposed to perish on an island in the tiber. it was also customary, in case of the murder of the master, to put all the slaves of the household to death who were not in chains or helpless at the time of the murder. the testimony of the slave was generally received only under torture; he might be tortured in the attempt to compel evidence against his master; but, if he, of his own free will, accused his master of any crime, except treason, he was condemned to the arena. there were different punishments for slaves and for men of rank. "numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were committed. the well-known anecdotes of flaminius ordering a slave to be killed to gratify, by the spectacle, the curiosity of a guest; of vedius pollio feeding his fish on the flesh of slaves; and of augustus sentencing a slave who had killed and eaten a favorite quail, to crucifixion, are the extreme examples that are recorded; for we need [!] not regard as an historical fact the famous picture in juvenal of a roman lady in a moment of caprice, ordering her unoffending servant to be crucified. we have, however, many other very horrible glimpses of slave life at the close of the republic and in the early days of the empire. the marriage of slaves was entirely unrecognized by law, and, in their case, the words adultery, incest, or polygamy had no legal meaning.... when executed for a crime, their deaths were of a most hideous kind. the ergastula, or private prisons of the masters, were frequently their only sleeping places.... we read of slaves chained as porters to the doors, and cultivating the fields in chains. ovid and juvenal describe the fierce roman ladies tearing their servants' faces, and thrusting the long pins of their brooches into their flesh. the master, at the close of the republic, had full power to sell his slave as a gladiator or as a combatant with wild beasts."[ ] lecky admonishes us that we should not judge the whole institution of roman slavery by this one side of the picture. he calls attention to the respect in which learned greek slaves were often held, as showing a better phase of the system; but it is quite possible that certain slaves or classes of slaves should be held in respect and that the rest of the slaves should be treated, nevertheless, with anything but respect or kindness. the great wonder to the modern mind is that the romans felt at liberty to hold learned greeks slaves at all. lecky points out that slaves were emancipated in great numbers; but we must remember, first, that slaves were very plentiful, further, that freedmen and their descendants remained bound, by a sort of feudal tie, to their former masters until the third generation, and moreover that it was considered an honor to have many freedmen in one's following; so that the advantage of manumission was often, as lecky himself says, on the side of the master. slaves were sometimes emancipated to prevent their revealing crimes of their masters under torture, and many slaves were given their liberty especially in order that they might make a show in the funeral train. augustus, indeed, found it necessary to restrict emancipation by will to _one hundred slaves_.[ ] seneca mentions that masters who ill-treated their slaves were the object of public odium; but then it may occur to us to inquire what the romans considered ill-treatment; some of the laws which lecky cites in evidence of the improvement of the slave's position in the third or last of the periods under which he considers this position may appear to his readers as much evidence against, as in favor of, kindness on the part of the masters. "the petronian law," he says, "which was issued by augustus, or more probably by nero, forbade the master to condemn his slave to combat with wild beasts without a sentence from a judge." we may inquire as to how difficult it was to obtain such a sentence. "under claudius some citizens exposed their sick slaves on the island of Æsculapius in the tiber to avoid the trouble of tending them, and the emperor decreed that if [!] the slave so exposed recovered from his sickness, he should become free, and also that masters who killed their slaves _instead of exposing them_ should be punished as murderers.... under nero, a judge was appointed to hear their complaints, and was instructed to punish masters who treated them with barbarity, made them the instruments of lust, or withheld from them a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of life.... domitian made a law, which was afterwards reiterated, forbidding the oriental custom of mutilating slaves for sensual purposes, and the reforms were renewed with great energy in the period of the antonines.[ ] hadrian and his two successors formally deprived masters of the right of killing their slaves; forbade them to sell slaves to the lanistæ or speculators in gladiators; destroyed the ergastula or private prisons; ordered that, when a master was murdered, those slaves only should be tortured who were within hearing; appointed officers through all the provinces to hear the complaints of slaves; enjoined that no master should treat slaves with excessive [?] severity; and commanded that, when such severity was proved, the master should be compelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated."[ ] the humanity of the last law is open to dispute. moreover, lecky does not notice, here, that constantine nevertheless felt it necessary to limit the punishment of slaves by prohibiting its administration with a cudgel, though not with the lash, and forbidding poison, mortal wounds, various kinds of torture, stoning, hanging, mutilation, or throwing from a height.[ ] but he mentions two facts which indicate some degree of humanity in certain directions, and namely: that, though the law did not recognize the marriage of a slave, "it appears not to have been common to separate his family;" also, that the private property of slaves was recognized by their masters, though part or all of it usually reverted to the master on the death of the slave. the great mass of evidence goes to show, however, that what the romans termed humanity to slaves would have been, in the eyes of modern "civilized" peoples, extreme barbarity. women, among the romans, were, like their children, under the control of the head of the family--father or husband. "the father disposed absolutely of the hand of his daughter and sometimes even possessed the power of breaking off marriages that had been actually contracted. in the forms of marriage, however, which were usual in the earlier periods of rome, the absolute power passed into the hands of the husband, and he had the right, in some cases, of putting her to death." "the power appears to have become quite obsolete during the empire; but the first legal act (which was rather of the nature of an exhortation than of a command) against it was issued by antoninus pius, and it was only definitely abolished under diocletian."[ ] roman women had, at first, no share by law in the heritage of their fathers; but public opinion revolted, in some cases, from the law, and gradually this was considerably altered. when marriage became, under the empire, a mere matter of mutual consent, divorce a mere matter of repudiation, the daughter, though married, often remained in her father's house, having full control over her own property. practically, if not always legally, the position of women among the romans seems to have been considerably better than among the greeks; roman wives became, gradually, far more nearly the equals of their husbands than greek wives ever were, and appear to have received a proportionately greater degree of love. their position, however, falls far behind that of even german women at the present day, and certainly much behind that of every other civilized nation. after recording the use of animals in the public games, there is little need of considering the subject of their treatment specially; there can be no doubt as to its probable nature; though certain famous romans had their brute favorites. it is sometimes argued that, though we are morally superior to the greeks and romans in some respects, we fall short of their standard in other respects. doubtless new forms of evil may arise in later periods, which were impossible under old forms of government and the social relations of earlier peoples. each period and nation will, according to its circumstances, have its own peculiar forms of vice and misery. but the question which we are considering is not whether or not we have some forms of evil which the ancients did not possess, but whether the particular forms which prevail among us are or are not worse than those which prevailed in greece and rome, and, in general, whether the average of sympathy and altruistic action in modern times and among the foremost peoples is greater than the average among the greeks and romans. and it must be recollected, moreover, in considering the question, that while the evil in our midst is brought very vividly before our eyes through the medium of our many methods of news-carrying and of wide personal observation,--through our railways, our telegraphs, our many newspapers and periodicals,--we have, in reality, when all is told, very scanty knowledge of the daily life of the common people, of the ordinary, every-day miseries and sufferings, among the greeks and romans. but there are some features of these facts that tell in favor of modern times; for the ancients were but little impressed by the miseries of the poorer classes; and just the spirit that notes and makes much of our modern inhumanity is evidence of a broader sympathy peculiar to our later times. of europe as a whole in the centuries after rome's decline and its loss of power, it is not necessary to say much, in order to prove the moral superiority of modern times. we are all acquainted with the fierce contests between christianity and its opponents, with the mutual persecutions, the martyrdoms of christians and the retaliation of christians upon "heretics," with the license and bigotry of the clergy, the robbery and oppression of the poor and dependent by these as well as by the titled castle-owners, the burning of "witches," the general intellectual and moral darkness which spread and covered even the lands of former comparative civilization and was lifted only as europe as a whole advanced to a higher stage. but without entering into any extended discussion of this complicated process of development as a whole, after the disturbance of the old equilibrium, it may not be undesirable to note the general course of events in some one country as typical, not in its special features, but in its general moral import, of the course of development in the other countries of europe also. the manner of the growth of state and social recompense for evil out of individual and tribal vengeance has already been touched upon. the enemy within, and the enemy without the tribe, the foe of the battle-field and the criminal were regarded, at many stages, with much the same feeling of animosity, the advantage being rather in favor of the criminal. to the greek all those who were not greeks were barbarians, against whom but little justice or mercy was necessary; and, as we have seen, the romans condemned to the arena their war-captives equally with their criminals, together with slaves who were also, originally, war-captives. crime is, in ruder societies, hardly distinguished from other forms of aggression that are, later, not included under this head. the definition of crime differs greatly in different periods of a people's history, changing as the conceptions of morality as duty to society as a whole emerge from the crude conceptions of individual and tribal constraint through revenge. it is for this reason that the history of criminal law and the administration of "justice" constitute, in reality, a history of moral evolution. there is nothing that is a clearer index of the moral status of a people than its treatment of those considered to be malefactors. cæsar and tacitus both mention human sacrifices as taking place in england before the roman conquest; but little is known certainly on the subject. the romans, of course, introduced their own laws and customs, which existed side by side with many ancient ones not wholly abolished. the torture and burning of slaves for various offences was customary. these penalties were gradually mitigated. but the invasion of the teutonic tribes seems to have introduced many new barbarities. in the first half of the tenth century, for instance, appears a law which condemned to the stake female slaves who had stolen from any but their masters, the wood to be piled about them by eighty other slaves of their own sex; this last office being designed, doubtless, to impress the lesson upon the minds of the eighty attendants. later, many heretics were burned, and the writ for the burning of heretics was not abolished until the reign of charles ii., though it was practically annulled by the laws of . however, in , a number of women were burned for witchcraft in berwickshire, and burning continued to be practised, much later, in cases of heresy and witchcraft; still later in cases of high and petty treason, and up to the time of george iii., for murder. in the thirtieth year of the latter's reign, a statute was passed substituting hanging for burning. in , a woman was burnt at portsmouth for the murder of her husband. during the last years, however, in which the sentence was carried out, it seems to have been customary for the executioner to wring the malefactor's neck before the burning. but comparatively trivial offences, among these false coining, were classed as treason, and it is noticeable also that the stake seems to have been a favorite punishment in the case of women-offenders, even in later days.[ ] in the year , two persons of the household of the bishop of rochester having died from poison thrown into some porridge by the cook, an "act of poisoning" was passed, according to which offenders coming under its definition were to be boiled to death. the statute was shortly afterwards repealed, but the bishop's cook was publicly executed in accordance with its provision.[ ] but simple burning or hanging was, for the most part, considered much too good for the man who had committed high treason; he was given the mere mockery of a trial, and, if convicted, was hanged, was taken down while yet alive, disembowelled, and his entrails burnt, was beheaded, and quartered. law modifying this penalty first comes into prominence in the reign of william iii.[ ] when richard i. sailed with his army for the holy land, it was ordained that whoever killed a man on board ship was to be tied to the corpse and thrown into the sea, whosoever killed a man on shore was to be burnt alive with the corpse, while simply drawing blood with a knife was to be punished with the loss of a hand, and a thief was to be shaved, treated to a head-bath of boiling pitch and feathers, and put ashore at the first place the vessel touched at.[ ] the payment of blood-money was a common custom among the teutons, and so little distinction was made between greater and lesser crime that, while a murderer could commonly buy off the relatives of his victim, the petty thief often suffered death or mutilation for his offence. pike says of these punishments in the early history of britain: "it was for the free man of low estate, for the slave, and for women, that the greatest atrocities were reserved. men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl. the horrors of the danish invasions had no tendency to mitigate these severities; and those who were chastised with whips before were chastised with scorpions afterwards. new ingenuity was brought to bear upon the art of mutilation, which was practised in every form. the eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lip were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive."[ ] the law of the tenth century, according to which a female slave who had committed theft was burnt alive by eighty women-executioners, has already been mentioned; parallel to this law was the law that a male slave who was a thief was to be stoned to death by eighty slaves, any one of whom, who missed the mark three times, was to be whipped three times. "if a thief was a free woman, she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned."[ ] the law did not favor women. the dividing line between mutilation and torture is a difficult one to draw. one of the earlier forms of "trial" was by ordeal. the accused, with his hand bound in cloth, was compelled to snatch a stone from elbow or wrist-depth in a caldron of boiling water, or to lift a weight of heated metal. if, at the end of three days, when the cloth which bound the arm was removed, no scald or burn was visible, the accused was pronounced innocent. these ordeals took place in the church with much sprinkling of holy water and other ceremony. the clergy themselves seem to have had less trying substitutes for these ordeals, often being compelled only to take oath on the sacrament, or to partake of consecrated bread or cheese which was supposed to produce evil results in case of guilt. as pike suggests, it is quite possible that, as priests had the preparing of this bread or cheese, it may sometimes have come up to expectations in this respect; as it is also possible that the cloths bound on the arm of the layman who was to undergo the ordeal of fire or water may have been differently arranged in different cases.[ ] as late as the reign of king john, trial was made by ordeal, and mention is also made of it in the reign of henry ii. it was not formally abolished until the year .[ ] for remaining mute before accusers in court, the dire penalty of imprisonment with starvation was inflicted, in the reign of edward i., and to this punishment was added, about the time of henry iv., torture by the press.[ ] in , a man found guilty of forging warrants for the arrest of two persons was sentenced to the pillory for two days, on the first of which one ear, on the second the other, was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he must "by his own proper motion" tear it away.[ ] the rack is supposed to have been introduced into england in the reign of henry vi., and in the reign of henry viii. was added "skevington's daughter," an instrument by which offenders were compressed rather than extended until "the miserable human being lost all form but that of a globe." blood was forced from fingers, toes, nostrils, and mouth, and ribs and breast-bone were commonly broken in. the thumb-screw was also in use, and there was a "dungeon among rats," and a chamber in the tower called "little ease," in which it was impossible either to stand upright or to lie at full length.[ ] the press was not abolished until the reign of george iii.[ ] it is recorded of the case of burnworth, tried for murder in , that he bore pressure of nearly four hundred weight, for an hour and three-quarters, before begging for mercy and pleading not guilty. he was, however, found guilty and hanged.[ ] in , alexander leighton was punished for "framing, publishing, and dispensing a scandalous book against kings, peers, and prelates," in the following manner: he was whipped, put in the pillory, had one of his ears cut off and one side of his nose slit, was branded on one cheek with a red-hot iron, was afterwards returned to the fleet to be kept in close custody, and seven days later was whipped again at the pillory, had the other ear cut off, his other nostril slit, and his other cheek branded.[ ] as late as , john durant, who "either was, or pretended to be, deaf and unable to read," had his thumbs tied and the knot drawn hard because he did not answer the accusation of the court; he was also threatened with the press.[ ] excepting in cases where the press was used, torture was not, according to pike, practised in england after the first part of the seventeenth century; but the case just cited is a contradiction of so broad an assertion. the introductions of customs of penance did much towards rendering the differences in the punishment and general treatment of the poor and rich, the humble and noble, more conspicuous. as for the clergy, they had special benefits given them, and were accustomed, in the early days of britain, to murder, rob, and indulge their passions very nearly as they chose, without interference from the state.[ ] but the benefit of clergy, which rendered any one subject to it, "practically exempt from the ordinary punishments for most of the greater crimes," was applicable, in later centuries, not only to clergymen proper, but also to all clerks, the term including every one who had been married and could read.[ ] the position of the slave after the teutonic invasion has been noticed. the position of the churl was nearly as bad. "the infliction of a penalty which he could not pay, and which none would pay for him, rendered him utterly bankrupt in freedom.... if he left the place assigned to him it was held that he had stolen his own body. he could be summarily hanged when caught, and his life was worth nothing to his lord, or even to his kindred, unless they redeemed him. this was the fate which was continually impending over the free man of low estate if he had the misfortune to make enemies among those who had the power to save or condemn him."[ ] in the reign of edward i., "a statute was passed which made it a grave offence to devise or tell any false news of prelates, dukes, earls, barons, or nobles of the realm. others, too, were enumerated as being within the meaning of the act--the chancellor, the justices of either bench, and all the great officers of state." under richard ii., the statute was reënacted and made more stringent.[ ] for most trivial offences of all sorts, extreme punishment was meted out. mutilation was often inflicted merely for the killing of game belonging to the king's forests, and though the forest charter of henry iii. provided that no one should, in future, lose life or limb for the sake of the king's deer, the penalty does not seem to have gone out of use at this period, for other offences. in the reign of edward iii., a tailor was sentenced, for brawling in court, to imprisonment in the tower of london for life and the loss of his right hand; "and the rolls of gaol delivery of this period show conclusively that the ordinary punishments were hanging, the pillory, and the tumbrel or dung-cart."[ ] late in the reign of henry viii., an act was passed condemning any person who struck another so that blood was drawn, within the limits of the king's house, to the loss of his right hand. the pillory was in use up to the reign of queen victoria; "it could be applied to perjurers and suborners of perjury until the year . it was even applied to women for no greater crime than fortune-telling, late in the eighteenth century."[ ] "of the other punishments associated with the old spirit of violence, and inflicted in public, the chief was whipping. it was commonly awarded to men guilty of petty thefts.... instances in which women were whipped were by no means uncommon at the very end of the eighteenth century." until , pocket-picking, until , stealing from bleaching-grounds, were punished with death. in , , and , a bill was introduced to abolish capital punishment for a theft of five shillings from shops; but it was defeated in the house of lords. in , the amount necessary to the death-sentence was raised to £ . until , horse, cattle, and sheep stealing, theft from a dwelling-house, and forgery, were capital offences. in , house-breaking; in , returning from transportation before expiration of the sentence; and, in , sacrilege and letter-stealing ceased to be punished with death. but it was not until that hanging was limited by law to cases of murder and treason.[ ] the worst element of the punishment by pillory or in any manner in public did not lie so much in the punishment itself, as in the violence of the mob, which appears to have been regarded as a legitimate part of the ceremony, and against which the criminal seldom received any protection. sometimes, the man or woman sentenced to the pillory for a petty offence died of stoning at the hands of the onlookers; and pike writes of the burning of a woman in , for coining: "her last wish was that she might say a prayer in peace. but the mob which had come out to take its ease and its pleasure had no mind to sacrifice its rights for the comfort of a criminal. a woman at the stake was a good butt for filthy missiles and ribald jests; the yelling rabble would not permit the poor wretch to collect her thoughts, or to hear her own words, and instead of sympathy they gave her stones. when the fire was kindled, even the consuming flames must have seemed less cruel than the men and women standing around."[ ] we all know the condition in which howard found the prisons of his day; and if we possess strong powers of imagination, we may perchance be able partly to conceive what must have been their state in days when the people knew but very little of what passed within prison-walls, and the keepers wielded an almost absolute power over the prisoners. if the abuses which were common even two centuries ago were to occur in only a few instances to-day, the whole english nation would flame with indignation. in the fourteenth century, jail-breaking was frequent in cases where the prisoner could afford to pay for his escape; judges were often bribed; a "clerk" who was delivered over to the bishop before or after sentence, according to the benefit of clergy, could still be acquitted by the bishop in case the requisite number of compurgators were found to swear to belief in his innocence; and, moreover, clerks who had been convicted could not afterwards be tried for any offence committed before their conviction. on the other hand, if a woman attempted to obtain sentence against the murderer of a relative, she had not only to fear the revenge of the man's allies, who seem to have had things very much their own way; but in case courage deserted her at the last, and she failed to appear against the accused, she was "waived" or outlawed; again it may be remarked that the laws of england did not favor women.[ ] writs were forged, juries were packed, judges, justices, and sheriffs bribed. in the reign of james i., the young countess of essex, who, having fallen in love with lord rochester during the absence of her husband, had obtained a divorce to marry him, became angry with a friend of her lover who counselled him against the marriage, caused him to be imprisoned in the tower, had the lieutenant and under-keeper of the tower replaced by friends of hers, and through the aid of these administered poison to him. the countess and her husband were arrested on charge of causing the death, and the former pleaded, the latter was proved, guilty. yet the two were pardoned, _though some of their accomplices were executed_.[ ] it is impossible that such customs should exist, in legal relations, in connection with great justice and sympathy in other relations. some allowance may be made for idiosyncrasy, for individual and national peculiarities; it is possible that a bloody-minded and cruel ruler may find pleasure in petting pigeons, but his pleasure will be likely to be rather of an egoistic order, and his apparent kindness easily turned to cruelty if anger comes upon him. so, too, the cruel potentate may prove a kind husband and friend, as long as his own interests coincide, and do not conflict, with those of his friends or his family. but the man who is consistently treacherous and unfeeling in any one relation will not, as a rule, show consideration and tenderness in other relations, except in so far as these other relations subserve his own ends of gain or vanity; the point where they part company with such ends is the point where he will resort to another mode of action. the same is true of nations. accordingly, we find brigandage and open robbery common even down to the end of the last century, and not only on the part of the poorer classes, or rather not so much on their part as on that of princes, nobles, and even the clergy; we find pirating and wreckage common on the sea; we find intrigue upon intrigue at court, nobles and members of the royal family continually plotting each other's murder, but nevertheless escaping punishment and received with adulation; we find the much-praised heroes of the crusades devasting the lands through which they passed, violating wives and daughters of their hosts, and deserting to the enemy for bribes; we find wholesale massacres of unoffending jews; we find perjury a profession, station an excuse for nearly every crime, religion a cloak for extortion and vice, and oppression of the poor and lowly universal. and yet we weep over modern deterioration! we forget, when we read--perhaps with an exclamation that man is as much a savage as ever--how the onlookers at the burning of the shanghai made no effort to save lives but only to secure spoil, that it is only a short time since such scenes must have been common enough on all the shores of europe; we forget, when we shudder with horror at an exceptional case of unjust or brutal punishment on the borders of our civilization, that it is not long since torture and mutilation, barbarities of every sort, were practised among the foremost nations of the world, and for the most trivial offences. nor do we always remember, when we grow indignant at the hard case of our poor, that there was a time when the excess of indigent population was prevented only by famines and pestilences which killed their thousands upon thousands, and of which we very seldom see the like in modern times; we forget that there was a time when the desperate rising of the continental peasantry against the bitter oppression of the landowners drew from even the reformer luther the exclamation that the revolters ought to be throttled collectively. i have no intention to underrate present evils or to excuse them by past ones. i see no reason for believing that the present age should rest upon its laurels; on the contrary, i believe that we are only at the beginning of civilization; but i see no need for denying past evolution in order to make this assertion. starvation is not easier to a man to-day, because it is proved to him that many more men died of hunger in the past than die of it in the present century. but just for this reason, i fail to understand why there should be so much effort expended by certain reformers in the attempt to disprove what history and observation yet so plainly show,--namely, that the condition of the masses at present, taken for all in all, is much better than it has ever been before; that misery is not so extreme or proportionately so widely spread; that the worst sorts of crime are decreasing; that justice is more general, and that sympathy is warmer, than in any previous age. it is true that we have new methods of exploiting the poor; but we need to consider how our ancestors would have used those opportunities had they possessed them; and we need also to remember, with regard to a particular form of evil, that some time is necessary for society as a whole to grow to a comprehension of its increase and importance, and to reach unanimity of opinion as to action for its removal. as forms of evil change, some one particular form may increase for a time, swallowing up in itself, as the larger wave accumulates several small ones, various other forms, until the slowly gathered resistance of public opinion brings the reaction. we may gather valuable evidence as to our progress, even in comparison with recent times, by reference to our artistic literature. true, the great writers have often been far ahead of their times. but if we regard the average, we shall soon perceive the signs to which i refer. the stilted mannerisms of the ancient novel mark the absence of democratic feeling, and witness to the less general diffusion of true kindness, which, wherever it appears, tends to simplicity, having no need of mannerisms. nothing, too, is more indicative of our advancement than the change in conceptions of humor; for to know what a nation laughs about is to know what are its ideals and shortcomings. earlier humor is often mere vulgarity or brutality, or a mixture of the two; obscenity, vice, and the heartless torture of the weak and helpless are its favorite themes, and appear in the characters of its heroes and ideals. the truthfulness of victor hugo's description of earlier british "fun," in his "l'homme qui rit," is borne witness to by english literature. all modern literature marks the progress of the democratic idea. our history and our art are full of the people. the very unrest and dissatisfaction of the time are signs of a more general and a better education, an increase of sympathy in degree and extent, and, i believe, of better nourishment and a more energetic physique. the higher ideals which were once the property of the few are become the property of the many. our institutions are grown more democratic and humane. we have our free hospitals and dispensaries, our soup-kitchens and cheap lodging-houses, our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, old people and orphans, the weak and afflicted of all kinds, our guilds, "settlements," and "open-air" charities, our crêches, our refuges and reformatories, our societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals, our "open doors," and "midnight missions," our trade and industrial schools, and our free schools and scholarships and free libraries. in times of famine, disease, and disaster, we band together to aid, and funds for the distressed pour in from every side, and not only from people of the nation to which the sufferers belong, but often also from those of distant parts of the world. fancy the greeks subscribing to a fund in aid of cholera-stricken barbarians; imagine the romans, even, clubbing together, in every part of the world to which they had wandered, to succour the sufferers by a johnstown flood; or conceive of the wealthy classes of the middle ages furnishing fires and food as did the parisians during the unusual winter cold of - ! not only has sympathy become more wildly diffused within the state; it has spread outside it also. national narrowness is slowly disappearing. the federation of the states of europe and of the civilized world is no longer looked upon as a mad-man's fancy but as a sober possibility or even a probability. it is now agreed that war between the english-speaking nations of the earth,--between england and her colonies, or england and the united states, is very nearly, if not quite, an impossibility. the union of three of the most powerful nations of europe, not for war but for peace, is assuredly of great political importance in itself; but of even more importance in the influence insensibly exerted by its continuance upon the opinions of the world. the masses of the people themselves are becoming more and more cosmopolitan, and we have an ever-increasing number of international unions and congresses, political, scientific, artistic, and ethical. on the whole, it is, perhaps, as much a lack of imagination as anything which makes us fall into the mistake of underestimating our own age and overestimating all others. the crimes and abuses far away in times different from our own are difficult to conceive, and stir our blood even less than those distant in space; the sufferings of the middle ages, or even of one or two centuries ago, are more difficult to realize and move us less than a famine or flood in china or a murder in the heart of africa. the things immediately before our eyes affect us most; and it is well, for many reasons, that this is so. nevertheless, idealization of the past is evil in its consequences. for, if present progress is to some men an excuse for easy-going inactivity, the extent of existing evil is even more often an excuse for the same selfish course. man has had, in all periods, the tendency, in his discontent with the present, to invest with ideal attributes of every sort some past period in which the special evils he deplores did not, perhaps, exist; the dissatisfied of all times have imagined a golden age somewhere in the past. the old, who look on the innovations of a younger generation with distrust, and are likely to mistake, in remembrance, the gold of their own life's morning for an outer radiance independent of their youth, add to our delusion; while the young confuse their increasing knowledge of the evil of the world with an increase of the evil itself. but the more science progresses, and the greater our acquaintance with the facts of history becomes, the more these delusions tend to disappear. the much-praised simplicity of our ancestors was, in truth, a half-savagery, where the higher forms of justice were not practised, that finer tact and consideration which makes life best worth living was unknown, and many of the faults which we most deplore in our own day were considered rather virtues than otherwise. it is a moral pity that poets and philosophers have lent the beauty of their verse and the dignity of their eloquence to the idealization of the past. indeed, "i do distrust the poet who discerns no character or glory in his times, and trundles back his soul five hundred years, past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, to sing--oh, not of lizard or of toad alive i' the ditch there,--'twere excusable, but of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter, some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen, as dead as must be, for the greater part, the poems made on their chivalric bones."[ ] it is an especial pity that the reformer should ever devote his effort to the upholding of the old idea of the inferiority of the present to the past. not in the past, but in the future, lies the golden age of man. footnotes: [ ] "the origin of civilization," pp. , . [ ] ibid. pp. , . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] see, as above, pp. , . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. pp. , . [ ] see, as above, p. . [ ] see lubbock, "prehistoric times," also especially chaps. iii. and iv. of "the origin of civilization." [ ] cause or effect, which? mexico is not a country poor in animal life. [ ] "the origin of civilization," pp. , . [ ] see "the origin of civilization," p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] "social life in greece," d ed. p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," p. . [ ] "social life in greece," p. _et seq._ [ ] "lectures on primitive civilization," p. _et seq._ [ ] mahaffy: "three epochs in the social development of the ancient greeks," pp. , . [ ] "social life in greece," p. . [ ] "social life in greece," p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. _et seq._ the italics are mine. [ ] "social life in greece," p. _et seq._ [ ] "social life in greece," p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] "social life in greece," p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. _et seq._ [ ] "les institutions de la grèce," p. _et seq._ [ ] lecky, "history of european morals," i. p. . [ ] ibid. p. _et seq._ [ ] lecky, "history of european morals," ii. p. . [ ] "the origin of civilization," p. . [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. . [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. _et seq._ [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. . [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] compare, however, "history of european morals," i. p. : "ionian slaves of a surpassing beauty, alexandrian slaves, famous for their subtle skill in stimulating the jaded senses of the confirmed and sated libertine, became the ornaments of every patrician house, the companions and instructors of the young.... the slave population was itself a hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which it came in contact." [ ] "history of european morals," i. p. _et seq._ the italics are mine. [ ] l. o. pike, "crime in england," i. p. . [ ] "history of european morals," ii. p. . [ ] l. o. pike, "a history of crime in england," i. pp. , _et seq._; ii. pp. , , , , _et seq._ [ ] ibid. ii. pp. , . [ ] ibid. i. p. ; ii. pp. , , _et seq._, _et seq._ [ ] ibid. i. pp. , . [ ] "history of crime," i. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] "history of crime," i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. i. pp. , . [ ] ibid. i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. ii. p. . [ ] ibid. ii. pp. - . [ ] ibid. ii. p. . [ ] ibid. ii. p. . [ ] "history of crime," ii. pp. , . [ ] ibid. ii. p. . [ ] ibid. i. p. _et seq._, p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid i. p. _et seq._ [ ] "history of crime," ii. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. i. p. . [ ] ibid. ii. pp. , , _et seq._ [ ] ibid. ii. p. _et seq._ [ ] see as above, ii. p. . [ ] as above, i. p. _et seq._ [ ] ibid. ii. p. _et seq._ [ ] mrs. browning, "aurora leigh." chapter viii the results of ethical inquiry on an evolutional basis in professor alexander's statement that "the good man of former days was as good as the good man of to-day,"[ ] the standard applied to the two cases compared is not the same; the comparison is not a direct one between the two men, according to some common rule, but resembles a mathematical statement of proportion, or comparison of ratios; the man named good according to the standard of one age stands to the social conditions of that age as the man named good by the standard of a later age to the social conditions of his age. the implication of this double standard is, however, easily overlooked, so that the statement stands in danger of the reproach of misleading as a begging of the question; in "the good man of former days," the moral verdict is already delivered. a question of moral expediency arises here. how are we to define "the good man of former days"? shall we declare, for instance, that that cannibal who fulfilled the ideal of pity in his society by sparing his conquered foe to abject and miserable slavery, instead of cooking him for dinner, was good, and as good as the man of highest benevolence of the present day? or suppose an australian savage who varies the tribal custom of wooing by carefully carrying home his victim after reducing her to unconsciousness, instead of dragging her over the ground at risk of life and limb, thus fulfilling a high tribal ideal; shall we compare such a man with lovers like mill or browning and pronounce him as good as the latter? or, to take less extreme cases, shall we compare the spartan of one period, with his ideal of successful theft, with a socrates or a bruno dying for sake of what they believed to be the truth, and pronounce one no better than the other? no one denies the right of the individual to fix the significance of his own terms, provided he adheres to this significance consistently; but mankind thinks slowly and painfully, and the double purpose of language, in the communication of thought to others and the registration of it as a stepping-stone to our own further reasoning, is likely to be frustrated by a too peculiar use of terms. in ethics, this question of expediency takes on a moral aspect; and alexander's definition of absolute right and wrong as action in accordance with, or opposition to, a standard fixed by the age and nation is likely to lead to moral as well as intellectual confusion--to the excuse of wrong-doing because of circumstances, on the one hand, and the dogmatic assertion of infallibility on the other, or at least to the confusion of the ideal standard with the easy-going standard of the average man of his age. but it is true that this criticism is scarcely conclusive alone. for the definitions criticised are on a line with the idea of progress as at each moment establishing the equilibrium of the society, and fulfil the demand for self-consistency. a criticism of the use, in ethical theory, of a continually changing standard of moral judgment, must concern the more fundamental idea of a continually established equilibrium. to the practical considerations of the possible confusion of the ideal with the average standard through alexander's idea of the judgment of an age by its own standard, it might be objected that the moral standard implied in his theory is not at all the average standard, but the standard as represented by the ideal in the mind of the good man of his age.[ ] to this may be answered that he whom we regard as the good man of his age is by no means necessarily in harmony with his age, as is proved by the persecution that many good men endure; and the statement that the good man is not in harmony with his age means that he does not represent the character of his society as a whole, and cannot, therefore, be said to express an attained equilibrium of the society. his sentiments and ideal are not the sentiments and ideal of the society as a whole considered as an adjustment of sentiments and ideals. if it be replied, to this, that the good men of their age who undergo persecution must be regarded, according to alexander's theory, as only prospectively good,--as representing an ideal that has not yet been proved to be the victorious variety,[ ] then we are driven to return to the conclusion that, by the good man of his age who represents the social equilibrium, alexander designates, not the man who leads the moral van, or he who plans an advance, but he who is carried on by it, the man who represents the preponderating mass of opinion, the ideal of the majority or the average ideal; and the practical criticisms above made hold good. whatever may be said of our judgment of a past age by present standards, the standard by which we judge present action is not at all the average standard, but the highest moral ideal we can discover; and in this fact lies the whole significance of ethics. or there is another form in which alexander combines his idea of the good man and that of a social equilibrium. according to this interpretation, the equilibrium the good man represents is not an actually attained equilibrium, but merely one that would be secured were his ideal universally carried out,--an equilibrium realized only in so far as men are good.[ ] in this case, indeed, the ideal may be rescued from the reproach of representing only the average, easy-going morality; but, at the same time, all the remarks that make present morality absolute because it represents and maintains a present social equilibrium, and the argument in a line with such remarks that all maintenance of existence means adjustment to the conditions, or equilibrium, become inapplicable. it might be contended that the whole dilemma is avoided by alexander in the assertion that wickedness has but little share in the life of society[ ]--that is, that goodness prevails; but such a statement may be disputed, except as morality is judged by the average standard; and, in this case, the argument begs the question, and the old problem recurs. it may further be added that the action of the good man in any other sense cannot represent the course that would be followed by every man, were all men good like himself, for his action takes into consideration the fact that all men are not good like himself and is a compromise with inideal conditions. there is, in fact, and has been up to the present time, no "full" equilibrium of any society as a whole, and certainly no absolute equilibrium such as must coexist with an absolute right, which would be its expression. du prel, to illustrate his conception of the evolution of the systems of the heavens, imagines a group of dancers, each of whom sets out to dance a figure of her own without reference to the movements of the others; and he points out that if, in all cases of collision, the colliding parties either withdraw from the group or else move from this point together, a harmony of movement must finally be attained.[ ] we may conceive of momentary equilibrium of small portions of a society, just as, in the case of such a group of dancers, we may conceive of any moment as possibly representing an absence of collision in some one part of the company, although, in other parts, many collisions are taking place. but there is, at present, no general equilibrium of ideals, no common ideal for any society as a whole, but, on the contrary, a mass of conflicting ideals continually at war with one another; although, of course, there may be calculated an average ideal made up from all extremes, and there may be discerned a preponderating ideal in smaller portions of a society that form a body by themselves. the isolation of such portions is, however, only relative, and any equilibrium that can be spoken of as attained by them is most imperfect. the "good man," in so far as we regard his goodness as inherited, may be said to represent an equilibrium; but it is only the equilibrium of some one favored line of descent, and not an absolute, but a relative, equilibrium. in so far as we regard the "good man's" goodness as the further result of especial association with good men, it may be, to a large extent, in harmony with their ideals, and may hence represent a certain equilibrium among men who preserve themselves from intimacy with individuals of low ideals or only average morality, thus forming a partly isolated body; but this equilibrium, again, is only a relative equilibrium, just as the isolation of the group is only partial. if our definition of morality is progressive and not statical, the good man must be he who leads the advance. but such a man is not representative of his society as a whole. alexander regards the infliction of incidental pains as of little consequence for the absolute rightness of conduct. but the necessity of these pains has a reactive influence on character. that, in order to do the work which i can do best and which, therefore, i ought to do for society, i must pass many beggars in the street without inquiry into their cases, and much misery of all sorts without materially lessening it, has a certain detrimental result to myself. all pain, the sight of which is endured without the taking of active measures for its alleviation, vitiates the sympathies; and, on the other hand, a certain hardness of heart is necessary to the endurance of mere existence, at the present time; a certain selfishness to the enjoyment even of a life spent in moral effort; for perfect sympathy would make life unbearable in sight and hearing of the suffering of many of our fellow-creatures. the need for self-defence has been felt at all stages of the world's progress--in olden times for self-defence of a brutal sort, in modern days for a less and less brutal self-defence; such self-defence is at present imperative, lest the yielding to one person result not only in a lack of fulfilment of our own duties to others than the one, but also in the strengthening, in that one, of a selfishness and dogmatism which may issue in further evil to others. and yet all resistance, where and in so far as carried out, vitiates temper and benevolence. alexander's position is positivistic in that it aims not to go beyond the facts; and this position might seem to lead naturally to the judgment of each age by a standard possible to the individuals of that age, that is, existent, in some form, in the society judged; and it might seem to lead, also, to the assertion of an absolute right where the existence of wrong is unfelt. but to this might be answered that, as soon as the higher standard does exist, the wrong may be judged by it; and that the judgment of a right as yet including elements of wrong implies the existence of another and higher standard as one of the facts. if du prel's company of dancers were automata, incapable of forecasting collisions, we might regard a momentary absence of collision in some one part of the company, from the standpoint of the automata concerned, as absolute equilibrium, since our judgment would have no regard to the rest of the company or the next move of the figures at present in equilibrium. but human beings are not automata, and the theory which regards the moral evolution from the standpoint of the ideals actually existent in society must take into consideration the actual realization which enters into the practical ideals of a large part of society, of the contrast of those ideals with a conceived higher standard at present impracticable. it is true that the consciousness of past ages, not comprehending in so great a degree the complexity of human interests, or looking so far into the future to distant results as does present mankind, had not so strong a sense of this contrast. but the contrast has arisen, was vaguely conceived even in far-distant times, and has continually grown more definite and pronounced in human thought. so far from its being true, as professor alexander conceives, that conscience always asserts the possibility of an absolutely right course,[ ] it may be said that, although doubtless the mind always conceives, amongst the courses open to choice, some best course, there is a growing realization of the evil to conduct and character, of self and others, involved in any course possible under present conditions. the assertion of an absolute right, with an exact boundary-line dividing it from wrong, belongs to past ethics; the appreciation of present evil doubtless differs in degree in different persons; but it is increasing both in extent and in intent, and is the explanation of the tendency to believe the present age worse than all past ages. it is not the sign of growing evil, but is, on the contrary, a part of a growing good; nevertheless, it registers the existence of present evil. there are few men of the present date, excepting the very young and exceptionally healthy and happy, who would agree with alexander, that "it is ridiculous to suppose that wickedness occupies a considerable space in the life of a society." professor alexander himself acknowledges the progress of society towards a state of good that shall be good not for a part of the human race merely but for the whole; and he recognizes also the fact that this extension of the ideal to the whole race means a progress in intent also. such an ultimate state is certainly not ultimate in the sense that it is eternal; but it may be considered permanent in the same sense as the equilibrium of the solar system is permanent--in the sense that it remains practically the same for a period long to human thought. it expresses a perfect, though not an absolute, equilibrium. as such, it does not involve absolute happiness any more than absolute preservation of existence, immortality: it implies only the reduction of pain to a minimum through increasing wisdom and sympathy; through the endeavor, on the one hand, of a far-seeing and sympathetic society to protect the individual from disappointment, and through such increase, on the other, of the ethical pleasures that what alexander terms "incidental pains" become inappreciable by contrast. the evolution of human society is not an evolution of one state or country alone but of the habitable globe; a condition of full equilibrium can be reached only when, in one way or another, all countries are gathered into the circle of civilization and sympathy. until this happens, the isolation of single societies must be repeatedly broken in upon and the process of equilibration disturbed by the introduction of new elements to which adjustment must take place; the new adjustment being in the sense of progress towards a higher system of equilibrium, that is, one of more elements, and the whole process constituting a continual progress in the direction of a full stability of life upon the earth. while despotisms exist to pour into other, freer countries their hunted and miserable subjects, unused to the responsibilities of self-government, and often as unfit for peace as is the dog who has been always chained and tormented, democracy must feel the evils of tyranny even in her own system. while uncivilized, or mentally, morally, and physically degraded human beings exist in one country, men in other parts of the world are not secure from contact either directly with these lowest orders, or, at least, with those who have been rendered less honorable or more callous to suffering by their influence or habituation to their suffering. and while war rouses hatred, and hatred results in war, there will also be, in societies, internal fluctuations, jealousies, hatreds. lack of sympathy, violence, or indifference to suffering in one respect or direction is likely to be accompanied by lack of sympathy, violence, indifference, in other respects: while, again, violence is likely to beget violence, indifference indifference, between individuals, classes, parties, or nations. different degrees of progress may be visible in different countries; but the more facilities of communication increase, the more inevitable it will become that the evils existing in any one nation will affect all, as also that the progress of any one nation will affect all; in other words, progress must tend, more and more, to equalization in all countries. fechner's ideas of the tendency to stability thus explain the loss of greek and roman civilization, as well as the insoluble mystery which wallace finds in the fact of the attainment of greatness among earlier peoples, there being "no agency at work, then or now,[ ] calculated to do more than weed out the lower types."[ ] increasing sympathy is a continual accompaniment of the increasingly close relations of men to each other through the gradual peopling of all parts of the earth, but especially through the increasing facilities of communication by which the distant is brought into contact with us; but the sympathy is of gradual growth, and the continual renewal of the struggle for existence induces renewed evils, so that it might seem, at first glance, as if the evil must continue indefinitely and undiminished, only changing its form. as long as no absolute equilibrium has been attained, doubtless evil of some sort must exist; change is inevitably accompanied by disadvantages as well as advantages, everywhere. but several facts are to be noticed. first: the statement which has often been made, that the severity of the struggle for existence is increased in the social state and grows with the growth of society, is erroneous. that is to say, more is doubtless continually demanded of the individual, but it is no abstract "principle" or "law" outside man which makes this demand: it is the increased power of the average of society which makes it; or, that is, the increased requirements of the age are met with increased capacity, and this would still remain true if we reckoned capacity as merely dependent upon the inheritance of knowledge and implements. coöperation increases resources; and the average length of life is shown to increase with the progress of civilization. there is a lagging minority who suffer, for one reason or another, in the advance; these represent the inherently inferior types, or the types which suffer temporarily from outer disadvantage. the evils of competition in human society are not greater, they are simply more evident to human beings than the evils elsewhere in nature. the tragedies of the woods are bloody but short; death puts a speedy end to sufferings, and the earth quickly hides the victims. in society, on the other hand, coöperation preserves not only the aged and feeble, the deformed and idiotic, of the more privileged classes; it even suffices to enable the most miserable to drag out a forlorn existence somewhat longer. it forbids the mother who finds her child a burden simply to leave it by the roadside as the savage mother does, and it will give a penny or two against starvation where it will not bestow enough for comfort. this prolongation of suffering is thus the sign of an increased but not yet sufficient sympathy; in other words, evil not only changes its form with social evolution; it also gradually loses its force. to suppose, indeed, that renewed progress must always be attended with as great evils as to-day attend it, is to make the erroneous supposition that character has no constancy, and the sympathy for one's fellow-men gained in one relation will wholly fail to act in others. again, it might possibly be thought that increase in density of population, even as condition of the closer contact necessary to increase of sympathy, must go on _ad infinitum_, with ever-increasing, or at least ever-renewed, misery, until the individual be left with barely standing-room; indeed, the picture of such a _denouement_ has occasionally been drawn. but it is to be remembered that the conditions of mutual comprehension, dependence, and sympathy, come to lie, in later social stages, less and less in mere density of population and more and more in those many devices of modern life which we have termed means of communication. the increase of the human species must tend, in time, to self-correction; the only alternative is the extinction of the race through growing unhealthfulness of conditions. but this alternative is an impossibility; the human species cannot be annihilated as a whole except through some catastrophic event which interferes with the present course of evolution by the destruction of the earth--or through that final gradual decay which must accompany the earth's decline in power of nourishment. from internal causes we cannot expect the species to perish; for again in this case it is impossible that a struggle should be continued until the last individuals are destroyed. indeed, the idea of destruction through insanitary crowding gives us at once a contradiction of the supposition of limitless increase, and a partial solution of the question. but the later and higher solution of the question is another. the fittest will survive; and the fittest will be those who perceive the evils of overcrowding and take active measures to avoid it. the fittest will be those who perceive that they are acting for the good of their children, and that of society as a whole, if they do not bring into the world more offspring than they can furnish with a healthy constitution, good moral training, and a sufficient education for self-support and comfort under conditions of normal labor. the term "health" is not an absolute one; but if we once suppose a start made in the direction of the decrease of pressure, we must suppose, other things being equal, that those lines of descent and parts of society in which it arises will be favored in the struggle for existence, and will come to supplant other parts. to suppose that the increase of pressure can go on _ad infinitum_ is, indeed, to reckon--if we look at the matter from the purely psychological side--without man's reason. social development and moral theory have not favored any limitation of progeny as long as population was sparse. but certain facts are beginning to be recognized: ( ) that the propagation of their kind by the criminally constituted and by the hopelessly diseased is immoral; ( ) that the propagation of offspring to such poverty and ignorance as stunts them physically, and makes their entrance into the criminal or pauper classes a probability, is also immoral; and ( ) that duty does not demand of men and women that they shall sacrifice health and happiness, and drag out a miserable, overworked, joyless existence in illy rearing an over-large and probably weakly family. the greatest favor, privilege, and luxury that parents can confer upon children is that of health, and the next greatest is that of healthy parents, neither ill-tempered with care nor morbid and dull with overwork, but alert to perceive and ready to sympathize in all their trials and aspirations, and endowed with sufficient leisure to give some attention to that quite as important duty as child-bearing--the character-training of children. selfishness is, of course, possible in the direction of limitation of increase as in every other direction, and in this case it must defeat the end to a great extent; but such selfishness must tend to correct itself as sympathy develops and society, in its approval, recognizes and demands more and more what is for the good of all. the course of our reasoning does not pretend to predict an absolute social equilibrium, which must include the immortality of man on the earth, together with the prevention of every accident and of every disappointment whatsoever. a word has already been said as to the probable necessity of the death of the individual; and with death are given also disease and age and their attendant mental evils. we may suppose, however, under an increased healthfulness of general conditions, an increase of vitality which shall make death, in an ever greater proportion of cases, rather the issue of a gradual failure of the powers than the result of violent illness. that the tendency is in this direction is demonstrated by the gradual increase of the length of life. a high degree of mental, moral, and physical harmony in human society is no more "wonderful" or inconceivable than the high degree of harmony already attained in the movements of our own solar system. on the one hand, social progress means the attainment of results which call less and less for reform; and, on the other hand, we are accustoming ourselves to social change; reforms, the like of which would once have convulsed the world are now accomplished with little inconvenience, and we are able to go forward with a rapidity of which no former age was capable. we may look at social development from still another point of view, as a process by which the preservation of the individual gradually becomes coördinate with the preservation and welfare of the species. darwin surmises that the work of the benevolent or intellectually great man for his people may be as important for its welfare and the determination of its conquest in the struggle for existence as is the propagation of offspring. as social organization progresses, and the relations of men become more intimate and complex, all the acts of the individual grow to be of greater and greater significance for his kind, while, reciprocally, the health and happiness of the individual increase in importance for his kind. and thus, from both sides, virtue and health, virtue and happiness, also tend towards coincidence in the individual life, and environment comes more and more to favor the virtuous. sympathy, which is for the general good in many relations, increases in strength as inward characteristic and acts with more and more certainty and universality, so that the society which has been merciful and helpful in a degree towards many individuals comes to show mercy and helpfulness in a greater degree, and with more uniformity, towards more and more individuals; while, at the same time, the welfare and the happiness of the individual become more and more coördinate with the welfare of society as a whole, and the latter is accordingly more universally sought. this does not necessarily mean that it is sought from motives of self-interest; on the contrary, as society progresses, the individual is more and more moulded to such harmony with its needs that he finds his happiness in seeking its welfare. the earlier punishments of offenders were extreme and cruel; the majority, in endeavoring to protect itself, had little regard for the individual, as the individual also had little regard for the welfare of the majority. with social progress, however, the majority become more humane even towards their enemy, the criminal. the checks which the fear of extreme physical punishment alone could impose at an earlier period are gradually succeeded by the checks furnished in the approval and disapproval of society as a whole, and of those to whom the individual is bound by ties of affection and of respect. that is, in the sympathetic feelings themselves a dependence on others is developed which acts as an effectual preventive and stimulus, and must become more and more effectual as society advances and the range of sympathy widens. this increasingly altruistic form of even the checks to evil is taken no account of by the pessimist. as the necessity for severity decreases, severity even in social disapproval must lessen; as the individual comes to yield more readily and promptly to a slight spur, extremer methods will be discarded. thus fear will be, by degrees, replaced by hope. this development is seen not only in sectarian matters but also in the history of religious thought; nearly every religion has had its heaven and its hell, but with social progress and the broadening of sympathy, the hell falls more and more into disrepute, the motive of heavenly reward being rather emphasized. as sympathy broadens, we come to feel, not alone pain at the pain of others, but in an increased degree and with regard to ever wider circles, pleasure also in their pleasure. the altruistic pleasure afforded by the relief of pain, as the more necessary to the preservation of existence, has been the earliest developed. a great good in its province, it may contain, nevertheless, an element of vanity that opposes itself to a further evolution. there is no doubt that a certain kind of benevolence would greatly miss the gratification and self-aggrandizement experienced in the relief of poverty and suffering. the higher but not yet so universal capacity is that of rejoicing in others' good and happiness as well as sympathizing in their sorrow. this capacity shows itself as yet chiefly in the more intimate relations of love and friendship. in these, too, the influence of approval and disapproval is powerful, and the pleasure we give a friend in being worthy of his esteem may make our best happiness. here we have a hint of an increasing union of love for the individual and love for the ideal which must tend to raise friendship itself to the highest plane. as a result of our considerations, we may deny the truth of rolph's assertion that the stimulus of want will be forever necessary in order to secure exertion--that is, if by want is meant misery or great pain of any sort; if merely desire is meant, which the anticipation and early accomplishment of satisfaction may prevent from becoming pain, we may admit the statement. in this case, however, the argument which rolph deduces against the possibility of a final state of social harmony is invalid. but it is not the intention of our argument to assert that all desires without exception will be fulfilled in any future condition of society. what may be said is that, in an increasing degree, sympathy will endeavor to satisfy the wants of the individual, while, on the other hand, the approval and fellow-feeling of society, and the consciousness of having performed his duty, will come to represent to the individual, in a greater and greater degree, recompense for personal loss. this change of direction in desire and gratification is no weakening of it: it is no more necessarily true that the man of perfect principle is poorer in emotion than the man whose passions lead him to sacrifice his fellow men than it is true that the average man of civilized society is poorer in emotion than the brutal savage. merely, human evolution is a continual development of higher and more complex emotions, which rise into force on the proper occasion to modify the more primitive ones, or, more accurately speaking, the lower emotions of the savage themselves take on a higher form through organization with later ones. spencer, in criticising theories of altruistic morals, endeavors to show that time and energy are lost in the distribution, through others, of the happiness or means of happiness which might with more profit, because a better understanding of need, be sought by the individual himself; and he remarks, that it is a question how much of the happiness which means also vitality the individual may rightly sacrifice to society. but the refusal of individuals to sacrifice anything of personal gratification must lead, under present conditions of desire, to extreme sacrifice on the part of other individuals; so that the principle of the illegitimacy of sacrifice logically contradicts itself. it is not perfectly clear what is meant by a "division and redistribution" of happiness, or the means of happiness, against which spencer directs his argument. it is probable that the author has in mind, and is especially opposing, a particular school of theorists whose ideas we will consider later on. suffice it to say, at this point, that social harmony can never be reached by the stubborn continuance of each in his line of inharmonious conduct, but can only be attained by such gradual moulding of habit and desire that by natural organization individuals will come to be in harmony with each other. it is the history of social evolution that the individual, though always determining what are his own needs, as it is obvious that he can best do, is increasingly aided in satisfying them by coöperation, while he also gives increasing aid in return. against the list of the advantages of egoism enumerated by spencer and others, i would muster the advantages of altruism, for by coöperation alone can the individual attain the pleasures which now so often lie beyond his reach; by it alone can society attain a higher plane; and the pleasures of altruism are the highest and the most unfailing. the selfish man will suffer disappointment and loss as well as the benevolent man, and he will lack the refuge of sympathy and of the power to find happiness in the happiness of others. what man who has felt the joys of sympathy would exchange even the hardships it brings for the brutal liberty and unmoved selfishness of the savage! what man who has known the joys of the higher, the more unselfish love, would exchange them for the ungoverned and quickly-palling pleasures of the profligate! these joys first lend life worth and meaning; through association and altruism, coöperation in action and feeling, man first becomes a power in the world. yet the man who is capable of the higher sympathy is incapable of a selfish calculation of its personal advantages to him. wundt has an objection to evolutional ethics as it is understood by this treatise, on the score of the assumptions with regard to moral inheritance involved. "how, out of tendencies stored up in the nervous system, moral conceptions arise, is, and remains, a mystery," he says.[ ] the problem is nothing more or less than that of the connection of brain-function and psychical process, in inheritance; and we may say again that we no more perceive the necessity of explaining the "how" of this before accepting the evident facts, than we see the necessity of explaining, in the same sense, the connection between light and heat, or between the seen vibrations and the heard note. moreover, the "mystery" belongs as much to the conservation of character in the individual life as to its conservation in the race; if an explanation be necessary before acceptance of the facts in the one case, it is assuredly necessary in the other also; and its necessity must be fatal to physiological psychology. it is time that that ancient scarecrow of superstition, "a mystery," were removed from the field of science. when wundt further proceeds to interpret spencer's theory of heredity as one of the inheritance of distinct and definite ideas in their original form, he reads into the theory what spencer himself, with his conceptions of instinct and reflex action, never put there, and what, moreover, no modern writer on philosophy has distinctly asserted. this present treatise is much more open to wundt's criticism than is spencer's work, though it makes no positive assertion as to the nature of "instinct" and so-called "automatism," but leaves the question as to their unconscious character open. the appearance of common psychical phenomena at the period of puberty, and with characteristics peculiar, moreover, to the particular lines of descent, would be enough to establish the fact of heredity, if no other testimony were forthcoming; and yet no one can "explain" the sudden appearance of these phenomena at a certain age. but the most of the objections to evolutional ethics are not on such score as this. a while ago, the conservatives in ethics declared that the theory of evolution, even if true, had nothing to do with morals, which occupied a region far above the plane of science. now, the most of the conservative schools content themselves with merely asserting that evolution may be true even in application to ethics, but that it is useless in this province, since it adds nothing of value to theory or practice. it may be well to examine into this assertion. _a priori_, we could scarcely suppose that increased knowledge in any branch could fail to be of importance to that branch and to affect it in some manner. knowledge is power, and we should presume not less so in ethics than in any other science. the assertion that evolution adds nothing to theory would indeed be as just with regard to other sciences as with regard to ethics; or, rather, it would be more just with regard to the natural sciences. for they at least recognized, before the appearance of the theory of evolution, the element of constancy ordinarily called law, and attempted to formulate this constancy as a basis of thought and action. to these concepts of constancy and the predictions founded upon them, the theory of evolution merely added greater certainty and a more extended range, supplying the bond of union between various branches, and showing the inner relation of many before disconnected theories; its whole force was one of clarification. but the work of evolution for ethics, though of a similar nature, has been of even greater degree and significance; it has unified and clarified the attempts made to discover a basis for moral principles and has rendered that foundation for the first time secure; it has cleared away, with one sweep, the rubbish of ancient superstition, made exact methods possible, and raised ethics to the plane of a science. if it had added anything absolutely new and entirely unconnected with previous theory, it would be as unintelligible to us as calculus to a fiji-islander; if it had no intimate and vital connection with foregoing ideas, it would meet with no comprehension or acceptance. science, too, is an evolution, not a creation. the value of the theory of evolution lies in the very fact that it is simply an addition, though a large one, to previous thought, a higher phase of conception which rises naturally out of the old. but the cavillers say on the one hand: "it teaches a theory of conscience as instinct, therefore we may still cling to the old and unaltered doctrine of the veiled and sacred 'mystery of feeling'"; and on the other hand: "we already accepted a basis of reason and utility, therefore our theory, not being overthrown, needs no alteration." both schools forget that, in science as elsewhere, the new develops from the old, but evolution brings with it, nevertheless, a difference of degree that finally issues in difference of kind. it has been said even by one belonging to the advanced school of ethics, that, if the course of evolution could be shown to prescribe immoral conduct, the duty of the moral man would be to oppose evolution even if he perished in the attempt. the conception which lies at the basis of this assertion is as erroneous as that which asserts that man must go forward on the path taken by evolution whether he will or no.[ ] to suppose the will of society opposing the course of evolution is to suppose a self-contradiction. nature and man's will are not two different things in this process; man _is_ the part of nature which is involved in the evolution considered. our prediction of the direction of social development is a prediction of his will; he _will_ will in certain ways constant in the broad sense in which all nature is constant, constant as character and reason are constant. the individual has assuredly the power to oppose himself to all other individuals, if he so wills; and his influence will not be lost; _but it is exactly this willing and the mutual influence of individuals upon each other which the theory of evolution, as applied to ethics, endeavors to take into account_. the result in prediction cannot be properly likened, as it is likened by stephen,[ ] to the inference of the future of an organic whole from its present parts. it does not define the progress in society as a whole from a study of the individual; it is, on the contrary, an inference of the future of the whole from its past and present considered in the light of general natural laws, and is as legitimate as the computation of the future position of heavenly bodies from their observed past movements and present position; though we can doubtless make only general predictions from general observations. or, if we approach the question from another side, we may say that the science of ethics endeavors to ascertain the ideal by which the welfare of all may be attained, and that the solution of this problem cannot be given otherwise than through rules for the attainment of the general health in the broadest sense of the word; for this corresponds to a final harmony of desires through survival of the fittest. the power of prediction is, thus, evidently not to be interpreted as if the evolution of morality would go on except through the human will, and through this will in individuals. in any assertion to the contrary, the same old contradictory division is assumed, of nature as active opposed to nature as passive; man is first regarded as a part of nature and then again as outside nature and compelled by it. we divide him into two parts: the one necessarily coincident with the nature in himself, the other antagonistic to it; the one absolutely passive, the other active; and yet these two are the same, and we regard them as the same from other points of view. nor does prediction impose any "laws" upon the will from without; it is simply inference from the observed relations in the action of individuals: it does not create or alter those relations. it reckons, not from man as compelled by "necessity," but from man as possessing will and acting from reason. if man is reasonable, he will perceive that it is for the good of himself as well as for that of the rest of his race to attain a state of harmony; as he is reasonable, he will perceive that social progress is for his benefit as well as for that of others. the increasing solidarity of society continually rendering progress desirable, and the line of the fittest, that is, of those who will in a manner that best fits them for social conditions, continually tending to coincidence with the line of moral progress, the final triumph of the moral is assured. it is not in any way denied that man chooses this course of advancement. on the contrary, wherever we begin in our analysis, we come round finally to the variation of reason, emotion, and will. as above noticed, the false interpretation of the significance of evolutional ethics on the subject of man's will in relation to progress sometimes gives rise to the opposite erroneous impression to that just noticed, to the impression, namely, that progress will go on whether men strive for it or not, and that it is of no particular consequence what the individual does, or at least that evolutional ethics can furnish nothing but statistics and predictions, never motives to right-doing. this confusion has caused much self-contradiction, has given rise to the most of the discussion on the subject of absolute and relative ethics, and has impelled certain authors to close their books with something very like a half doubt of the efficacy of their own method except as one of observation. but the value of evolutional ethics lies not only in the fact that it goes deeper than any other system and analyzes more clearly the ground of moral conduct,--thus removing doubt with those who are open to conviction, and furnishing a less fallible criterion to those who desire to perceive where right lies in order to perform it,--but in that it also renders obvious the fact that conduct opposed to the welfare of society becomes, with time, more and more disadvantageous. the individual may escape punishment for his misdeeds: but the chances against him are greater, the greater these misdeeds and the longer they are persisted in; it is the "average of the line of moral progress" that is favored by natural selection. a system of ethics is a part of the environment which acts on the individual; its force is no more lost than is that of any other part of the environment, although the result in the particular case will depend, also, on the character of the individual appealed to. but if evolutional ethics cannot bring any such force to bear on the individual as will change his character in an instant, rendering him apt and ready to act according to the ideal, whatever may have been his previous character, there is neither any other system of ethics which can do this, and there has seldom been one so sanguine as to hope to do it. theological ethics, or rather, theology, has asserted the possibility of such instant transformation, and the doctrine of socrates that the knowledge of right will secure its performance is a much less extreme instance of a similar idea. but evolutional ethics, while rendering manifest the necessity of unceasing endeavor, affords us encouragement by its assurance of the possibility of progress, and its demonstration of the fact that the force of endeavor can no more be lost than any other force. it adds dignity to the smallest acts, and lends earnestness and worth to life. it neither contains any excuses for inaction nor leaves any reason open to pessimism except a selfish one; to the man to whom his own selfish gratification is all in all, the knowledge of social evolution is not a matter of encouragement and rejoicing; but to the lover of his kind it must be. evolutional ethics admonishes us to labor, yet teaches us the necessity of patience, since, however the individual will, nothing arises all at once, and the evolution of morals in society as a whole must, like all other evolutions, be a gradual, because a many-sided one. it admonishes us, too,--and this is well,--that we cannot sin without leaving ineffaceable stains upon our own character. the past is never dead, either in its results outside ourselves or in our habit; and it is not the drunkard only who one day awakens to find himself irrevocably moulded, by steps of habit so slight as to have been almost imperceptible, to that which he once loathed and detested. "our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness."[ ] we may not be a mere spectator of the struggle for existence even if we will; the dead weight of inaction is itself a force opposed to other force. willy, nilly, so long as we live we must bear the responsibility of taking a part for or against the progress and welfare of the world. but there is, as i have said, a system which asserts the possibility of instant entire change of character, as well as of the forgiveness and obliteration of past sins. what manner of obliteration is this? not the obliteration of the consequences of the acts, since that is impossible, but an obliteration of responsibility for them such that the doer may erase them from his conscience. the innocent on whom the evil results fall are, then, according to this view, the only ones who shall suffer for them. the doctrine of the atonement takes away that sense of personal responsibility which is most essential to morality, and this removal of responsibility explains the ease with which christians of all ages have combined a fervid religiosity with vice and crime. christian theories of morals of the present day forbid the issue of indulgences; but the consciousness that full and free forgiveness is always waiting to receive the offender whenever he gets ready to repent, even if it is not until his death-bed, is most pernicious in its results. so we learn, for instance, that the "mollie maguires," a league formed in the mines of pennsylvania a few years ago, for the express purpose of murder by coöperation, were in the habit of opening their meetings with prayer, and of withdrawing regularly from the society, for one quarter of the year, to attend church, in order then to murder with an easy conscience for the other three quarters. the senior member of conan doyle's "firm of girdlestone" is no mere fiction of the imagination. i have no desire to join with those who pronounce all christians, or everything in christian doctrine, morally unsound; i only maintain that the doctrine of the atonement is in itself pernicious, and is shown to be so by its easy reconciliation with evil action. theological ethics is defective in other respects also. a system which represents god as accomplishing his own will in the world in "mysterious ways," to question which is sacrilege, has necessarily led to the excusing of much evil as punishment or discipline, and so to inaction against it. "men can do so little themselves to make the world better," said a fervent christian to me not long since; "we must leave these things to god." so, poverty has been held to be a mysterious dispensation of providence which it was not necessary to do away with even if its abolishment were possible, but the slight alleviation of which was counted among the means of atonement for other sin. thus it has been in other ways than in itself a curse to mankind, furnishing a sort of indulgence for the immoralities of the rich. poverty has even been represented as a blessing, since it was to be compensated with double joy in the hereafter. the christian, pointing the miserable and starving to heaven as a recompense for pain, experienced, without largely inconveniencing himself, a sense of his own piety and desert, and exerting himself to no radical cure but only to a meagre dole of charity, shifted all responsibility of the cure or its omission, by prayer, to god. so salter is led to exclaim: "if we must pray, let us pray to men; for there all the trouble lies. could you, o churches, but open the hearts of your worshippers as you seek to move the heart of god, the need for all other prayer would soon be gone."[ ] again, theology has continually taught that man's first duty was to save his own soul from hell, and in this doctrine, ideas of repentance and redemption, faith and worship, have played a larger part than "mere morality." the tendency has, therefore, been towards an "other-worldliness," an egoism of the hereafter, rather than a fulfilment of the commandment of love. faith has been exalted above love of truth, and blind obedience above reasoning morality. thus it was that christians entered, with such zeal, into the persecution of heretics. had the commandment of justice: "do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," been followed, the inquisition could never have taken place. but christians forget, when they point to this commandment in evidence of the superiority of christian ethics, that it is not the only command or doctrine that the bible contains. nor is this conception of love to others, which christians have continually cited as testimony of the divine origin of their religion, confined to christianity or even original with it. many other religions contain it. the buddhist religion enjoins towards all creatures such love as that with which a mother "watches over her own child, her only child." it is true that the majority of the objectionable points of christian ethics are found in the old testament. this testament is, however, accepted as the exponent of divine truth, though the authority it now possesses is slight in comparison with that which it formerly held. yet christ himself says: "think not i am come to destroy the law (_i.e._, the pentateuch),[ ] or the prophets, i come not to destroy, but to fulfil. for, verily, i say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." repeatedly, christ shows himself a strict conformant to the jewish code. but if we examine the pentateuch, the jewish law, we shall easily find on what grounds the burning of heretics and witches, and all the other cruelties of the middle ages were committed in the name of christianity. lubbock writes, for instance:[ ] "among the jews, we find a system of animal sacrifice on a great scale, and symbols of human sacrifice which can, i think, only be understood on the hypothesis that the latter were once usual. the case of jephthah's daughter is generally looked upon as exceptional; but the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth verses of the twenty-seventh chapter of leviticus appear to indicate that human sacrifices were at one time habitual, among the jews." see also sam. xxi. , - , . in lev. xx. ; ex. xxii. , the stoning of witches is commanded. in ex. xxii. ; deut. xiii. - , - , , ; xvii. - ; xviii. , it was commanded that men be put to death for idolatry or heresy or for "dreaming dreams" in the service of another god, and that idolatrous cities should be utterly destroyed even to the cattle within them. superstition and insanity must have fared ill among the jews. ex. xxxi. , ; xxxv. , ; sentence of death is pronounced on any who shall perform even so much labor as the kindling of a fire on the sabbath; and num. xv. - , describe how a man was put to death, by god's command to moses, for gathering sticks on that day. death was also commanded for murmuring and for all sorts of ceremonial offences; see, for instance, ex. xii. , ; xxx. - ; lev. vii. - ; xvii. - , - ; xix. - ; xxiii. , ; xxiv. - , ; num. i. ; iii. , ; iv. , - ; xi. ; xvii. ; xviii. , , ; see also especially deut. xxviii. - ; xxxii. - . command of subjection to the priesthood on pain of death is found in deut. xvii. - , and examples of fearful punishment for protest against its supremacy are given in num. xvi. - , , , - , - , . it may be noticed, that here the children are represented as perishing with the parents by god's express command and miracle. many instances of the stoning and putting to death of whole families for the sins of some member or members of the family are recorded in the old testament, and prove that the expression "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation," is not to be interpreted as a mere reference to heredity, as many have endeavored to prove it to be. see on this point is. xiv. ; also ps. cix. - ; cxxxvii. . the origin of ordeals may be traced to num. v. - . the old testament also sanctions slavery, and makes no protest against the selling of children into slavery; see ex. xxi. - , ; lev. xxv. - ; although the israelites were to treat slaves and servants of their own nation with much greater kindness than that used towards those of other nations. ex. xxi. , , prescribes that a man shall not be punished for beating his servant to death, provided the servant does not die directly under his hand, but linger a day or two; "for he is his money." christians have often protested that their religion cannot be held responsible for the sins of the prophets,--for david's murder of uriah in order to obtain the wife with whom he had already committed adultery; for his torture of the ammonites with saws and axes and harrows and fire, and his houghing of the horses of a thousand moabitish chariots; for solomon's concubinage and his slaughter of joab according to david's last orders; for elijah's wholesale slaughter of the priests of baal; or for the thousand other vices, crimes, and atrocities described in the old testament as committed by god's chosen men, generally without punishment or protest from him. however, the case is not so easily dismissed when we find just as great cruelties and atrocities directly ascribed to god's express command or miraculous interposition. a large number of such are included in the passages already noticed; and we further find descriptions of a destruction from god for the crime of census-taking[ ]-- chron. xxi. , - --for touching the ark in the endeavor to save it from a fall-- sam. vi. , ,--and for many other trifling offences. god is always represented as favoring the israelites in their wars and massacres, and often as commanding the slaughter of thousands; so that we can easily understand how it happened that the cowardly murderers of the duke of gloucester, in the time of richard ii., swore "upon the body of christ before a certain chaplain of st. george in the church of our lady of calais, that they would not disclose the murder they were about to perpetrate,"[ ] as also, on what precedent russia, at the present day, has her war-engines blessed by priests of the "god of battles." deut. xx. - , commands the slaughter of males captured in a siege, but the sparing alive of women and children as booty; and num. xxxi. describes a case in which the command was carried out, with the reservation of a certain portion of young girls for the priests. see also deut. xxi. - . furthermore, a religion that makes man absolute ruler of the earth and all living things, and sanctions animal sacrifice, cannot conduce to a sense of the duty of self-restraint towards other species, and is, in fact, often used as an excuse for the autocracy and cruelty of man. it is, indeed, strange to see civilized peoples of the nineteenth century proclaiming the divine origin of laws and beliefs like these--laws and beliefs at least as barbarous as those of the greeks and romans whose gods the christians deride, and far behind the ethics of some philosophical systems produced among those "heathen" peoples. as has been said, various attempts have been made to explain away these barbarities, or to withdraw all responsibility for them from god, to whom the old testament often directly ascribes them. but in the light of what we know of other primitive peoples the customs of the jews are only too easily comprehensible; the same barbarities of human and animal sacrifice, slavery, murder without pity, and unscrupulous cruelty of every sort, were to be found, as we have seen, among many other ancient peoples. as for withdrawing the responsibility from the god of the jews, christians forget that, in denying the divine origin of the cruel, brutal, and obscene laws ascribed to god together with other laws of less barbarity but of organic growth with these, they are forever destroying the grounds of belief in any assertion of divine supervision, and throwing doubt, by implication, on the new testament as well, since christ and his followers were believers in the law and the prophets, and often refer to their assertions and accounts of divine direction. but most religions have claimed, and do claim, the divine origin and ratification of their laws, as a means of enforcing them. the god of the jews, jehovah, was originally a nature-god, the god of the heavens, like zeus, jupiter, and many other of the greatest gods of other peoples. science has exploded ancient ideas of the sky; but the christians still cling to the old terms brought into use at a time when men believed in a flat earth and a region of spirits above floored by an opaque heaven. the god of the jews was, like the gods of all primitive peoples, a "jealous" and revengeful god, rather to be "feared" than loved; for to such peoples, possessing few resources against the powers of nature and ignorant of their character, the destructive forces of the elements appeared at first rather evil than good, and therefore to be conciliated and appeased; the gods take on their friendly character only as man comes to learn how the forces of nature may be employed for his benefit, and as he slowly attains, in himself, to sympathetic and moral feeling. accordingly, the jews were continually occupied with all manner of propitiatory offerings of their most valuable possessions--their herds and the fruits of the earth; and these were burnt under the impression common to nearly all primitive and savage tribes, that they suffered by fire a sort of death and entered the spiritual world. gradually, the jews became more civilized, and took on the higher ideals of eastern religions with which they came in contact; but even to very recent date, the "fear" of god was regarded as the chief essential emotion on the part of the worshipper. of late, as social ideals have become higher, and sympathy more general, the idea of love, lost for a time through the mixture of eastern peoples with more barbaric ones, has come to the fore. that a doctrine of polytheism is clearly taught in gen. iii. ; vi. - , christians do not generally even notice. the idea of demigods, found in the latter verse, is called by them, when they meet with it in the greek or roman religion, a "myth"; and the idea of sexual intercourse between men and gods, also taught in these verses, is held worthy of all abhorrence, when these "heathen" religions are under consideration. the fact is, that exegesis, forced to advance by progressing civilization, has left far behind the simple original meaning of bible-texts,--such obvious meaning as christians find in the buddhist, persian, or egyptian scriptures, when they peruse them. this is true of the new testament as well as of the old. the christian religion has indeed developed into a system of christian philosophy as different from the christianity warranted by the old and new testaments as were the later buddhist philosophies from original buddhism. when christ conferred upon his apostles the power to forgive sins, he laid the foundation for papal authority, and confirmed the ancient authority of the priesthood, preparing the way for that organization of priestcraft which figured so prominently in all the sorrowful history of the middle ages. moreover, the vein of sadness and the subordination of natural modes of life which mark his teaching as they mark only in a greater degree those of the buddha, easily led to the celibacy and mortification of the flesh which so long condemned the most aspiring from a moral point of view, the most gentle and conscientious, to a life of loneliness, and peopled the world with the progeny of the less moral. indeed, if we read matt. xix. correctly, christ distinctly taught emasculation as a high religious virtue. the new testament tolerated the slavery upheld by the old testament, and we not only find no protest whatever against it, but we even find paul returning a runaway slave to his master. not only paul, but john also, taught both predestination and hell-fire for idolaters and unbelievers, as well as for the fearful and doubtful, equally with murderers, whoremongers, and liars: rev. xvii. ; xx. . christ himself plainly proclaims the damnation of unbelievers--matt. xxii. , ; xxiii. , ; mark xvi. ; etc.--and he at the same time asserts a very positive doctrine of predestination, avowing that he himself takes special pains that many of those to whom he preaches shall not be able to understand him, believe, and be saved: mark iv. , ; john xii. , . his language on these subjects is very clear, and bears no sign of being intended as figurative, though modern christians prefer to regard it as such rather than to relinquish a religion the morals of which would, by other interpretation, be proved inadequate to the demands of the standards of higher civilization; the same method of exegesis applied to the sacred books of confucianism or of buddhism, from which it now appears probable that very many of the christian ideas were derived, would suit them ill. but even if christ's language were figurative, it must have some meaning; the wrath and vengeance of god are continually spoken of in the new testament as well as in the old. such expressions were not looked upon, until of late, as figurative, and they doubtless did much to justify, to the minds of earlier christians, the burning of heretics. the justification of all sin in god's elect, a permanent indulgence, is plainly taught by paul, rom. viii. ; iv. - ; cor. vi. . let us take the buddhist scriptures, and, in the light of the better passages, or in the light of siddhartha's devotion to truth and to his fellow men, interpret the passages which, morally, we find wanting, and we shall find this religion as beautiful as the christian. a chief reason often advanced by christians for continued faith in their religion, is the comfort conferred by a belief in immortality and the forgiveness of sins through christ; that is, the rescue of men from the "wrath of god" through the offering of an innocent being, a "human sacrifice," which was to bear this wrath, and appease it, according to the old jewish idea of the scapegoat. the morality of the last doctrine we have already condemned; there is no real making atonement in this world; we should recognize this fact, bear the responsibility of our deeds, and in the light of past experience, avoid the repetition of our old sins. and the moral question as to mortality or immortality is not: "what is the pleasanter to believe?" but "what is the truth?" in this recommendation of the pleasant in belief, we have but an illustration of one of the chief defects of christian theory, which lays most stress upon faith and far less upon a love of the truth at all costs. the peace of the christian's death-bed is often made one of the chief arguments in favor of the christian religion. but the mind in which there exists the noble love of truth will seek this only at the cost of all peace and blind content. on the general connection of faith and morals, clifford writes: "belief in god and in a future life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure to those who can hold it. but the foregoing of a refined and elevated pleasure, because it appears that we have no right to indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce as its consequences, a decline of morality."[ ] indeed, christianity, as has been already remarked, and as is conclusively shown by any conscientious and unprejudiced examination of the bible itself, leaves room for an ease of conscience and a self-excuse in even very great sins, which no high standard of morals can tolerate. how many of those who attend church regularly, on sunday, are restrained by their religion from practising vice and injustice on week-days, under the consolation, if their conscience troubles them at all, that their prayers for forgiveness and the bestowal of charity, or even, in extremity, a death-bed "repentance" will make their peace with god? in place of an attempt at reparation towards men, against whom sin is really done, christians are taught to seek the "forgiveness" of god. some there are, indeed, who remember only the law of love and endeavor to follow it. all honor to them. but they are adherents of a modern christian philosophy, the product of many good men who have winnowed out the wheat of their religion and left the chaff; they are not followers of the bible, or even of the new testament, as a whole. many there are who are perceiving this, and the old system needs replacement with a newer and higher--with a system which affords clear and evident grounds for moral action, leaves no room for mysticism, self-justification, or inaction, offers no opiate to conscience. such a system must be founded on the solid rock of scientific truth; not on any doctrine of blind obedience to traditions; it must take into account man's evolution, that it may progress with his progress. many term the ethics of science dry and uninspiring, and turn, with preference, to religions which, if they give us mysticism or pessimism, give us poetry also; for man is an emotional as well as an intellectual being; and there may be much poetry in pessimism. but again, it may be said that the truth is that which we should first seek. and especially let it be remembered that, if poetry is lacking, it may be that the deficiency is in ourselves. it is a history many times repeated, that men call their age and its ideas dry and uninteresting, and seek their ideals and inspirations in the past, until the master-mind arises, who boldly faces and interprets the realities about him; and then men exclaim and wonder, and find that their own blindness, and not the age, was at fault. we cling by habit to the old and fear the new; and so we have yet to inspire these new ideals with the beauty gained by association and habit; in themselves, they do not lack beauty. in truth, as i believe that there is more of poetry in the gray wires strung across our streets and guiding the swift, silent, fearful forces in which lies power to light a city or destroy a life, than ever was in any feeble-flamed grecian lamp, so i believe also that, in the dry, hard, cold-seeming facts of modern science there lurks more poetry than all the ages gone have known; though we may need the poet to interpret it to us. the highest poetry is that of love; and it is the realization of this poetry that the ethics of evolution teaches, promises, and enjoins. certainly the superficial utilitarianism which looks only at external forms of government and customs and the arithmetically calculated relations of men, not at their inner character and the organic complexity of moral questions, cannot satisfy in the long run. nor can the bald materialism satisfy which, standing by its analysis in physical terms like the physiologist in the dissecting-room with his chemicals about him and the dead nerves and muscles in his hand, exclaims with a triumph that is half a sneer: "this is all." it is not all. the synthesis of nature and of life cannot be represented by its parts merely; the bond of organization wanting, all is wanting. nor is the action in the brain more real, more forceful, more spontaneous, or freer, than the love for a friend, the thought of him, or the will to do him a kindness. footnotes: [ ] "moral order and progress," p. ; part i., this book, pp. , . [ ] "moral order and progress," p. , etc.; part i. p. , this book. [ ] "moral order and progress," pp. , ; part i. pp. , , , this book. [ ] "moral order and progress," book i. chap. ii.; part i. pp. , , this book. [ ] "moral order and progress," p. . [ ] see "die entwicklungsgeschichte des weltalls." [ ] "moral order and progress," p. ; part i., this book, p. . [ ] on the theory of weismann. [ ] "human progress, past and present," "the arena" for jan., . [ ] "ethik," p. . [ ] see part i. p. . [ ] "the science of ethics," pp. - . [ ] george eliot, "romola." [ ] salter, "ethical religion." [ ] it is strange that even enlightened christians often, without thinking, interpret the "scriptures" referred to by christ as if they, in some way, included the new testament, which was not written till long after his death. [ ] "the origin of civilization," p. . [ ] superstitious fears are often awakened in savage tribes, and among the ignorant of our own more advanced societies, by attempts at census-taking. [ ] pike, "history of crime," i. p. . [ ] essays and lectures, "the influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief." chapter ix the ideal and the way of its attainment mr. stephen questions the possibility of our determining at all what a state of ideal morality should be. i should contend, on the contrary, that there would be little disagreement in opinions as to what the ideal should be, but that rather our chief difficulties must lie in the determination of the course to be pursued in order to attain to the ideal. the profligate, it is true, will not be likely to acknowledge that self-control and faithfulness are parts of an ideal condition if he thinks that the acknowledgment binds him in any way to faithfulness and self-control in his own conduct; and the dishonest man will be chary of admitting that honesty is desirable if his consciousness suggests that he ought therefore to practise unvarying honesty himself. but the dishonest man is generally very thoroughly convinced of the desirability of honor and uprightness in every one else; and the profligate also is generally both among the loudest in his denunciation of unfaithfulness in those he feels should be true to him, and sufficiently ready to acknowledge the social advantages of principles opposite to his own, if you can but convince him that it is only a matter of pure theory you are discussing, which will doubtless never be put in practice by society as a whole, and which in no way interferes with your thorough approval of his own action. so, too, the cruel, the rough, and the rude, will easily confess that unselfishness, unfailing kindness, tact, and consideration in the rest of society, are what the world needs. did these virtues exist, there would be no need of the choice between evils now necessary. that which really troubles us is this choice, the difficulty of ascertaining just what course is the best, which brings us nearest to our ideal, assists most effectually in hastening development towards that goal. for there is no course, under existing conditions, which is wholly advantageous to society, none which does not involve some evil. it follows, from this, that it is insufficient to show that any particular course involves some advantage to some one in order to demonstrate that it is the right one, as also that it is insufficient to show that a course involves evil to some one in order to demonstrate that it is wrong. it is not proved that, because the restraint of any particular desire or passion is attended with pain to the individual, it is wrong. the argument has often been, and is still, advanced--seemingly with the idea that it is conclusive--that the indulgence of physical passion in youth tends to sobriety and steadiness in later years; and, with a similar idea apparently, a dramatic critic falls into a rhapsody over the manner in which the characters in a recent play come out "purified by the evil" they have wrought or endured.[ ] but even if this argument were scientifically sound, it would not prove the desirability of self-indulgence, since not the individual alone is to be considered. the argument is, however, erroneous. with advancing years comes in general, in any case, a diminution of passion, or at least a greater admixture of reason; but apart from this, indulgence tends to increase desire and tendency, except as excess may lead to morbid conditions, or the disregard of higher instincts to disappointment and cynicism. when we are told, in another play than the one mentioned above, and apparently with the idea that the statement is an excuse, that the hero could find no other outlet for the exuberance of his youth than the seduction of an innocent girl, we may see no reason to doubt the assertion, but we may question whether society has not a right, nevertheless, to suppress a little of such exuberance or turn it into other channels. the man born with fierce and ungovernable fury in his disposition may likewise feel a strong propensity to express the exuberance of his youth in a murder or two; but i see no reason why society should permit him to do so. the passion of anger is also a perfectly natural one, and the ungovernable fury which led to murder was not an exception with our ancestors of the savage plane, but the rule. not all natural passion is to be indulged simply because it is natural; and even the fact that a tendency is good in moderation and under certain restrictions is no proof that it is good or to be indulged in immoderation, or without these restrictions. it can have been only by restriction of the natural savage fury that this fury grew less prominent in character. the cannibal transported into civilized society may still have a strong and perfectly natural hunger for my spareribs, but that is no sufficient reason why he should get them. jack the ripper is endowed, evidently, with a very passionate love for his human vivisection, and finds it an outlet for an exuberance which also bubbles out otherwise in many ways; yet i think society will be justified in putting a peremptory end to that exuberance, when it gets the opportunity. morality is indeed a matter of welfare, and so, of the gratification of desire and tendency; but neither the present alone, nor the single individual in preference to all the rest of society, is to be considered. effort should be exerted continually for the reduction of pain to a minimum, in every respect possible, with regard to the individual and the minority as well as with regard to the majority, though the greater good and the greater number must always take precedence. the rule of the majority may be asserted to be moral in that it is the best possible expedient where there is disagreement of desires. the necessity for choice between evils is the origin of the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number, and this, as has been said, covers all the ground, _if rightly applied_. but it offers a temptation to stop with the mere comparison of two sums of individuals and degrees of happiness for the time being, without taking into the problem the wider results of a particular choice to society as a whole, through habit and personal influence. the consideration of these last important factors has led, on the other hand, to such rules as that of kant,--"act so that the maxims of thy will might be taken as the principle of universal action"; and this rule, because it goes deeper, is less likely to lead to error. the moral requirement of continual effort to find the best method of reducing the evil still remaining, of recompensing the individual and the minority for the good of which they are necessarily deprived, needs especial emphasis; for the continual direction of attention to effort for progress, even where no outward change is, for the moment, possible, constitutes an inward progress in character which is ever ready to issue in external progress the instant opportunity presents itself. present pain to individuals is the sign of imperfection in those permitting it and those suffering it, and must result in increase of tendency in this direction of imperfection unless it takes place only in spite of the most vigorous effort for its prevention. even the reformer must choose that to which he would chiefly apply his endeavor, with some necessary withdrawal of effort from other directions. yet the neglect of any present opportunity of reform or benefit, though it may sometimes be necessitated for the gain of some more important future good, is still an outer, and also, especially, an inner evil, which can be compensated only by a high degree of superiority in the future good to be obtained. as the man who, perhaps from the fear of failing in thoroughness, leaves all original work until middle age, is likely to find his power of originality much deteriorated by that time, so the man who is cruel to-day, in order to be kind in some wider respect later on, is likely to find, on the final arrival of opportunity, if the period through which the unkindness is exercised be a long one, that his capacity for kindness has diminished. every neglect of present opportunity is a loss to character as well as an external loss. when the present good passed over for the sake of the future includes the welfare of whole lives, the question of choice and the postponement of good becomes still graver; when it includes generations, we need to consider earnestly before we take on ourselves the responsibility of a choice that shall prefer the future. i cannot agree with those who believe or practically live out the idea that the present generation is only or chiefly for the sake of the future generation, the parents only for the sake of their children, or the individual only for the sake of society as a whole. we need to remember that the race includes present and future, and parents and children, and has no existence outside the individuals that compose it. it is difficult to reconcile the many conflicting principles; and thus it appears that morality is not easy, even where earnest desire for it exists, and that different views with regard to it may be conscientiously held. the difficulty only increases the duty of continual endeavor to reconcile the many different conditions of happiness and welfare. we come thus naturally to a question of the day,--the contest between the individualist and the socialist. what has already been said makes it sufficiently evident that, if individualism is to be maintained at all, it cannot be upheld on the ground that the doings of the individual are of no importance to society, and his sins may therefore not be interfered with by society. in "social statics," mr. spencer secures freedom for "personal vice" by turning his principle that a man has a right to seek his own ends as long as he does not prevent others from the pursuit of their ends, into the entirely different one, that a man has a right to seek a certain end if he does not prevent others from seeking the same end.[ ] the argument in this form is applied to drunkenness, but it could as well be used to prove the moral rightness of murder or any other crime, the sole condition being that the murderer did not prevent others from committing the crime also. nor is the individualism less self-contradictory which bases its theory on the principle that it is the office of civil law to guard the rights of the individual. what individual? all individuals? if so, then assuredly it is the duty of the state to see that the laborer is paid a fair price for his work. nor can it be shown, as höffding asserts, that intellectual labor benefits the whole of society, while manual labor is less valuable because it is for a few. the intellectual laborer knows well of what value to him and his ilk is the manual labor which feeds him, clothes him, and manufactures the thousand and one things necessary for his comfort, leaving him leisure to pursue his studies with all material wants provided for. the satisfaction of our material wants is the very first requisite of life, without which intellectual labor would be an impossibility. there are, however, many degrees and shades of individualism. as höffding says, individualism may be identical with egoism, but it need not be so. and, moreover, as has been noticed, the adherents of theories of egoistic morals are not necessarily adherents of any theory of selfishness. the theories bearing the name of socialism are also very various,--quite as much so as those included under the head of individualism. it is, therefore, both confusing to consider socialism without some notice of the distinction between these various phases of theory, and is likely to lead to protest from one side or the other. but no single party of socialists can be treated exclusively as "the" socialists; a minority of the party cannot expect to be regarded as anything but a minority. of the tendency to represent the whole of the present order of society as utterly bad,--a tendency not confined to the socialist party, but nevertheless strongly developed in many parts of it,--considerable has already been said. as höffding remarks, it is difficult to perceive how, in an utterly corrupt society, any foundation may be found on which to build the almost flawless society the socialist proposes to institute. if the course of evolution has hitherto been propitious to the increase of evil, it is difficult to find any scientific grounds for a belief that evolution will now proceed to favor the good. if man, as a being possessing reason, has hitherto chosen, in increasing degree, injustice towards his fellow-man, it is scarcely possible for any one who proceeds upon the supposition of constancy in the action of man as a part of nature to hope that future events will exhibit exactly opposite characters. assuredly, we are far enough from the goal yet, but in order to demonstrate this fact it is not necessary to prove that we are worse than any previous age has been. the tendency to lay stress, by every means, on present evil, in the endeavor to impress its reality and undesirability upon the mind of society, is comprehensible; and doubtless, too, as the troubles of the individual are likely to appear to himself among the hardest possible, so to those on whom the evils of the age press most severely these are likely to seem greater than the evils of any other times. but this method of regarding history is not the less erroneous. "in the age of chivalry men had at least a common ideal," said a socialist to me, not long since. but what an ideal! and unity of purpose is not by any means necessarily a sign of a high plane. it may, on the contrary, signify stupidity, lack of the power of independent thought. the first result of thought on any particular subject is sure to be a division of opinion, although mutual criticism gradually evolves harmony from the strife, and brings about a degree of unity again, on a higher plane; for the mutual criticism is sure to have been of intellectual use. the socialists themselves have demonstrated the fact that division of opinion necessarily arises when men begin to think upon any question, for with the development of their party many different phases of socialistic theory have appeared. the history of the division of the church into sects, and of the mutual criticism of these sects, has been the history of religious progress. with some socialists, again, the already criticised idea of a "return to nature" plays a conspicuous part. but we have never departed from nature; we are as much a part of nature, as natural, as we ever were. or, if we are to return, who shall tell us at just what point we leave the "artificial" and arrive at the "natural"? there are no stopping-places, no stations or pauses, in the scale of evolution. there is only continual change by inappreciable increments. the theory of evolution carries with it no significance which could authorize us to consider that we had arrived at our goal at one point rather than at another. and, again, if we are to give up the artificial customs of later development and return to earlier habits, then customs of altruistic action, as the most distinctive and characteristic of later forms of conduct, must be chiefly affected. if, however, by a return to nature is meant the adoption of a simpler mode of life in some classes in order that a less simple but more healthful one may become possible in other classes, the question of the desirability of such a change is, of course, open to discussion; but let us consider it under these terms then. to designate the proposed mode of life as a return to the natural, thus making present modes of life artificial, is to smuggle in an illegitimate assumption against the latter. it is the habit of a portion of the socialist party to represent the laborer as the epitome of all the virtues, the capitalist as his moral opposite. this view cannot be other than erroneous, considered from any standpoint. moral evil cannot affect one part of a closely united society without affecting the other parts also, though it may assume different forms in different parts. this should be, in reality, the socialist's strongest argument, and is, indeed, one which he constantly makes use of in other connections. if the steady labor of one class is often associated with certain virtues, there are many elements of its surroundings which tend to develop and encourage certain vices also; and if, on the other hand, excessive wealth is often the condition, as well as the result, of selfishness, still the relief from material anxieties may be used, on the other hand, as opportunity for other useful labor, and leaves room, indeed, for a development of finer intellectual and moral qualities. to reply that much greater good would accompany other conditions is irrelevant; for we are not now comparing actualities with ideals, but one class of people with another under existing circumstances. a somewhat similar phase of idea to that just considered is found in the agitation against machinery. this agitation is not of recent date, however; it began over two centuries ago, and would, if it had succeeded, have deprived the world of nearly all the comforts and conveniences which have, since then, become possible. doubtless the abolishment of machinery would temporarily furnish labor to all the unemployed. indeed, it has been computed, from facts supplied by the statistical bureau of berlin, that it would require about double the number of inhabitants now on the face of the globe to perform the labor accomplished by the steam works of the principal civilized lands. but the increase of the earth's inhabitants depends, to a great extent, on the favorable or unfavorable circumstances of the environment; and we cannot suppose otherwise than that the sudden accession of abundant means of livelihood would cause a very great acceleration of the rate of increase and so a speedy return of the old problem. even supposing that a certain recklessness of sexual indulgence would be done away with under better circumstances which afforded access to other means of pleasure than the purely physical, this over-indulgence leads quite as often to sterility and disease as to excess of offspring. habit and opinion not being matters of instantaneous or even rapid change, the new order of society would very largely depend upon the character and ideas acquired under the old order, and population must increase with a rapidity fostered by an immense multiplication of regular marriages, and by more healthful surroundings for offspring at all ages. unchecked, as hitherto, by the excessive mortality due to famine, filth, and neglect, it must soon arrive at a point where the questions of competition again present themselves. but machinery is a relative term. every tool and device for lightening labor is, in fact, a machine, and takes, by definition, from the labor of the world. when, therefore, we should find ourselves face to face with the former conditions, i do not see that any consistent course would lie before us but the doing away with our more complicated tools, and, later, with our less complicated ones, and so on, as the increase of the world's inhabitants brought again and again the recurrence of questions of competition, until we should arrive, at length, at that ancient state of things where all transport would be made by porters, land ploughed by the pointed stick, and clothes--if we consented to withdraw labor from the cultivation of the earth for the manufacture of such luxuries--would require for the preparation of each garment several weeks, months, or even years of work. i do not see where else the theory of the abolishment of machinery for the sake of supplying labor to the unemployed can logically and practically lead, especially as the withdrawal of machinery must mean, in the end, the withdrawal of those opportunities for cultivating the arts and sciences which the leisure from merely mechanical pursuits alone can give. under more primitive conditions of labor, the ignorance of the masses must spread more and more, until its widening circle must take in the great majority of men, as was the case when these primitive conditions prevailed. in other words, the abolishment of machinery means social retrogression, and, if affording temporary relief, leaves the race, in the end, on a lower plane of evolution, with the work of advancement to its former plane all to do over again. and this brings us to the consideration of another point, namely, the agitation against luxury,--an agitation carried on not, like that against machinery, by only a portion, if a considerable portion, of the socialist party, but by that party as a whole. we may inquire, then, as to what luxury is. the socialists find considerable trouble in defining it; they generally content themselves with the word alone, leaving it undefined or referring, with a general indefiniteness, to "velvets, jewels, and laces," or "diamonds and silks"; the german socialists have sometimes shown particular antipathy to the glacé glove; and a society of english socialists listened, not long ago, to a lecture in which, as an example of the reforms proposed by socialism, it was prophesied that the evening-dresses of the future would be made of more lasting though not less delicate and beautiful material. this last would assuredly be desirable, if it could be carried out; but it remains to be seen in how far it is practicable. the things which are the most delicate, whether they be clothing or other articles, are ordinarily likewise the most perishable; the union of delicacy of texture with endurance is a problem that can be solved only by gradual improvement if at all; and it is probable that it can be solved only relatively in some cases and not at all in others; yet there are few people who will not find delicacy an attribute of beauty. few will disagree with m. de laveleye that beauty of costume must consist rather in harmony of colors and purity of line than in the mere costliness of the goods; however, in a large number of cases, excess of price corresponds to some actual superiority of color, durability, or texture, in the goods. doubtless it is true that some things (m. de laveleye instances opium) may cost much money and yet be useless or even harmful; but this very limited assertion cannot, by any logical method, be converted into an assertion that the price of an article is an argument against it. even the extra price demanded and paid for novelties corresponds to an actual, general desire for variety, and if this is often carried too far, the fact still remains that the want is inherent in all human nature, indeed, in all life, and cannot be entirely disregarded. the proposal of m. de laveleye to reinstitute a national dress is, for this reason, a foolish and inartistic one. no two people are suited to exactly the same costume; and the more society develops the more the individual shows a desire for individuality in dress. no nation with a sense of beauty will ever consent to eternal sameness. luxury is relative, as m. de laveleye himself acknowledges. we might define it, as he does at one point,[ ] by excess of price or labor expended. in that case, such articles as those african dresses which it takes several years to manufacture would assuredly come under the head of luxuries, and must, as such, be condemned from the standpoint of the tribal plane of advancement; though they are not equal in texture or taste of ornamentation to many of the cheapest of english goods, within the reach of all but the very poorest. what are, with europeans, the bare necessities, or comforts of lowest grade, represent the extreme of luxury to the africans on whose plane our ancestors once stood. many of the things which are regarded by the average individual of to-day as indispensable--every-day comforts--were within the reach of only the wealthy few, a century ago, and could be had only as rare and choice articles, to be preserved with the greatest care. the comforts of a century ago represent, again, the luxuries of a preceding age, and so on. almost all products of labor are costly and rare before they can become cheap and abundant. had our ancestors entertained a socialistic prejudice against the luxuries of their age, and resolved, with one accord, to forego their manufacture as supplying only artificial needs, we should not have had them to-day; but it is doubtful whether the social problem would be any nearer solution than it is. the agitation against machinery, at least, is ill combined with an agitation against luxury; for every removal of machinery must make luxuries out of what were, before, mere comforts, and advance the things now regarded as necessities to the plane of the present comforts, as far as expenditure of labor is regarded. m. de laveleye distinguishes between rational and primitive needs and irrational, "superfluous," or "spurious," ones; and he defines the rational ones as those which reason asserts and hygiene determines.[ ] but from the merely hygienic point of view, every need bears with it, by its very existence, a title to some consideration, health and the gratification of desires being most intimately connected. certainly luxury is not necessarily inconsistent with the most healthy physique, or the longest life. many of the things ordinarily looked upon as luxuries present unusually favorable conditions for health. nor can the question be decided by arbitrarily pronouncing all desires for luxury "spurious." to m. de laveleye and a minority of others they may appear so; but what right has the individual to the assumption that all needs beyond his own are spurious? even the poorer classes of society would, for the most part, be very glad to possess the luxuries of the rich, and find them desirable; in other words, those desires which m. de laveleye pronounces spurious appertain to very nearly all human beings who have at all formed a conception of their possibility. the savage does not desire what we term luxury in as far as he knows nothing of it. the argument that luxury is wrong or irrational simply because men once were able to do without it is by no means conclusive. the conditions of life, the employments of human beings, are far different now from those of the time when men "lived in houses of osier." "primitive" the desire for luxury may not be; but if we attempt to determine what is primitive in man, we shall meet with excessive difficulties. and again, if we decide the question on the basis of any assumption against the non-primitive, we must, in all consistency, exclude, as has already been said, all higher ethical emotion and the love of art and science; none of these can be pronounced primitive. possibly we might define hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, and the desire for a comfortable degree of warmth, as the most primitive human needs; and these, indeed, are soon satisfied; but the man who has no needs beyond these can not represent the social ideal. the whole history of civilization from century to century is the history of the formation of new needs and the gradual satisfaction of these in larger and larger circles, until their objects, from costly and hardly obtainable rarities, have become articles of common use. with this course of development, coarseness has decreased, refinement and taste have become more general. nor can we, as has before been stated, divide the human being into his separate desires and functions, and assume that he can get rid of this or that one without influencing all. the desires of the human being are of organic growth, and the desire for luxury has an organic connection with the taste and refinement with which it has grown. it is impossible that the love of beauty in general should develop without the appearance of a desire for beauty in the details of every-day life,--in utensils, clothing, surroundings of every sort; as it is impossible, also, that this desire for beauty in particulars should be dispensed with without a corresponding retrogression in refinement and love of beauty in general. one of the chief expenses of american entertainments is the profusion of flowers used in decoration, and often most artistically arranged; and whatever else may be said on the subject, the pleasure derived from them can scarcely be termed spurious or irrational. not all large sums spent by the rich are given for mere display or for sensuality; they may be spent for scientific experiments on a large scale, like those of edison, for travel, for books, for statuary and fine pictures, for fine architecture, for rich tapestries and carpets, and even in great measure for appliances and methods that secure greater cleanliness and more healthful ways of living altogether. nor are the appliances of art and culture as desirable in huge museums or draughty and ill-ventilated libraries, or anywhere else where the individual is forced into the noise and numerous other annoyances of a promiscuous crowd, as in his own home, arranged according to his own peculiarities of taste, and associated with all the joys of love and domestic freedom. when sympathy has become so general and so strong that not only men but women also can find their best intellectual enjoyment in public places, these reasons will cease to be of any force, but at present they have even moral force; and since inherent character is a matter of evolution, a condition of general sympathy and mutual consideration, and even of universal common decency, must be of slow growth. it may further be said, in particular, that there is no material more used by artists than the so-much-decried velvet; again, many people of taste, who otherwise spend money for little more than the necessities of life, find a peculiar delight in the delicacy of fine laces, and are willing to forego many other pleasures in order to possess them. george eliot's dorothea, otherwise simple of habit, content with her plain wool gown, found a peculiar fascination in the colors of an emerald bracelet, and numerous persons confess to a similar pleasure in the changing rainbow of the diamond, or the clear blue of the sapphire. these desires and pleasures exist; they exist in people of comparative taste; they exist as the result of human progress; they are not confined to a few individuals; and they cannot be dismissed with a mere arbitrary definition of them as "artificial," "superfluous," "irrational," or "spurious." the more cultivated socialist complains of the lack of taste in society; and an artist who is also a socialist not long ago expressed his regret that art was at present "unable to prevent" the wearing of unbecoming forms of dress, etc. but we trust that this is not a hint that socialistic government would undertake to decree what forms of dress should be adopted; and we scarcely think that it could supply taste itself to all people, or render differences of taste impossible. taste is, like everything else, a matter of evolution; it must make its experiments, and undergo many failures for every step in advance. the modern average of taste is as much in advance upon the average of our savage ancestors as the modern average of morals is an advance upon savage morals. the ideal of taste is, by definition, above the average; and it may be doubted whether the time will ever come when there will not be both degrees and differences of taste, and also an æsthetic superiority of taste among those who devote their lives to art that will render the average "poor" to them. if, then, we are to condemn luxury on any tenable scientific grounds, we must face the fact that it is an organic feature of the progress of human society in intellectual and moral character, and a part of human happiness; and we must show, over against these undeniable facts, outweighing reasons for condemning it. the matter is more difficult than a superficial utilitarianism perceives. the question seems to be one of the relinquishment of certain things on the part of one class, in order that another may be elevated to a higher plane. certainly, no one can deny that the present misery and degradation in society is a moral wrong, and that it is our duty to seek some method by which it may be removed as speedily as possible. but what is the degree of relinquishment which will suffice to raise all the poor to a plane of comfort? without defining the tastes for the refinements or elegancies of life as "spurious," or, except as they are personally injurious or associated with idleness, as in themselves bad, we must admit that there are many exaggerations of expenditure for the mere pleasure of the moment to a very small minority of individuals, which, in view of the joys the same sums might secure for multitudes, cannot be justified. but suppose that we do away with the spending of immense sums for the entertainment of princes and potentates, with the lavishing of wealth on a single dinner, on a single reception, on carriages built for the mere purpose of carrying a single millionaire bride to the church-door, and with the other expenses of this order; shall we be able, as a result, to supply all the destitute with comforts? or to what length must we go, to what grade of luxury must we descend in our reforms, in order to secure this? it would certainly not be for the general good that society as a whole should relinquish all the refinements that it has won in its evolution and be reduced to a mere bread-and-butter level in the equalizing process. beyond the superficial utilitarian comparison of the two classes we have to consider also the welfare of society as a whole. if we cannot morally defend the sacrifice of the general good to one class, neither can we defend its sacrifice to another class. and here we come again to the population question. it is foolish to suppose that character, as already formed, at any period, in adults, as inherited correlative with physical organization, and as further influenced by the contact of children with parents, husbands with wives, friends with friends, and classes with classes, could be changed in the twinkling of an eye. it is foolish to suppose that men would become all at once, with the accession of comfort, wise, prudent, self-controlled, and unselfish. on the contrary, those unused to prosperity are generally the ones who use it least well when their lot is suddenly changed. many would not perceive or realize what results their action would have on the condition of future generations, and many would not care as long as they themselves escaped those results. we cannot, therefore, conceive otherwise than that the rate of increase of population would suffer an immense acceleration, were prosperity to be all at once secured to all classes. supposing, then, that the equalization of wealth, or that even comfort to the poorer classes, were possible without a return to too primitive a standard of life for all society, would the reform be a permanent one? the population question is one that the majority of socialists systematically avoid. but however avoided theoretically, it cannot be avoided when we come to practice; and for this reason practical men are likely to steer clear of theories that take no account of it. there is a reason for this almost universal avoidance of the population question by socialists; it is, in fact, a question which stands in the way of the very large majority of socialistic projects. but even the more advanced of socialists take but little notice of its importance. at a recent meeting of the london fabian society, a large number present seemed to agree with a member who argued that population might be left to take its own course since "there is only a tendency" to too rapid increase. naturally, there is only a tendency to increase beyond the food supply, since beyond this limit comes--death from privation and disease; and since even beyond the limit of comfort come morbid conditions which gradually bring death. if the theory of the fabian in question is not _laisser faire_, then i do not know what is. but the population question never has solved itself and never will; it can only be solved by definite intention. at the same discussion mentioned above, another debater objected to any decrease in the size of the families of laborers, on the ground that such decrease would tend to lower wages and so also to lower the standard of life. but the payment of higher wages, either on an average to correspond with an actual average of larger families, or in particular cases in view of the size of family in these cases, can never constitute a raising of the standard of life; on the contrary, the wages would be paid on the old standard for the individual, and competition would be increased by the actual increase of population. the standard of life is, and can be, raised only as a higher standard for the individual is demanded and obtained. but to these various arguments may be objected by the socialists that under socialistic government the whole environment of human society would be changed, and so the old rules would be of no force. and this brings us to another point. a word continually in the mouth of certain of the socialists is "environment." man is what he is, say they, by virtue of his environment. change the environment, and he must change. the present bad condition of things is due to the environment; crime is the effect of poverty, selfishness of competition; therefore, we have but to introduce the socialistic form of government in order to do away with poverty and crime at the same time with competition. the argument is attractive and seems to solve the question as easily and indisputably as if it were a mere elementary problem in geometry. but the solution does not at all harmonize with the course of analysis followed in this essay. from the idea of an individual introduced into social conditions where poverty is absent, it generalizes to the whole of society introduced to a new set of laws. it forgets, in its definition of environment, that _men themselves are the most important factor of the environment_, and that, _in order to_ change the environment, one must change the moral character of men with respect to each other. the whole argument makes the mistake of choosing the one of two concomitants as alone cause and regarding the other as alone effect. it is perfectly true that, if you can abolish poverty, you will also have abolished crime and sin; and, without looking farther, the socialist regards this as conclusive evidence that the system he proposes is logically demonstrated to be the right and sure cure for present evil; but it may be added that _it is quite equally true_ that, if you can abolish crime and sin, you will have abolished poverty, also; and then it may be further said that neither can be abolished, as a whole, first, in order that the other may be gotten rid of through its disappearance. competition is no more the cause of selfishness, than selfishness is the cause of competition; the present legal system, the present form of government is no more the cause of the evils in society than the other evils in society are the cause of the defects in the present form of government. man's nature is no more the effect of the social environment than the social conditions are the effect of his nature. extreme poverty and crime or vice work reciprocally for each other's increase, or they increase and decrease with what may be termed oscillations; poverty results in vice and vice in poverty, or vice in poverty, and poverty again in vice; in the individual, either may be primary, may precede the other. it is as true that you must change men's characters in order to change all the outer evils of the environment as it is that you must change the outer evils in order to change men's characters. it is as true that you must get rid of crime and vice in order to get rid of poverty as it is that you must get rid of poverty in order to get rid of crime and vice. here is the new version of the serpent with its tail in its mouth; but here it is not a symbol of eternity, but of evolution. _there is no one cause of the evils in society, but all existing things are interdependent conditions._ there is, therefore, no possibility of getting rid of any one of them at one stroke, its abolishment to be followed by the disappearance of the others; as they increase, so they must decrease,--by reciprocal action, or complex action and reaction. if we imagine, for a moment, a whole society of savages suddenly introduced to a set of ideal laws by--we will say--some one individual from out an ideal society, who proclaims these laws and then returns to his own land, we shall not be able to imagine such laws remaining in force for any great length of time. if we suppose our own ancestors of the stone age introduced to our own laws by some one from out the present century returning to them as mark twain's yankee returned to the court of king arthur, we shall not imagine those laws as very long binding; and nothing could be truer to facts of psychology than the gigantic tragedy with which mr. clemens' book closes. no set of ideal laws introduced to an inideal society can be regarded as the "environment" of that society, which shall render it ideal. the more democratic a country, the more the passing, even, of a law or measure depends on the general sentiment; but many laws have been passed and many measures of government projected which have failed completely in administration because they were too far in advance of the general moral status. external morality of institutions and internal morality of character in society as a union of many individuals can only increase together, and gradually, by reciprocal action. in other words, the evolution necessary to the attainment of any ideal condition where poverty and crime are eliminated must be internal as well as external; and this is a fact that few socialists recognize, at least practically, and that even the fabians, accepting as they do the theory of evolution, continually fail to take account of in the application of their theories. they have indeed received the theory of evolution as regards external institutions; but, with perhaps a few exceptions, they have not regarded it in its inner, psychical significance. this is made evident by the continual recurrence of such references and remarks as we have criticised, which trace all evil to our "artificial system," refer to character as bad because "saturated with immoral principles by our commercial system,"[ ] and reckon upon a change in this "artificial system" which, first accomplished, will cause a revolution in character. the acknowledgment of the necessity of evolution is, for the most part, forgotten in practical discussion; and the reason of this forgetfulness is easily understood from just the fact noticed--that the evolution, the necessity of which is recognized, is the mere external one of state institutions. character is regarded in any case as a dependent, an effect; and this is in accordance with the old theory of the will as passive and as determined by the rest of nature, never as the active and independent factor determining and instituting. thus, even a fabian is likely to look with only half-approval at institutions like the society for ethical culture, which has for its first object the cultivation of character; and many socialists, until very lately the great majority, have regarded all improvements which did not bear directly towards socialism as mere temporizing. the socialistic government was to be first established, and this would perform all the reforms necessary; or, rather, evils would disappear of themselves when once it was established. fortunately, socialism is itself undergoing an evolution. but again, even those socialists who talk of an evolution up to "socialistic forms" are continually found representing the ease with which government might, at present, take over the business of the nation. this is the natural result of the fact that the evolution recognized as necessary is only that of institutions, not that of character. the perception, on the other hand, that character is not, at present, capable of receiving or administering a socialistic form of government, is the reason of much of the resistance opposed to a party which, whatever a very small minority may claim as to theory, is practically endeavoring to force a system of government upon peoples not prepared for carrying it out with success. there are few governments, as yet, where even the democratic idea has sufficiently taken root to render the people at all used to self-government; and where they exist, the good they confer is not unmixed. i am not advancing an argument against democracy; but the defects of human nature which render its benefits of a mixed character must hinder in an incomparably greater measure a scheme which would place all power, even to the control of all wealth, in the hands of the administration; in other words, socialism, if introduced to-day, could no more get rid of poverty and crime than democracy can get rid of them; and the gulf between the old and the new order being so great a one, the danger attending the new institutions would be particularly great. as höffding remarks, it is not proved, because we intrust many things to state-government (with mixed good and evil) that it would be well to intrust the management of _all_ matters to it. the socialists propose to secure the perfection of system by making the government responsible to the people and the executive responsible to the government; but in democratic governments this principle is already carried out. are we to suppose that the possession of still greater power and so still larger opportunities for fraud would afford the people greater security? or how could the responsibility of the legislative and administrative functions to the people be still better secured than it is anywhere at present? the power of the people might be extended to include interference with both functions. but the socialistic government must, in any case, be excessively complicated; even bellamy, whose government is much simplified by the supposition of the immediate attainment of an ideal character through the action of the social "environment," designates the scheme as "very elaborate." the difficulties of direct interference with the legislative functions in countries larger than switzerland (where the referendum is occasionally resorted to), the difficulties of deciding on evidence before the court of the whole country in cases where the power of deposition might be used, the labor of arriving at a general verdict about which there should be no dispute, the strife and party feeling which must be thus continually engendered in the contest of opinions as long as men have not attained to an ideal character, would be likely, if such powers of national interference were often exercised, to keep the country in a state of continual uproar; while, on the other hand, if peace were purchased at the sacrifice of the power of direct interference, the machinery of state would no more than at present secure the nation from fraud, which must be greater as the power in the hands of a socialistic government would be larger. to the man of principle, it would doubtless appear foolish as well as wrong to sacrifice position, comparative comfort, and the esteem of fellow-citizens, for mere gain in wealth by dishonest means; but as long as there are many men by whom temporary gratification is often preferred even at the sacrifice of more lasting pleasure, and selfish pleasure is of more account than public esteem, as long as there are men to whom the element of excitement in crime is an attraction, as long as women are often unscrupulous and men the slaves of passion, as long as there are those who find the power to command by means of wealth more desirable than security in moderation, and as long as there remain others who will bow down to wealth fraudulently acquired, as long, too, as there are countries anywhere upon the earth in which malefactors may find refuge, the chances of fraud under a socialistic government are large. they must be particularly large where "inordinate luxury and the hope of it" are abolished; for, leaving out of account all question as to the morality of luxury, there are undoubtedly many men who desire as much of it as they can obtain. bellamy discreetly supposes his ideal government to be adopted at once by all nations, thus paying no attention to the obviously very different degrees of social development represented by those different nations. but as long as any communication of trade whatever existed with nations still under the old régime, ingenuity could devise ways of theft, and foreign lands would constitute a goal for the enjoyment of the spoil. there are, and will be for very many years yet, plenty of places of refuge for the clever thief. moreover, communication and commerce with other lands not only being necessary but becoming daily more and more desirable, a law excluding all foreigners would be difficult to establish; and this being the case, the social equilibrium must be continually disturbed, and inner character affected by the influx from other nations. there is another general objection to socialistic schemes which bears on the point of their application to present conditions, namely, their arbitrary nature, the manner in which they would decide summarily many questions on which society is at present most at variance and different individuals entertain the most conflicting opinions, the comparative value of which can be tested only by experiment. this feature of socialism is inseparable from the general condition of things. many feel, therefore, and feel with reason, that sympathy is not yet sufficiently general and strong to warrant the entrusting of all interests of the individual to a majority of his fellow-men. it is even a question whether free scientific investigation would not be imperilled if some socialists had their way. it is not long since that i heard an "evolutionary" socialist expressing his opinion emphatically that the waste of time and energy in the pursuit of ambitions never to be realized was so undesirable that he questioned whether the individual ought to be permitted to choose a vocation in which it is believed he will fail. but the element of interest that causes a man to choose a given occupation is the very factor which most often results in efficient labor; and it is the testimony of many that the perseverance possible through love of their work has prevailed in direct opposition to the predictions of onlookers. thousands of men have succeeded against all expectations. it is by no means those who apparently possess most ability who succeed best or profit the world most by their work. there are projects of arbitrariness very similar in sort and nearly as great in degree in all the socialistic schemes in which the questions of the day are furnished with cut and dried answers. it is strange, for instance, that american advocates of women's right to a free choice of a vocation have failed to discover with what dexterity bellamy avoids the whole question of women's capacity, by the discreetly blind remark that they are not only inferior to men in strength, but "further disqualified in special ways" (a formula which the author finds so successful that he repeats the words in a subsequent essay), while he appears practically to side with the conservatives in thought on the matter. the government of bellamy provides, furthermore, that one can change his vocation only up to the age of thirty-five, and even to this date only "under proper restrictions"; the experience of mankind has shown, however, that a man's best inspirations may come to him after this age, and lead to a development of talents heretofore unsuspected even by himself. the "aids to choice" in a state may be as numerous as you like; but they can never give a man of thirty the experience and mental development of the man of thirty-five, thirty-seven, or forty. the assistance which the judgment of others can give in the choice of a vocation is, for the most part, of little use to the adult; and whatever the minor advantages of an elimination of the certain amount of disturbance consequent on changes of occupation, the harm to society of restriction on efforts in any direction of useful labor must more than counterbalance these. the method of newspaper-editing in bellamy's state is also peculiar. the people who desire any special interest to be brought before the public choose an editor, establish a newspaper "reflecting their opinions and devoted especially to their locality, trade, or profession," and when the editor fails to give satisfaction in his publications, simply "remove him." this method would, i fear, scarcely meet the desires of any editor possessed with a brain, and to whom his profession was something more than a matter of mere automatism. indeed, the whole order of bellamy's state is of too military and automatic a character; though it is easy, in a work of fiction, to represent the members of his industrial army as universally content and universally virtuous. it is in consequence of the more or less distinct perception that, for all these reasons, human nature of the present time is unsuited to the absolute coöperation involved in socialism, that many individualists advocate a continuation of the system of competition. from ancient savagery up to our present half-civilization has been a gradual evolution, not of government with character as its effect, but of government and character as coördinates, or (if we view them in another light) as advancing by mutual action and reaction; and our future must constitute a like gradual evolution (though with continual acceleration of velocity) of character and government as coördinates; the attempt of individuals or parties to force one of these coördinates before the other must always result in failure. it is true, as mr. grant allen stated in a lecture before the london fabians--designed as refutation of the individualistic theory that competition is necessary for the best social evolution--that natural selection favors coöperation,[ ] that is, that those societies in which the efforts of individuals are most supplemented by the aid of others, have the best chance of life and health both as wholes and in their individual units; but this fact does not do away with the necessity of the evolution of coöperation _coördinate with character_. "we know now," says another fabian, "that in natural selection at the stage of development where the existence of civilized man is at stake, the units selected from are not individuals but societies."[ ] this, however, we do not know. natural selection acts on cell, on individual, and on all the various social units to which men combine, in their multiplicity of relations. it does not cease to act on individuals because it acts also on social organizations, any more than it ceases to act on cells in acting on organisms as wholes; it is only true that the line of the preservation of the individual and that of the preservation of the whole of society approach each other more and more nearly with social progress. the tendency of the whole of social evolution has been one of increasing coöperation coördinate with increasing social instinct or sympathy in all its complex relations and dependences; and with the attainment of the maximum of sympathy we can not well imagine or suppose anything else than the maximum of coöperation. on the other hand, the gradual nature of social evolution up to this maximum, and the contest of differing opinions, secures a sufficient experiment, and so the protection of the people from tyranny under another name; for it is not the emotional nature of man alone which must grow to greater harmony, it is also his intellectual nature; as opinions are brought nearer and nearer to each other by mutual criticism, men become more capable of coöperation; and this intellectual agreement represents the line of adjustment or natural selection, since it is the conclusion reached by means of experience--the common knowledge bought through the practical application of various principles. a tribe of savages would be incapable of administration of the government of our so-called civilized states, as also of obedience to it:--both because the individual would rebel in opinion and in emotion at the barriers imposed by it, and because the functions of administration in the hands of savages would tend to injustice that would be greater as the sphere of government exceeded that to which the tribe had been used; and for similar reasons, the present age is incapable of that maximum of coöperation in all relations which is involved in socialism. even the æsthetic use of wealth, moderation and taste in enjoyment, must be learned by degrees; it cannot be infused by any government. the savage envies, in our more civilized states, chiefly the opportunities for the gorging of good things and for self-adornment which they afford; and the savage lack of self-control where alcohol is concerned, is proverbial; the average of more civilized societies shows a much greater self-control and moderation in the face of opportunities of purely sensual gratification, and a much greater love of more æsthetic and more moral pleasures. or rather, we should perhaps say, as before, the sensuality becomes more refined, and is gratified in more moral ways, through its organization with higher instincts. it is not among the wealthier classes, who have had the use of wealth, that taste is poorest; on the contrary, the average of taste is smaller, the outlay for foolish ornament of all sorts larger in proportion to means, in the poorer classes; and were these classes to come without change of character into possession of considerable means of enjoyment, it is to be suspected that expenditure for tasteless adornments would, in many cases, and especially among the women, precede and exceed expenditure for higher things. and this brings me to a more especial consideration of that very large portion of the socialist party who acknowledge no necessity for an evolution up to socialism in any sense, but desire a revolution. bellamy distinctly denies the necessity of an evolution, and many of his followers agree with him on this point; but the revolution he believes in and hopes for is a bloodless and peaceful one. to this conception the preceding objections sufficiently apply. a revolution in the ordinary sense of the word is always, however, the sign of powerful opposition between two parties, of which one may gain the immediate ascendancy by force; but will surely be exposed, afterwards, to the long-enduring hatred, opposition, and revenge of a strong minority, that will make itself felt with an energy greatly increased by the vindictiveness which naturally follows on war and defeat. france is still suffering from her revolutions even at this length of time after their occurrence. where the people have no vote and real influence upon the government, and even the expression of opinion is restricted by law, so that to gain an influence is practically impossible, a political revolution may take place; but its results, both immediate and remote, must contain a very large modicum of evil even if some advance is accomplished by it. a revolution to obtain the establishment of absolute coöperation would be self-contradictory, and the self-contradiction of character implied in it would result in its failure; it could not happen in a country at all prepared for absolute coöperation, or even for a very high degree of coöperation. a revolution in any country at the present time would have to reckon with all sorts of depraved tastes and vicious characters, matters of organization and inheritance which neither in the individual, nor in the line of descent, could be gotten rid of in a day; which must, indeed, affect society for many generations, and before they could be eradicated would do away with socialism or destroy its success. poverty and crime cannot be banished by any device of mere legislation; only with time and by gradual means can they be gotten rid of. socialism is, then, as a whole, too impetuous, if individualism is, as a whole, too reluctant. but socialism is undergoing an evolution, as has been said. arising as the voice of the poor, the oppressed, the miserable, the hungry, it has made itself heard and has materially modified public opinion, while it has, at the same time, been itself modified, according to the universal law of the equilibration of forces. forced by necessity practically, and gradually altered by criticism as to theory, it is coming to give its energies less and less to a consideration of the final socialistic government which should do away with the necessity of further reforms because accomplishing an immediate and universal one, and devoting them more and more to present measures of reform, many of which are simply liberal measures proposed by non-socialists and such as would have had no meaning to the majority of socialists of a few years past, or would have been regarded by them as useless temporizing. in its mutual action and reaction with individualism, it will doubtless still more modify and be modified, so that more and more ground for united action will be won. the cause of the laborer is the most urgent of our times; but increase of wages will be of very little use except as it is steadily accompanied by aids to knowledge and self-direction, aids in the formation of character, in the use of self and of the means of enjoyment; otherwise, the laborer must continually defeat his own cause, and renew the old problems. the education of self-control must begin with the child. the education of the child is never to be considered by itself; the child is not one individual and the adult another, neither is there any dividing line between childhood and maturity; and that which the individual is to become in later life he must grow towards as a child. the habits which the man would exercise the child must learn. in germany, where the military spirit prevails, implicit obedience to authority is ranked among the highest virtues, and habits of strict military discipline are carried into the family as well as exercised in all public relations. in countries where more democratic ideas are strong, the older methods are giving way to milder ones. these sometimes degenerate into the opposite extreme of careless indulgence, with bad results; but taken on the average, their beneficial influence is seen in the greater alertness, originality, and openness of the children brought up under them. frankness and originality are on the average incompatible with harsh or stern treatment; the latter is more likely to generate craftiness, fawning hypocrisy, or an unloving and unlovable rigidity of character; and any of these qualities is compatible with secret self-indulgence in any form, wherever this is possible. only an education in freedom can teach the use of freedom. the old, hard, religious idea of "breaking the will" (the natural outcome of a religion based on blind faith, "fear," and unquestioning obedience) was a sad blunder; what we need is not less but more will, with better direction of it. true, the wisdom of experience must always guide the young; but its guidance, to attain the best results, should make itself as little felt as authority as possible, and should withdraw into the background as early as possible. not that it should degenerate into slipshod yielding to importunities, but that it should endeavor to give reasons rather than mere rules of conduct, to instil principles and ideas rather than laws, and so to develop the power of self-direction. it is often objected that the young child is incapable of comprehending principles; but so is the infant incapable of comprehending speech, and yet it is through the use of speech to the infant that comprehension is gradually attained; as sounds are fixed in the receptive memory of the infant, and slowly acquire meaning, so ethical principles, simply stated, may be communicated, and will be better and better understood as the child develops. this method of instruction is, rightly understood, as far from weakness as it is from tyranny and dogmatism; indeed, no method demands in the instructor so much care, thought, and patience. it must be judicious and consistent, never capricious, and its fundamental principle must be the cultivation of justice through justice, and so of kindness through kindness. especially should the young be prepared in the home, by self-knowledge, for the trials and temptations which menace in the world outside, through the passions of maturity. to the earnest man or woman, nothing appears more trivial than the false shame which hinders, even in the home and between parents and children, the moral discussion of some of the most important of human relations for good or evil. to the pure all things are pure; but, unfortunately, it is also true that to the impure all things are impure. nothing is more injurious to children than the morbid curiosity stimulated through the secrecy and deception which are ordinarily practised, and which inspires them with the sense of a mystery that is half criminal, half sacred. curiosity grows under such tuition, a disproportionate interest is awakened and often comes to be satisfied from sources outside the home, with an admixture of deplorable vulgarity, the influence of which is not soon lost. such a tuition tends, not to purity of thought, but to impurity, and often directly to vice. the mystery with which natural, and what may be perfectly moral, relations is thus invested, is often the source of a fatal attraction to ignorant youth. what we need to make out of our children is not puppets of which the world as well as ourselves may pull the wires, but earnest and self-comprehending men and women, self-reliant and fearless because life is no strange country filled with unknown shadows and pitfalls, but a pleasant land, whose dangers, known, may be avoided, and the road through which leads to a comprehended and desirable goal. parental power was once held sacred and beyond interference; nevertheless the use made of it does not seem to have been always a sacred one. the roman law allowed parents to put their children to death. the modern state has tended, on the other hand, to take away more and more power from the parents, extending its protection to the helpless child. and this is well; the child, as well as the adult, should have the right of protection against abuse. nevertheless, the theories which would relegate the whole education and care of the child to the state must be regarded as too extreme. whatever disadvantages there may be in the government of parents, especially at the present day when the education of women is still so inadequate, there is yet nothing which the child cannot better miss out of his education than the influence of parental love, the lack of which no state institution can ever supply. granted that parental government is of a most mistaken sort in some cases, and that it is not perfect in any case, it still remains true that family affection furnishes one of mankind's greatest joys, and that the love of the parent should, and even does, on the average, make the best protection and educator weak and clinging childhood can have. no one who has at all studied the condition of children in orphan asylums and other institutions under the care of the state, can have failed to notice, even in those institutions managed with the greatest kindness, the immense difference in happiness and attractiveness between their inmates and the children used to family love and mother's caresses. the lack of love makes the child unlovable. the fundamental method of reform lies, not in the withdrawal of all power from parents, but rather in the better preparation of men, and especially of women, to fulfil the duties of parentage. such a preparation must consist, however, less in any particular study than in such general physical, intellectual, and moral discipline and education as shall expand all the powers in health and harmony, thus securing to children a good physical inheritance and an early guidance both wise and moral. a higher morality must particularly emphasize the fact that not self alone or even merely the two parties to a marriage are to be considered; that the welfare of possible offspring must be regarded; and that, therefore, marriage with the morally unfit is a crime against future generations as well as against self, and marriage of the physically unfit, where offspring are permitted, is equally a wrong. the old idea, encouraged in women, that it was a good and noble use of life to "marry a man in order to reform him," is beginning to go out of vogue; and future standards will not tolerate the present social dogma that, however much of a profligate a man may have been, whatever associates he may have affected, however he may have betrayed the innocent and debauched his own moral sense, he is still fit to mate with any pure and good woman. the necessity of a better physical and intellectual education for the mothers of the race, as a preparation for the adequate performance of their duties, must be, at the present time, especially emphasized. the task of the mother in the early training of children is one that requires practical knowledge of the world, broad views, and that power of judgment which is possible only through mental discipline. superstition, narrowness, subjection to tradition and dogma, are incompatible with efficient motherhood. the education must, then, be real, no cramming with stale facts and staler theories; it must advance with the science of the day, and deal with its vital questions. but the standpoint which regards women only as means to ends outside themselves, which calculates all the advantages to be permitted them by the measure alone of their usefulness to husbands or children, is a poor one. to afford to all individuals the full and free development of capacity must be the ideal of society. the ancient conceptions which laid little emphasis practically, whatever they might do theoretically, upon the woman's right to opportunities for her own sake, which made meekness and self-abnegation her chief virtues, and fixed its regard always upon future generations in her case, is one that cannot be defended from a higher ethical standpoint. if no man lives unto himself alone, neither should any man, or woman either, be expected to spend his life merely as a means to others and having no end in himself. every human being has a right to a share in the general privileges and pleasures. for their own sake, and that of society as a whole, as well as for that of their immediate friends and family, women should share equally with men the benefits of mental culture, its æsthetic enjoyments, its consolations and distractions, and the calm and self-poise bestowed by its broad outlook. to women as well as to men applies what has already been said of the folly and sin of ignorance of the world. we have only to look at france in order to perceive the evils of a system which brings girls to maturity in a condition of seclusion, ignorance, and dependence, and then suddenly launches them upon society wholly unprepared to withstand the temptations it presents. the evil results of a less degree of the same system are visible all over the world. on the other hand, it is in just that country--america--where women have had the most freedom, that they are also most capable of enduring freedom, and that their civilizing influence is most visible. they are not the less womanly for this liberty, and society is very much the better for it. indeed, their attractiveness and the power they wield through it is not equalled in any other country. "i wonder," writes george eliot, "whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measure the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful--who made a man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life." "it is terrible--the keen, bright eye of a woman when it has once been turned with admiration on what is severely true; but then the severely true rarely comes within its range of vision." the questions of marriage and prostitution may be reduced to the single question of the desirability of monogamy. no one can well deny the evils attending the existence of a class of prostitutes isolated from moral associations, despised and ill-treated, daily sinking lower and lower through this isolation, and contaminating, by their influence, those who come in contact with them. the practical question is, then, would it be well for society as a whole to assume another attitude, of open approval, towards prostitution, to admit those who are now outcasts to a position on a par with faithful wives and pure maidens. this was the position of athenian prostitutes, and it existed together with, we may suppose, comparative chastity on the part of maidens and faithfulness on the part of wives. these, however, did not take part in the social life of the men, but lived in seclusion in their homes; it would be impossible to accord a similar position to prostitutes in modern society unless with the practical surrender of any demand or expectancy of faithfulness on the part of wives, or of chastity on the part of maidens. even in france, where the position of prostitutes most nearly approximates the athenian, a very distinct dividing-line is drawn between the _demi-monde_ and the rest of society; and, indeed, special precautions are taken to secure the chastity of girls. in like manner, purity might perhaps still be secured in girls, after the admission of prostitutes to a position of equality with other women, by a convent education and the greatest watchfulness; but the lack of self-dependence would be likely to be followed, as it now so often is in france, only in far greater degree, by excesses after the attainment of comparative self-direction with marriage. the profligate soon tires of the prostitute, and desires higher game; unbridled license begets morbid passion; the sense of honor is blunted; the pure cease to be safe except as far as they are able, by self-control and self-defence, to protect themselves; and for such self-poise only an education of freedom, of knowledge of the world and of self, can prepare. nor could even such a system of seclusion as we have imagined exist for any length of time side by side with the full acceptance of prostitution as perfectly honorable and right; the two things are self-contradictory and incompatible; in france, faithfulness is not less desired of wives than in other countries. indeed, the majority of men in civilized countries would never consent to a system of general promiscuity; they desire women, that is, a large number of women, a sufficient number to supply them with wives, to remain pure, whatever liberty they demand for themselves. the whole progress of society has been in the direction of monogamy, and the reason of this is obvious: as reason and taste develop, man ceases to be satisfied with the mere enjoyments of the animal; he develops higher powers and instincts which also demand their satisfaction; these powers, too, are not separate entities, but are organized with the more primitive capacities and the whole organization becomes another through their appearance. as the social instinct grows, and intellect comes to take a higher place, the mere or chiefly physical passion felt between the sexes of lower species becomes the higher human love, an organized instinct in which all the moral and intellectual desires, the highest aims and emotions of the individual are fused to a whole. moreover, momentary pleasure becomes, with social progress, indeed with all evolution, less and less the ruling power; man, above all creatures, comes to demand enduring sources of satisfaction. faithfulness in love is as necessary to perfect satisfaction as is faithfulness in friendship; and the long as well as the close companionship of congenial natures is now, and must more and more become, the spring of our highest human joys. disappointment in marriage may incline the individual to doubt, by a universalization from his own case,--to which disappointment is prone,--whether life-long love and faithfulness are possible; but he still must feel that this is the ideal. it has been said that men are naturally polygamous, women monogamous; but this statement is obviously erroneous, since men by no means favor general polygamy; even the savage is capable of jealousy, and men have continually used the superior power they have possessed in law and public opinion to emphasize the exclusive claim they have upon the women they take to wife. it is only true that, having also had the power in their hands of refusing a like faithfulness to that which they demand from women, they have used this power to their own advantage. women desire faithful love on the part of men quite as much as men desire it on the part of women; and women are quite as capable of physical excesses and of fickleness as are men, when the restraints of public opinion and social law are once broken over. a condition of promiscuity is impossible in an ideal society, and can never be the goal towards which we tend. men would not submit to it in the women they loved; and if it is not possible for wives, then we have left us only the alternative of prostitution in its present form, increasingly worse in character as the ideal of faithfulness is more universally demanded and more completely carried out in wives, and the necessary coördinate social ostracism and disgrace of the prostitute increases. but this also cannot assuredly be our ideal; the increasing misery of the class of prostitutes is not a thing to be sought. the whole theory which tolerates prostitution is, in fact, illogical and only devised as a prop for the selfishness of men, who are content to take their pleasure at the expense of so much misery. the same thing cannot be, as some one has said, at once right for the man to demand and infamous for the woman to permit. where the act is one to which both sexes are necessary, it must, if it be right at all, be right for both, and if it is wrong, then wrong for both. and this would remain true even if it were proved that, because of greater strength or for any other reason, the sexual passion of men ought not to be restrained; for, the responsibility of the prostitute's misery is thus laid at the door of men; if the women who ply this traffic are prompted by no passion, but only compelled by destitution, then the blame of their unhappy compulsion to such a traffic rests more than ever on the heads of those who furnish the demand to which their supply answers. in any case, the man is an accessory before the fact to a thing which he acknowledges wrong on the part of its performer. but the plea that passion is stronger in the man for an act which dates back to the point in evolution where sexual propagation first began, and which has been performed equally by both sexes through all the range of species up to man, and even equally by both sexes of the human species except during the comparatively short period of higher civilization, is absurd. the difference between the sexes in degree of sexual gratification is, _among those who transmit their instincts to offspring_, not great even under civilization. there is probably more excess in marriage than outside it. but apart from this fact, the fact of cross-heredity is to be taken into consideration. the sexual is no more than any other instinct a separate part of the individual character; it is organically interwoven with all other instincts and tendencies; and it is scarcely supposable that thus fused with the rest of character, it would not be subject, as all other traits, to cross-inheritance from father to daughter as well as from mother to son,--that the father's life would not, in many cases, affect his daughter's propensities, and the mother's life her son's. this _a priori_ reasoning is supported by facts of observation, among which those of pathology and criminology are naturally the most marked. man is an animal; but, as we have said before, he is not a beast, nor does he need to imitate the beasts. he has his own social organization and must determine his own moral laws. the old theory, that any restraint at all of sexual passion is a crime against nature, and likely to result in great physical evil, is now exploded. even if it were true that some evil to the individual was always the result of any restraint, the good of the individual is not the absolute criterion of right, and cannot stand against the claim of society as a whole; the unrestrained indulgence of sexual passion could no more be justified on this ground, and because of the fact that it is a natural instinct, than the absolute indulgence of anger can be justified because anger is a natural passion, and its expression doubtless a great satisfaction and relief to the individual. but very many medical men, and among them such men as professor krafft-ebbing, the german authority on nervous diseases, are now denying that self-restraint has such evil results as have been attributed to it. krafft-ebbing says, on the contrary, that while physical excess is very often the precursor of harm, self-restraint is seldom so, except in cases of abnormal and morbid appetite.[ ] in other countries than the united states and england, the plea of "poetry" or "romance" is often heard in defence of prostitution, and as an excuse for the seduction of pure women. but if this is poetry, which must so end in the bitter misery, the shame, degradation, despair, and even often the utter destruction of its heroines, then, in the name of pity, let us have less of poetry and more of common humanity. to a man of anything but selfish instincts, "poetry" or "romance" could never be an excuse for connivance at such misery, either by direct act or in any way by influence. nor is the poetry or romance of the highest order, in any case. there is no romance so powerful, no poetry so thrilling, nor any passion so strong, as that to which all the springs of intellectual aspiration and moral aim converge, and which draws its sweetness and force from a purity tainted by no degradation of ideals, galled by no bitter and humiliating recollections, checked by no self-consciousness of concealment and deceit. compared with such a feeling, the romance of the "man of the world" is tame and flat, his poetry but the doggerel jingle of the third-rate variety-show. physical passion the human being shares with every dog and other brute down to nearly the lowest forms of animal life; love is as truly of higher species as the æsthetic sense of the artist is of higher nature than the delight of the savage in gauds. the old idea that strong emotion of any kind was incompatible with perfect morality has already been sufficiently discussed. but this delusion has been the excuse of many a life of profound selfishness. it has led to the theory that the artistic nature must necessarily be unrestrained in the gratification of its impulses, and has furnished the libertine with a fine sense of kinship with the poet through the imitation of his sins. perhaps the poetry of the lives of robert and elizabeth barrett browning has been to the world as great a gratification and of as high worth as any that they ever wrote on paper. it has dispelled once and forever the false theory of the necessities of the artistic temperament, and has enabled us to perceive the higher beauty of enduring love. it is often urged in defence of the sexual sins of the poet or the musician, that they are natural to his temperament and that, moreover, he must be acquainted with all phases of life. but why is it not also urged, then, that he ought to be at liberty to give way to ungoverned fury, if he has inherited a tendency in that direction, or that he is justified in committing murder, arson, and all the other crimes in the catalogue for the sake of the experience and the greater power of portrayal thus gained? if the excuse suffices for one crime against the welfare of human beings, it should suffice also for others. dickens might possibly have been able to draw the character of bill sykes, to depict his crime and the succeeding emotions with greater power and faithfulness, had he himself experienced all that which he wished to portray; nevertheless, society cannot concede that he would have been justified in killing for the sake of his art; and neither can it concede, from a higher ethical standpoint, that any other act in direct opposition to the general welfare is justifiable for the sake of art. it may be possible for the artist, by torturing a slave to death, to paint a more realistic picture of dying agony; but however glorious the art, the man of finer sense and stronger sympathies must be revolted by it. society can even better miss a little of its art than take it at the price of human misery. but it is to be questioned whether the artist does not lose as much as he gains, or even more, by an immoral license of any sort. true, the artist must know human nature; but the best portrayers of criminal characters have not themselves been criminals; and if ever we should have a murderer-poet, we should in all probability feel the lack, in his verse, of various things, among these of the higher realism which comprehends higher as well as lower types. it is impossible to be merely the spectator of one's own life even if one is an artist; and especially is this true where passion is concerned. the emotions one feels, the acts one performs, must mould one's character, one's thought, opinion, the mental world in which one lives, and so one's creative genius. nature is by no means all dunghill or reptile-haunted swamp, or even common kitchen; she has also her seas and mountains, and skies, her fields and woods, and even her sunny gardens and dainty parlors. the snow-mountain glowing under the flush of dawn is as real as the reeking dunghill; but the power to appreciate and portray the one may be lost by too close association with the other, as the fine sense of smell is dulled by sojourning in foul odors. to the rake, the character of the self-controlled and virtuous becomes incomprehensible and chimerical; and his attempts to represent it are likely to be tinged with an atmosphere of unreality. of this we have much evidence in literature. to raise oneself to the higher standard in practice and comprehension requires an effort; but it is comparatively easy to allow oneself to sink to a level for which generations of one's ancestors has prepared innate if latent tendencies. on the other hand, though we desire to know men and things through art, we desire to keep with us through its aid, above all, that which most pleases us in the actual world--the beautiful in form, coloring, and idea, in nature outside man and in man himself; the good, if it is the truly good, and not cant or hypocrisy, is also the beautiful, and the loss of the power to portray it is a large one. and beyond the more easily definable loss which we have noticed, there is a still further one, felt in a subtle tone, a shade, an atmosphere; and which, if closely knit with our moral perceptions, is still an æsthetic as well as a moral one. the evolution of morality, could, indeed, no more take place without leaving its impress on art than without leaving it on humor. the higher sense of humor, in very proportion to its keenness, experiences a revulsion at the grotesque and gross vulgarity which passes for humor among the savage and half-civilized; and with time, the immoral comes to revolt too much to permit of æsthetic enjoyment. had dickens been a murderer himself, instead of the tender-hearted man he was, the world would doubtless have lost in every way æsthetically as well as morally by the fact. the old theory of the total emancipation of art from all claims of morality cannot be maintained from even the æsthetic standpoint, and certainly not from the ethical standpoint. art has every right to be non-moral (if that which delights innocently is ever anything but positively moral), but it has none to be immoral,--to use the mighty power it possesses in the cause of evil of any sort. nor is it even true that all nature belongs to art. in all its history, sculpture has never, except in a few isolated cases, reproduced the forms of the withered and decrepit. the painter of the extreme realistic school may occasionally portray the scenes of the dissecting-room, but pictures of sores and ulcers are left to adorn the pages of medical works or patent-medicine advertisements. there are moral sores and ulcers as little suited to artistic literature, and belonging properly to works on social healing alone. the depiction of evil in due proportion and with such limitations belongs to the accurate representation of human character. but let its portrayal include no sin against man; let not the artist dip his hands in the dunghill, for humanity's sake and also for his art's sake; lest his picture reek of it, and we find the offal mixed with the colors. the cant and superstition with which marriage has often been invested has doubtless been the source of the rebellion of many vigorous and original minds from the old morality; the morality founded on tradition and not on reason and sympathy has always this disadvantage. undoubtedly, the sale of human flesh for gold or any other sordid consideration, is evil, whether done under the sanction of the marriage-law or without it. undoubtedly also, the marriage-rite performs no miracle or magic spell, as the superstition of the past has imagined. nevertheless, it is of importance as a civil contract, a public acknowledgment, which furnishes data to the state, and places it in a position to protect any injured party, and to fix the responsibility for the maintenance and education of offspring. considering the number of individuals whose welfare is seriously concerned in these most intimate relations of life, with all their passions, the state cannot relinquish this right of arbitration, which should especially be employed for the protection of the weaker individuals concerned--the wife and children. unfortunately, it has, as yet, too often been used rather in securing the power of tyranny and abuse than in protecting. this fact is perceptible even in modern law, as, for instance, in the unequal divorce-laws of england, and in the fact that wife-beaters are often treated with great leniency by english magistrates, while the man who abuses his mistress is liable to relatively severe punishment as having no especial power over the latter. it is, undoubtedly, the result of such laws, together with other evils incidental to the average of marriages under the present conditions of human character, that on some sides a theory has grown up in favor of the total abolition of marriage. but neither in its general application, nor in this particular instance, is the anarchistic conception which finds the source of all evil in law, scientifically justifiable. the conditions of the evil lie in human nature itself, in the incompleteness of its evolution; of the present stage the injustice of present law is a part. the remedy lies, therefore, as far as the law is concerned, in its correction, not in its abolishment. the ideal of love is enduring faithfulness. but when that ideal is not only unfulfilled, but marriage brings, instead of happiness, only misery, shall the bond be indissoluble, difficult, or easy to loose? in countries where women are wholly dependent upon men, perfect facility of divorce means substantially the power of repudiation on the part of men. as long as women are incapable of efficient self-support, the advantage of very easy divorce lies largely on the side of the husband. marriage concerns, in any case, the welfare, not of one person alone but that of husband, wife, and children, and society as a whole must place some restrictions on the selfish action of the individual which may be to the lasting disadvantage of all others concerned. but as society advances, as the education and social independence of women increase, too great stringency becomes undesirable, its advantages continually diminish in comparison with its disadvantages. forced family relations where all the affection that might render them for the good of those thus related is lacking, are obviously in themselves undesirable, and in most cases where wife and children can be provided for independently of such relations, an evil to be avoided. assuredly, it is undesirable that the moral should be tied indissolubly, or practically so, to the immoral,--that a mother, for instance, should not only be forced to bring forth children to a father whose evil qualities they may inherit, but be compelled to endure the further ruin of their character through his influence, besides bearing the personal agony of the enforced companionship with a man whose principles she can but despise. but all character is at present faulty; and a desire for perfection in husband or wife therefore certain to disappointment; hence, the relinquishment of all divorce-restrictions whatsoever is too likely to lead to promiscuity; and unless such appears desirable to society, neither public opinion nor state-law can place the power of repudiation in the hands of individuals. it is a choice of evils; the state must take human nature as it finds it, and deal with it on this basis. it has sometimes been proposed to make some substitution for the old form of marriage, as, for instance, by the adoption of a period of probation, of two, three, or five years' marriage before the signing of the final life-contract; by this method, it was proposed to obviate the necessity for divorce. as far as this last proposal is concerned, it may be remarked that applications for divorce are by no means always made in the earlier period of married life, and that, furthermore, any such arrangement would offer the very best opportunities for the unscrupulous libertine. but beyond this, it may be repeated that, as höffding has said, it is not in the nature of love worthy the name to calculate the possibility of its own ending, and that the highest form of love is enduring. enduring relation must, then, form the ideal on which we must fix our eyes, even while failing to attain it; divorce, while given in cases where union seems no longer desirable, must be looked upon as indicating a failure of marriage to fulfil its end. the influence of an ideal held in mind is the continual moulding of reality to a form more nearly resembling it. but to descend to a form of contract which starts with the assumption of separation as possible or probable is to lose sight of the ideal, to relinquish it from imagination, and to do away with its influence upon public opinion, and so upon the evolution of institutions and habits. we certainly need better divorce-laws and the wider recognition of the desirability of divorce in many cases, but not the practical acceptance of an ideal of promiscuity. the plan of such short contracts could never be carried out practically for any length of time, in any modern civilized society. even if adopted for a time, it would speedily be abolished. man naturally desires and takes means of enforcing, at first with the lower means of compulsion, then with the higher through the sympathies themselves, faithfulness in woman; woman also, and equally, desires faithfulness in man, but is not able to secure it. the gradual growth of woman's social independence must, however, place her more and more in a position to know of the life of men and to enforce the faithfulness she desires; that is, to punish unfaithfulness with the same penalties of disability for marriage by which men have hitherto enforced faithfulness in women. we may easily perceive that this is the direction of development. in countries where women are wholly dependent upon men, the character of a suitor in any respect is a thing little inquired into, the chief object of the parents, who ordinarily have the most to say about the matter, being to secure a husband for the girl at any cost. with the progress of society, women become less and less ready to accept the known drunkard or the confessed libertine, and it is only the seclusion of women and their consequent ignorance of the lives of men that makes marriage, at present, still comparatively easy to the discreet and clever profligate. the coördinate increase of regard for purity in wives with the aggravation of the character of prostitution, supposed above for the sake of the discussion, is possible only up to a certain point, as an oscillation in one direction resistance to which is continually accumulating, and must result in reaction in the opposite direction. the two principles are mutually contradictory, incompatible, and impossible as enduring factors in the same society. the growth of a more widely diffused and stronger sentiment against prostitution and in favor of faithfulness has, indeed, as yet led chiefly to the greater exclusion of prostitutes from association with the rest of society, and made profligacy more and more secret; but, at the same time, the gradually increasing sympathy has formed an accumulating resistance which is rapidly taking shape in the realization that the prostitute is not more guilty in furnishing the supply than is the man whose demand makes self-profanation a source of income, that the misery of prostitution is immoral, and that the only remedy is prevention. there is no alternative to this remedy that progress can realize except, as has been shown, general promiscuity. it is best, then, that we should make up our minds between these two and act accordingly; for the action of every individual tells, for good or ill, upon society as a whole. what is the ideal? i think the answer is plain; no man who has any conception of the higher joys of love which is also friendship, intellectual companionship, can hesitate; and if this is so, then duty is plain also. no man has a right to deplore the evil by word who encourages it in any way by his act. it is sometimes averred by those who oppose the economic independence and educational equality of women with men, that women can mingle with the world on a plane of equality with men only at the sacrifice of all the chivalry and admiration which men now give to women. but this objection opposes every step of women's progress, from the harem upwards, and every step has proved its falseness. true, in the lands where women are freest, they are less favored with insincere and fulsome compliments, with vows and protestations which, when put to the test, mean nothing, or worse than nothing. the case is, however, far otherwise with the attentions which mark sincere regard, and the consideration paid by physical strength to comparative weakness. it would, indeed, be peculiar if higher intellectual powers, a clearer insight into the "severely true," the cultivation of that nobility of character which results from self-knowledge through knowledge of others and the habit of self-reliance, should render women less attractive. the pioneers in any cause need to be the hardier individuals, and so are often those who please little æsthetically; and the kicks and scoffs of the world may take from the disposition what little grace it at first possessed; but this does not prove the moral rightness of the kicks and scoffs, or the moral culpability of those who dare to adhere to their purpose in spite of them. in the countries where excessive difficulties are placed in the way of women's work in the higher professions (there are very few placed in the way of her overwork in other directions), these have resulted naturally in the suppression of effort on the part of the majority of the more finely constituted and more sensitive, and have left the field to the hardier and less fine; but in the united states, where women are freest in every way, they have lost neither in natural grace nor in the attention and regard of men; on the contrary, they have gained in both, and they have, furthermore, left the mark of their refining influence on the whole civilization of the country. as long as women are weaker than men physically, a higher moral standard must have regard for this weakness. when, through a more healthful life, women become more nearly equal to men in endurance, certain forms of attention will be less necessary, and will, doubtless, fall off somewhat, only to make room for a higher plane of mutual helpfulness. yet i doubt whether the time will ever come when the grace and beauty of women, the associations of love and the memories of family affection, will not stir men of finer fibre to peculiar kindness, repaid as the appreciation of women can well repay. there is another protest--which comes especially from the party that most exclaims against the evils of competition--against the "superstitious" respect for age. the reason is, obviously, that age tends by nature to conservatism. but the evils of the struggle for existence are not those alone of outward conditions; these are often far less hard than the bitter spirit of mental antagonism that sears and saddens the heart. youth is daring and originative; middle age is less venturesome, but it possesses, on the other hand, a wider range of experience. between youth and youth, or youth and middle age, the battle is more equal. but age no longer possesses the power to cope with the world physically or mentally; it is fixed in habit, and apt to follow one accustomed round of thought; we are certainly not likely to convince it by violence. it has borne its share of violence and has done its part in the battle. it has advanced with its generation, though it may not be able to advance any longer with ours. our ideal should certainly be that of forbearance, not of intolerance towards it. modern opinion is becoming dissatisfied with the old methods of dealing with criminals--with the methods which continually return the criminal to society not bettered by incarceration, and ready to commit all manner of crimes again. both the protection of society and the welfare of the criminal would be better served by a course of discipline that should only then give him back to society when he is fitted to live in harmony with it and to enjoy the advantages conferred by such harmony. recent experiments in reformatories have demonstrated the immense advantage of methods which attempt something like this. among the improved reformatories for children, many of them without walls, bolts, or bars, some have sent out cured from eighty to eighty-five per cent of the offenders committed to them. the elmira reformatory deals especially with offenders sentenced for their first state's prison offence, and its method is at once eminently humane and remarkably successful. offenders may be sent to it at the discretion of the judges. it contains three grades. members of the first of these wear better clothing, eat better food, enjoy various special privileges, and are used, to some extent, as officers and monitors for the other grades. members of the second grade are less well provided for and honored than those of the first; and members of the third grade are worst clothed and fed, and have the fewest privileges. every man who enters the prison is submitted to a minute examination as to his antecedents, his mental, moral, and physical condition and capabilities. he is then placed in the second grade, from which he may go up or down, according to his work and conduct. eight hours' work a day are required, and compulsory school is held in the evening, at which the common english branches are taught, and elementary instruction given in law, political economy, ethics, etc. discussion and thought on the subjects taught are encouraged, and everything possible is done to awaken interest. "perfect" work and conduct for six months--the standard of "perfection" is high--and a mark of in a scale of in the school secure a man advance into the next higher grade; and the same standard maintained for six months in the highest grade entitle a man to release on parole; so that the term of imprisonment need not exceed a year. the man must be willing, industrious, good-tempered, obedient, energetic, who gets release in this time. work is found for every man released; he is closely watched for six months more, and if his conduct does not keep up the standard required, he is returned to the reformatory and must begin over again; if, on the other hand, his conduct and work, an attested report of which must be handed in each month, is satisfactory for these six months, he is honorably discharged. the obdurate malefactors serve out their full sentence, as they would in state's prison. of those who go out from the institution, eighty per cent return to society reformed; and the superintendent is of the opinion that this percentage could still be raised were the time of detention made indeterminate and wholly dependent upon reform. all prison reformers are coming to recognize the desirability of such indeterminate sentences. the work of the men at elmira pays over two-thirds of the expenses of the institution, and even if we consider only dollars and cents, this method of dealing with crime is evidently the cheapest; for under the old method we have to take into account the expenses of the later crimes of the men released without improvement of character. the method of parole of first offenders, newly introduced into france, and in use to some extent in other countries also, seems to have rather less to recommend it, except in special cases; since the moral, intellectual, and industrial discipline of the reformatory are lacking. in all such reformatory work it may be remarked that hard labor and stringent discipline, as well as consistent kindness, are found absolutely necessary; and it is to be noted that the disinclination of criminals for labor and regularity of life is one of the greatest obstacles in the way of their reform.[ ] judge green quotes from mr. hough on this point: "those who are in control of penal institutions meet with no more pernicious influence than that exerted by certain well-meaning but mistaken philanthropists who are impelled by kindly hearts to slop over with sentiment. no criminal is so hard to reach as the one who fancies himself injured or has a grievance against society. aside from treatment that compels him to feel resentment, there is no one thing that will so quickly bring this feeling as to have some tender-hearted, benevolent person tell him that they think his penalty is far more severe than his offence warrants, especially now that he has promised to pray regularly and abandon his wicked ways."[ ] in connection with this point, we may notice bellamy's theory of crime as atavism, to be treated in the hospitals. whether or not we regard crime as disease, a distinction must be drawn between the disease that may be regarded as physical weakness and that which does not necessarily imply such weakness, though it may imply some physical defect in the sense that the psychical characteristic has always its physical coördinate. we may call the places where our criminals are treated prisons, or we may call them hospitals; but the name will not alter the fact that crime, and even the crime the tendency to which manifests itself early in life and is most incorrigible, needs, for the most part, a wholly different treatment from that pursued with the sick or the insane. discipline and labor may come into play in the insane asylum, and medicine and hygiene in the prison; but the methods are, nevertheless, widely separated, and need to be so in order to attain any success. bellamy's conception of the character of the criminal by nature--such as he imagines as alone existing under the conditions of his ideal state--as rarely untruthful, does not at all accord with the facts of psychology and criminology. total unreliability is one of the chief characteristics of the criminal by nature. he lies even where there is nothing to be gained by lying and often much to be lost; he lies apparently for the mere pleasure of lying; or he is crafty and cunning, and the smallest gain suffices to furnish him with a motive for falsehood. in mankind, as a whole, the love of truth, one of the latest developments of the moral sense, is likewise one of those earliest lost in any moral deterioration; and to suppose men, as a rule, strictly truthful and yet capable of committing crimes of any sort, especially in a general ideal state of society and morals, is to suppose a psychological contradiction. moreover, the antipathy of the criminal to undergoing the penalty of his crime would still remain as long as the discipline and labor of the places for criminal treatment were not abolished; and even the restrictions of incarceration would render the penalty disagreeable, since liberty is always preferable to confinement. and if we consider the indefinite sentence, which all prison reformers now regard as the first condition of the successful treatment of crime, to be introduced, the reasons for pleading "not guilty" would by no means be removed. but i doubt whether a society of high moral development would sanction the doubling of the penalty which bellamy conceives, as the punishment of simply a lie to escape it. the question of capital punishment is more difficult than at first glance appears. one of the arguments often advanced in opposition to this form of punishment is that the fear of it is no preventive of the crime of murder (for which alone, in times of peace, it is still imposed in civilized countries), since murder still takes place. but the argument in this form is practically worthless; we might as well say that art exhibitions do nothing to form taste, since many people who visit them are still lacking in æsthetic feeling. the fact that men have gone away from public executions and committed murder is more to the purpose, as an indication that the influence of the spectacle is probably a bad one. as to the private execution within prison-walls, it is difficult to suppose that the mere knowledge of it could arouse a desire for blood, as the sight of it may be imagined to do. if we abandon capital punishment on this ground merely, ought we not, in consistency, to do away with all representations of violent death on the stage and all description of it in fiction, since these things must affect the imagination full as vividly. the gladiatorial shows of rome were doubtless undesirable from a humanitarian point of view, not only in themselves, but also in their results; and it might be undesirable for most individuals to accustom themselves to the spectacle of the butchering of their meat; but, whether or not we agree with the vegetarians as to the social significance and influence of the use of animal-food (necessarily, of course, we must concede that every fact has an influence of some sort, and in some degree, upon the mind), it can scarcely be claimed that the mere knowledge that beeves are slaughtered somewhere is likely to influence the mind to such an extent as to lead to a morbid desire to imitate the deed; nor, the stimulating excitement of the actual spectacle of execution lacking, is it likely that the mere knowledge of its actuality should incite to the taking of human life. on the contrary, it appears far more likely that the would-be murderer should connect the thought of it with the possibilities of his own future in case of detection and arrest, and that he should, thus, be rather deterred from crime by it. the vital questions appear to be whether we have a right thus to sacrifice life, and whether the evil which the murderer brings upon society may not be better prevented in some other way. leaving out of consideration, for a moment, a point which will be considered later, the two questions will be seen to resolve themselves into one. if i should perceive an innocent man about to be murdered by a villain, who was on the point of plunging his knife into his victim's heart, and i had in my hand at the time a loaded revolver, my duty would be plain. i should have no choice as to the responsibility for one man's life; only the choice would be left me as to which life i would be responsible for; and to spare the murderer would be to make myself an accomplice in the murder. the responsibility lies with every society to do the utmost in its power to prevent the murder of citizens who are, in the majority of cases, better men than their murderer; and the life, even, of the murderer cannot stand out against the life of better men. if, then, the death sentence is the best preventive of murder, and society refuses to inflict it nevertheless, it makes itself the accomplice of the murderer as much as is the man who stands by and permits the knife to be plunged into the victim's heart, rather than shoot down its wielder. it is not mercy that spares the guilty to sacrifice the innocent. if, then, we must be responsible for the death of any man, let it be for that of the murderer rather than for that of his victims. it is easy enough to say, as do some on this point, that it should never become a principle of society to do evil in order that good may come; but as long as there are conflicting conditions in society, there can be no choice of absolute good; the only choice is between lesser and greater evils. forgetting this, and looking only on the one side of the question on which their sympathy has especially been excited, reformers are sometimes guilty of choosing the greater evil in order that a lesser good may come. it is, therefore, not sufficient to brand capital punishment "a relic of barbarism," in order to prove that it should be abolished. the problem of prevention of murder includes various elements: it includes the question of the possible repetition of the crime by the individual on trial, the question of his influence by precept and example, and that of his possible propagation of offspring who may inherit his evil propensities; and it also includes the question of the check of fear in other would-be murderers. it has been claimed that imprisonment for life would act as an effectual preventive in all these respects. there may be, however, various objections to this penalty. in the first place, an unconditional life-sentence without hope of pardon is difficult to establish, especially in democratic countries; and its justice is doubtful, in case it were possible. even if sentences of this sort were to be passed, pity would be likely to interfere later with their execution. and then the momentous question arises as to whether it would always be well-directed pity. the men in whom the right of pardon is vested are not always wise in their use of it, and in democratic countries they are guided to a considerable extent by the will of importunate portions of society which is often still less wise. the sentimentality which now vents itself in loading down violent criminals with flowers, fruit, gifts of all sorts, letters, photographs, commiserations for their "misfortune," and even offers of marriage, is likely to stand in the way of the safety of society in case the murderer lives. this sentimentality, which in many countries exalts the criminal into a hero, and in france turns the police court into a fashionable place of amusement, were it not to be followed by the dread ending which the sterner members of society exact, and were the hope of pardon still open, might invest arrest with even some attractions to the murderer, who is frequently a hero in his own eyes. the prominence of a desire for notoriety is evident in criminals of the jack-the-ripper and other types. the sentimentality which is unable to distinguish between a legitimate mercy, and the mercy to the individual which amounts to the worst of cruelty to many others, is, indeed, a continual danger to society and a hindrance to useful reforms. again, if the criminal be condemned to life-imprisonment, there is always the possibility of his escape to be considered, and the fact that he will probably stick at nothing to accomplish his escape. the dangers of ultimate success may not be so large; our prisons are nowadays strongly built, the warders and other officers are very seldom open to bribes, and the proportion of escapes is extremely small. nevertheless, the hopelessness of a life-sentence must constitute a strong motive for the stimulation of effort and ingenuity; and it can scarcely be hoped that a man who has not before hesitated at murder, and who has no greater penalty to fear in case of any number of repetitions of the crime, will hesitate when his liberty and all it means to him of freedom from irksome discipline and restraint of vice, is at stake. and in case of escape society has to fear, not only repetitions of the crime, but also the numberless and complex workings of the criminal's influence on others, and the propagation of offspring who may inherit his evil propensities. and, furthermore, if the sentence of life-imprisonment is carried out, the murderer's influence on the other tenants of the prison is to be considered, in case he is not kept in solitary confinement. the preservation of a large number of desperate criminals, in contact with the less corrupt ones whose reform is being attempted, has many objections. criminals have more than once stated that they learned their worst principles from companions in prison, and many of our prisons and many of our reformatories have been called mere schools of vice. moreover, in maintaining our desperate criminals, we are spending large sums for their comfort while hundreds of better men are left to starve, and thousands are more poorly clothed and fed. the fact that murder has not increased in some countries where the death-sentence has been abolished may be admitted as evidence in the matter, but cannot be regarded, alone, as conclusive. for, first, that which is for the general good in one country may not be so in another, the national temperament, form of government, and general habits of which are different. and, furthermore, it may be said that, although statistics undoubtedly must have some meaning in all cases, the complication of social conditions renders it often difficult to say just what the significance may be in the particular case. in the diminution of murders, other circumstances may have been at work which would have lessened the number even if the death-sentence had not been abolished. at least, experiments with regard to the abolition of the death-penalty have been too few to render any categorical assertion on the subject possible. but some of the above-stated objections to the abolition of capital punishment might be removed by the provision of separate prisons for malefactors condemned to life-imprisonment, with separate wards according to the moral condition of the prisoners, little communication being allowed between even those in the same ward, or communication only under supervision, and such instruction being given as would enable the individual to occupy the hours not devoted to labor in study, reading, or other mental recreation. green, in his book on crime, calls attention to the very undesirable vindictiveness sometimes aroused, by sentence of death, in the minds of the condemned and of his friends, and notices the general evil of the feeling in the minds of criminals that the state is their deadly foe, defiance of the laws being thus raised to the plane of legitimate warfare upon an enemy. the hon. john j. wheeler, in a paper quoted by green, lays especial stress on the desirability of convincing the criminal that not revenge but the protection of society is aimed at in state-punishment. again, the question may be asked whether the sentimental tendency to regard the criminal as a hero is not fostered by the death-sentence--whether the pity aroused at so extreme a fate would not be inclined to take a less harmful form if the treatment of the criminal were at once firm and humane but less sensational. doubtless, the glory of crime and half its attractiveness for a large class of morbid criminals would be departed, if we could come to regard the latter with commiseration as of a lower and abnormal type of humanity and to treat them as such. but it must be remembered that society, as a whole, is yet far from so scientific a conception; and that combined firmness and kindness of treatment is difficult to secure, both in prison-officials and in those officers who have the power of pardon at present placed in their hands. we need obviously many reforms in our system of sentence and pardon, as well as in the management of our prisons. we need more men like mr. brockway of elmira, mr. wardwell of virginia, and those other modern reformers of prison-life whose office is to them a matter of humanity and not merely of business. and especially, we need more firmness in society as a whole; sympathy and mercy may be evils in the path of human progress when they deteriorate into a weakness which sacrifices the innocent in a mistaken humanity towards the guilty. in order to be well directed, sympathy must consider all men, and not the individual alone; only then is it an unmitigated good. but as for the argument noticed above with regard to the employment of large sums of money for the maintenance of the criminal classes while the class of honest laborers is yet in destitution, it cannot be considered, on close inspection, as of great weight. certainly it would not be well to maintain the criminal in luxury while other reforms were waiting. but if we act on the principle of deferring all less important reforms until all the more important ones are accomplished, we shall be in danger of not reforming at all. any reform that is well-timed and possible is important; for the complication of social relations makes all reforms of weight in their wider significance. no reforms can or should be made in a lump; improvement must come from all sides and little by little; sympathy must be consistent and influence social conditions in every direction gradually as it gradually increases. it is the superficial utilitarianism which bids us wait such a reform as this, though possible, for another,--the same sort of utilitarianism which advocates the introduction of the spartan custom of preserving only well-formed and vigorous infants, and advises the administration of painless poisons to those hopelessly ill and suffering. all these things have their relation to character, and, therefore, to other social evils, or reforms. and here we are brought finally to the consideration of the point hitherto left out of account,--a point which bears, however, a strong argument; namely, the fact of the possible condemnation of innocent men to death. even since the limitation of capital punishment to cases of murder the innocent have been hung or guillotined in mistake for the guilty. and for such mistakes there is no reparation; the grave never gives up its dead. men have sometimes been discovered to be innocent in spite of the strongest evidence against them; human observation is defective, human memory fallible, human character--especially such as often appears in evidence against the murderer--by no means always strictly honorable and honest. even confessions of guilt have sometimes been proved false. as with regard to other propositions to place the power of the life or death of individuals in the hands of their fellow men, the question presents itself as to whether the use of so great power is not dangerous. and this appears to me the decisive point of our inquiry. societies are being formed for the abolition of capital punishment, and feeling is growing strong in its favor. let us hope, however, that the reformers will adopt a policy stringent and judicious as well as merciful;--that they will not forget that, in order to render the preservation of the murderer harmless to society we need other reforms in law and prison management. in general, it may be said of all questions, that the conflict between the principles of justice and mercy, known to theological ethics, resolves itself, from a higher point of view, into the question of justice only. the mercy which is not justice, is either mercy to one at the expense of others, or mercy that spares the offender in one respect to his own greater disadvantage in another. the ideal character is thus at once gentle and strong. we have followed the development of altruism from egoism up to the point where the thought of punishment ensuing upon the non-performance of duty ceases to play a large part in the motive to action, the reward of the pleasure of others and of their gratitude and love forming a complex motive. but beyond even the incentives of love there lies still a higher motive which, in cases of conflict, must figure as the highest morally. in an ideal state, the social sanction could not conflict with duty; but until we reach such a state, the independence of moral motive must be observed, the moral man must do what appears to him right, in spite of public opinion. the course has its dangers, and the principle must be carried out with caution, the questions involving such a course be carefully considered from all sides and in all lights. but when this has been done, the sense of duty remains supreme. in the ideal man, the consciousness of duty performed should constitute the strongest pleasure, the consciousness of failure in duty the severest pain. this is the solution of the problem ibsen gives us in "rosmersholm"; society has not advanced from savagery by permitting all pleasures which the individual desires; nor can it advance further towards the ideal by permitting the individual to choose those pleasures which the future shall regard as evidence of our present semi-barbarous state, since they are pleasures inimical to the peace of others and the general good of society; as in the past, so in the present and future, the harmony between pleasure and duty (that is between the conflicting pleasures of individuals) can be attained only by habit which shall bring the desires of the individual into harmony with duty. thus only can all desires, the happiness of all individuals, attain to harmony,--to "full" equilibrium. and this leads me to remark that we have reason to doubt the moral conviction of very many who protest against the "immoral" and "superstitious" restriction of personal pleasure in certain directions. were such individuals morally convinced, were duty to their fellow men really uppermost in their minds, they would not choose darkness and secrecy for their deeds, but after careful and thorough statement of their opinions and reasons would show the earnestness of their belief by open act. the man whose moral conviction is to him the highest duty does not fear public opinion, but dares to follow that which seems to him right, in the face of slander; therefore, we suspect the man who hides his deeds, of seeking his own pleasure and not that of society as a whole. "conscience is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more nicety, nor needs to question rumor if we fall below the perfect level of our thought. i fear no outward arbiter," says don silva in "the spanish gypsy." but for our encouragement, let us contemplate the heroic characters which progress has developed. from these we may take hope and courage, in these we may find the best results of the moral evolution of our race, and the promise of the better future which man alone can work out by ever-renewed effort. the love of such characters, and even the knowledge that they exist, is the highest joy of human association, a joy which the present age may feel in a degree that no former age has known; and herein lies the greater beauty of the present time over all others. the thought of such characters can sustain us even in our own self-doubt. what man has done, man can do. nay, he shall do more, much more. the question as to the final destruction of the human race, whether by sudden catastrophe or slow decay, can little affect happiness, at present, or for very many ages to come. as yet, evolution is in the direction of a greater harmony that means continually greater pleasure to life. we have not reached our maximum, we are evolving upwards towards it. the pessimist is fond of making much of the final end of our planet; but the healthy and successful will be happy in spite of future ages, and the extent and degree of happiness will continue to increase for such an immense period of time that there is no reason for considering the destruction of our race as exerting any important influence on ethical theory. the loss of our faith in individual immortality is a far greater source of present pain. it leaves death a harder sorrow;--but it lends life new meaning. the good we strive for lies no longer in a world of dreams on the other side the grave; it is brought down to earth and waits to be realized by human hands, through human labor. we are called on to forsake the finer egoism that centred all its care on self-salvation, for a love of our own kind that shall triumph over death, and leave its impress on the joy of generations to come. there is something lost in the dissolution of the old faith to us who were reared in it. the hope of restitution, to the individual, from supernatural cause, here or hereafter, is forever done away with. there is no restitution. in our favorite novel, when the doors are closed and the lights extinguished, that some unspeakable sorrow may hide itself in darkness and silence, we can always turn back the leaves till we are again in the midst of light and music and dancing, and the heart for which the tragic knife is pitilessly sharpening in the hand of destiny, is yet untouched. but in the book of reality, there is no turning back; the pages are burned before our eyes as we read. sooner or later, we all of us reach the point where that which made life most worth living has passed away from us forever. there is no help save the knowledge of the fact, that shall make us all draw closer in sympathy and by mutual kindness render loss less bitter. as we accept the truth, and bow our head to the inevitable, we may learn a less narrow happiness for this life and for the hereafter, from the great pioneers of scientific doubt and pure humanitarianism, one of whom has written:-- "oh, may i join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge man's search to vaster issues. so to live is heaven: to make undying music in the world, breathing as beauteous order that controls with growing sway the growing life of man. *....*....*....* this is life to come, which martyred men have made more glorious for us who strive to follow. may i reach that purest heaven, be to other souls the cup of strength in some great agony, enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, beget the smiles that have no cruelty,-- be the sweet presence of a good diffused, and in diffusion ever more intense. so shall i join the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world." footnotes: [ ] it should be said, in justice to the play in question, that the idea of purification by evil was evidently not present to its author. [ ] see part i. p. , this book; "social statics," - . [ ] "le luxe," p. . [ ] "le luxe," p. . [ ] "fabian essays in socialism," pp. , , etc. [ ] i have used the word here as elsewhere in its more general, not in its specific, technical sense. [ ] "fabian essays," p. . [ ] see "jahrbücher für psychiatrie," , "ueber neurosen und psychosen durch sexuelle abstinenz." [ ] see essay by charles dudley warner in the "north american review" for april, . 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(being the body of the work.) $ . . ziehen (prof. t.): introduction to physiological psychology. translated by c. c. van lieuw and dr. otto beyer. $ . , _net_. macmillan & co., fourth avenue, new york. from page images generously made available by internet archive (https://archive.org) note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustration. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) images of the original pages are available through internet archive. see https://archive.org/details/dataofethic spenuoft [illustration: herbert spencer.] the data of ethics by herbert spencer author of "first principles," "education," etc. [illustration] a. l. burt company, publishers, new york author's preface. a reference to the programme of the "system of synthetic philosophy" will show that the chapters herewith issued constitute the first division of the work on the _principles of morality_, with which the system ends. as the second and third volumes of the _principles of sociology_ are as yet unpublished, this installment of the succeeding work appears out of its place. i have been led thus to deviate from the order originally set down by the fear that persistence in conforming to it might result in leaving the final work of the series unexecuted. hints, repeated of late years with increasing frequency and distinctness, have shown me that health may permanently fail, even if life does not end, before i reach the last part of the task i have marked out for myself. this last part of the task it is to which i regard all the preceding parts as subsidiary. written as far back as , my first essay, consisting of letters on the _proper sphere of government_, vaguely indicated what i conceived to be certain general principles of right and wrong in political conduct, and from that time onward my ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis. to leave this purpose unfulfilled, after making so extensive a preparation for fulfilling it, would be a failure the probability of which i do not like to contemplate, and i am anxious to preclude it, if not wholly, still partially. hence the step i now take. though this first division of the work terminating the synthetic philosophy, cannot, of course, contain the specific conclusions to be set forth in the entire work, yet it implies them in such wise that, definitely to formulate them requires nothing beyond logical deduction. i am the more anxious to indicate in outline, if i cannot complete, this final work, because the establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing need. now, that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative. few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it. most of those who reject the current creed appear to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may safely be thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling agency. meanwhile, those who defend the current creed allege that in the absence of the guidance it yields, no guidance can exist: divine commandments they think the only possible guides. thus, between these extreme opponents, there is a certain community. the one holds that the gap left by disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics need not be filled by a code of natural ethics, and the other holds that it cannot be so filled. both contemplate a vacuum, which the one wishes and the other fears. as the change which promises or threatens to bring about this state, desired or dreaded, is rapidly progressing, those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, and that it must be filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief. to this more special reason i may add a more general reason. great mischief has been done by the repellent aspect habitually given to moral rule by its expositors, and immense benefits are to be anticipated from presenting moral rule under that attractive aspect which it has when undistorted by superstition and asceticism. if a father, sternly enforcing numerous commands, some needful and some needless, adds to his severe control a behavior wholly unsympathetic; if his children have to take their pleasures by stealth, or, when timidly looking up from their play, ever meet a cold glance or more frequently a frown, his government will inevitably be disliked, if not hated, and the aim will be to evade it as much as possible. contrariwise, a father who, equally firm in maintaining restraints needful for the well-being of his children or the well-being of other persons, not only avoids needless restraints, but, giving his sanction to all legitimate gratifications and providing the means for them, looks on at their gambols with an approving smile, can scarcely fail to gain an influence which, no less efficient for the time being, will also be permanently efficient. the controls of such two fathers symbolize the controls of morality as it is and morality as it should be. nor does mischief result only from this undue severity of the ethical doctrine bequeathed us by the harsh past. further mischief results from the impracticability of its ideal. in violent reaction against the utter selfishness of life as carried on in barbarous societies, it has insisted on a life utterly unselfish. but just as the rampant egoism of a brutal militancy was not to be remedied by attempts at the absolute subjection of the ego in convents and monasteries, so neither is the misconduct of ordinary humanity, as now existing, to be remedied by upholding a standard of abnegation beyond human achievement. rather the effect is to produce a despairing abandonment of all attempts at a higher life. and not only does an effort to achieve the impossible end in this way, but it simultaneously discredits the possible. by association with rules that cannot be obeyed, rules that can be obeyed lose their authority. much adverse comment will, i doubt not, be passed on the theory of right conduct which the following pages shadow forth. critics of a certain class, far from rejoicing that ethical principles otherwise derived by them, coincide with ethical principles scientifically derived, are offended by the coincidence. instead of recognizing essential likeness they enlarge on superficial difference. since the days of persecution, a curious change has taken place in the behavior of so-called orthodoxy toward so-called heterodoxy. the time was when a heretic, forced by torture to recant, satisfied authority by external conformity: apparent agreement sufficed, however profound continued to be the real disagreement. but now that the heretic can no longer be coerced into professing the ordinary belief, his belief is made to appear as much opposed to the ordinary as possible. does he diverge from established theological dogma? then he shall be an atheist; however inadmissible he considers the term. does he think spiritualistic interpretations of phenomena not valid? then he shall be classed as a materialist; indignantly though he repudiates the name. and in like manner, what differences exist between natural morality and supernatural morality, it has become the policy to exaggerate into fundamental antagonisms. in pursuance of this policy, there will probably be singled out for reprobation from this volume, doctrines which, taken by themselves, may readily be made to seem utterly wrong. with a view to clearness, i have treated separately some correlative aspects of conduct, drawing conclusions either of which becomes untrue if divorced from the other; and have thus given abundant opportunity for misrepresentation. the relations of this work to works preceding it in the series are such as to involve frequent reference. containing, as it does, the outcome of principles set forth in each of them, i have found it impracticable to dispense with re-statements of those principles. further, the presentation of them in their relations to different ethical theories, has made it needful, in every case, briefly to remind the reader what they are, and how they are derived. hence an amount of repetition which to some will probably appear tedious. i do not, however, much regret this almost unavoidable result; for only by varied iteration can alien conceptions be forced on reluctant minds. _june_, . contents. chapter i. page. conduct in general chapter ii. the evolution of conduct chapter iii. good and bad conduct chapter iv. ways of judging conduct chapter v. the physical view chapter vi. the biological view chapter vii. the psychological view chapter viii. the sociological view chapter ix. criticisms and explanations chapter x. the relativity of pains and pleasures chapter xi. egoism versus altruism chapter xii. altruism versus egoism chapter xiii. trial and compromise chapter xiv. conciliation chapter xv. absolute and relative ethics chapter xvi. the scope of ethics the data of ethics. chapter i. conduct in general. § . 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 again, 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. 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 co-operation 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. § . conduct is a whole; and, in a sense, it is an organic whole--an aggregate of inter-dependent 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 co-extensive 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 ordinary conduct is indifferent. shall i walk to the waterfall to-day? or shall i ramble along the sea-shore? 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 sea-shore, 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 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 larger 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. chapter ii. the evolution of conduct. § . 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 recompounded to achieve that co-ordination 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 aërate the blood which the heart sends to them; how heart and lungs together supply aërated blood to the stomach, and so enable it to do its work; how these co-operate 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 co-operation 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 co-ordination corresponding with the outer co-ordination of actions. but this admission is consistent with the 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 counter-blow 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 co-ordinations, our subject here is the aggregate of all external co-ordinations; 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. § . 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 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 for but 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 fit 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 sub-kingdom, as the mollusca, still better exemplifies this contrast. when we 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 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 cod-fish 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 defence 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 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 dwellings? 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 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 cuttle-fish, 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 cuttle-fish. 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 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. § . 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 to 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 sub-divide, 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 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 afterward 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 generally, neither can evolve without evolution of the other; and the highest evolutions of the two must be reached simultaneously. § . 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 larvæ. 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 toward 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 by 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 re-compounding 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 co-operation, 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. § . 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 co-existences 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 hinderance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid. these implications of the evolution-hypothesis, we shall now see harmonize with the leading moral ideas men have otherwise reached. chapter iii. good and bad conduct. § . 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 learned 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 predicted 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, refer 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 non-adaptations 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 co-exist 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 quantity 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 insistance on the needful limitations has to be perpetual; and the mischiefs caused by men's interferences with one another's life-subserving 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 re-acquiring 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 toward 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. § . 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 toward 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 blameable, 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? § . 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 facts 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 satisfactions 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-worshipers 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. § . 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 pre-occupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. just as money, which is the 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 every one 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 law-books 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 ( ) the character of the agent; ( ) the nature of his motive; ( ) the quality of his deeds; and ( ) 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. § . 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 edwardes. 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 time-keeping, 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 toward 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. § . 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 disassociated 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, truthfulness, 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-defence and in defence 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 conception 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. § . 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 pre-ordained 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 some one; 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 turcomans, 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. § . 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 insistance on the salutariness of a state in which the wills of slaves and citizens are humbly subject to the wills of masters and rulers--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 the 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 consciousnesses 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. § . 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 virtuousness 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. chapter iv. ways of judging conduct. § . 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 co-existence--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 development 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 called 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 semi-civilized. 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 general 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 re-illustrating 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. § . 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 of 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 effect? 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. § . 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 proceeded, there hath no right been transferred, and every man has a right to everything; and consequently, no action can be unjust. but when a covenant is made, then to break it is _unjust_; and the definitions 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."[a] in this paragraph the essential propositions are: justice is fulfillment of covenant; fulfillment of covenant implies a power of 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, etc., 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 _à 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 for 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 naturally 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 non-fulfillment 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 derives its authority from the natural effects of the acts? non-recognition of this implies non-recognition of natural causation. § . 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 are 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. § . 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 i 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. § . 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 toward 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 hinderance 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 under-feeding 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. § . 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 statement 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 operations 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 habits 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 pre-supposed. ethics has a physical aspect; since it treats of human activities which, in common with all expenditures or 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. § . 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. chapter v. the physical view. § . 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. § . 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 animalcule makes have severally no reference to movements made a moment before; nor do they affect in specific ways the movements made immediately after. to-day'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 to-morrow. 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, etc., 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 cannot; 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. § . indefiniteness accompanies incoherence in conduct that is little evolved; and throughout the ascending stages of evolving conduct there is an increasingly definite co-ordination 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 toward 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 larvæ 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 of 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 toward rectitude of conduct is progress toward duly-proportioned conduct, and that duly-proportioned conduct is relatively definite, we may see from another point 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. § . 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 differing 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 æsthetic, 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. § . 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 toward 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 toward 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 æration 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 is it 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 all 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 co-ordinated activities of each social unit and those of the aggregate of units. § . 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 re-distribution 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 into 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 co-ordinated 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 greatest in the highest. chapter vi. the biological view. § . 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, non-fulfillment of it in normal proportion is non-fulfillment 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 re-established. but it is none the less 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 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. § . 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 understood, their imperativeness. while recognizing the fact that in our state of transition, characterized by very imperfect adaptation of constitution of 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. § . 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 was pointed out in the _principles of psychology_, §§ , , 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 æstho-physiology. 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 co-ordinated, 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. § . in the _principles of psychology_, § , 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 make 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 toward 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 toward 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 polype 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 polype'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 toward 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 non-establishment 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. § . 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 careless 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. § . 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 § , 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 co-operation have been at variance with the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the industrial activities, carried on by voluntary co-operation, 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 co-exist 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, etc., 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. § . 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 life-long 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 trifling 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_, §§ - ) that while craving, or negative pain, accompanies the under-activity of an organ, and while positive pain accompanies its over-activity, 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 insure 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 causes a general discharge throughout the nervous system (_prin. of psy._, §§ , ), 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. § . non-recognition of these general truths vitiates moral speculation at large. from the estimates 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 exclusively 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 set-off 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, pooh-hoohs his shiverings and gets rheumatic fever, with 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 over-study continued regardless of discomfort and the cravings for fresh air and exercise.[b] 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 pouring half the night over his briefs, the feeble factory hands and unhealthy seamstresses passing long hours in bad air, the anæmic, flat-chested school-girls, 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 wide spread 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 non-conformity to the laws of life are the same whatever induces the non-conformity; 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. § . 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 semi-civilized, 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 inflict 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 under-exercise 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 influence 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, _à 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. § . 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 toward 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 re-establish 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. note to § . in his _physical ethics_, mr. alfred barratt has expressed a view which here calls for notice. postulating evolution and its general laws, he refers to certain passages in the _principles of psychology_ ( st ed. pt. iii. ch. viii. pp. , sqq. cf. pt. iv. ch. iv.) in which i have treated of the relation between irritation and contraction which "marks the dawn of sensitive life;" have pointed out that "the primordial tissue must be differently affected by contact with nutritive and with innutritive matters"--the two being for aquatic creatures respectively the soluble and the insoluble; and have argued that the contraction by which a protruded part of a rhizopod draws in a fragment of assimilable matter "is caused by a commencing absorption of the assimilable matter." mr. barratt, holding that consciousness "must be considered as an invariable property of animal life, and ultimately, in its elements, of the material universe" (p. ), regards these responses of animal tissue to stimuli, as implying feeling of one or other kind. "some kinds of impressed force," he says, "are followed by movements of retraction and withdrawal, others by such as secure a continuance of the impression. these two kinds of contraction are the phenomena and external marks of pain and pleasure respectively. hence the tissue acts so as to secure pleasure and avoid pain by a law as truly physical and natural as that whereby a needle turns to the pole, or a tree to the light" (p. ). not without questioning that the raw material of consciousness is present even in undifferentiated protoplasm, and everywhere exists potentially in that unknowable power which, otherwise conditioned, is manifested in physical action (_prin. of psy._, § - ), i demur to the conclusion that it at first exists under the forms of pleasure and pain. these, i conceive, arise, as the more special feelings do, by a compounding of the ultimate elements of consciousness (_prin. of psy._, §§ , ): being, indeed, general aspects of these more special feelings when they reach certain intensities. considering that even in creatures which have developed nervous systems, a great part of the vital processes are carried on by unconscious reflex actions, i see no propriety in assuming the existence of what we understand by consciousness in creatures not only devoid of nervous systems but devoid of structures in general. note to § . more than once in the _emotions and the will_, dr. bain insists on the connection between pleasure and exaltation of vitality, and the connection between pain and depression of vitality. as above shown, i concur in the view taken by him; which is, indeed, put beyond dispute by general experience as well as by the more special experience of medical men. when, however, from the invigorating and relaxing effects of pleasure and pain respectively, dr. bain derives the original tendencies to persist in acts which give pleasure and to desist from those which give pain, i find myself unable to go with him. he says: "we suppose movements spontaneously begun, and accidentally causing pleasure; we then assume that with the pleasure there will be an increase of vital energy, in which increase the fortunate movements will share, and thereby increase the pleasure. or, on the other hand, we suppose the spontaneous movements to give pain, and assume that, with the pain, there will be a decrease of energy, extending to the movements that cause the evil, and thereby providing a remedy" ( d ed. p. ). this interpretation, implying that "the fortunate movements" merely _share_ in the effects of augmented vital energy caused by the pleasure, does not seem to me congruous with observation. the truth appears rather to be that though there is a concomitant general increase of muscular tone, the muscles specially excited are those which, by their increased contraction, conduce to increased pleasure. conversely, the implication that desistance from spontaneous movements which cause pain, is due to a general muscular relaxation shared in by the muscles causing these particular movements, seems to me at variance with the fact that the retractation commonly takes the form not of a passive lapse but of an active withdrawal. further, it may be remarked that depressing as pain eventually is to the system at large, we cannot say that it at once depresses the muscular energies. not simply, as dr. bain admits, does an acute smart produce spasmodic movements, but pains of all kinds, both sensational and emotional, stimulate the muscles (_essays_, st series, p. , , or d ed. vol. i. p. , ). pain, however (and also pleasure when very intense), simultaneously has an inhibitory effect on all the reflex actions; and as the vital functions in general are carried on by reflex actions, this inhibition, increasing with the intensity of the pain, proportionately depresses the vital functions. arrest of the heart's action and fainting is an extreme result of this inhibition; and the viscera at large feel its effects in degrees proportioned to the degrees of pain. pain, therefore, while directly causing a discharge of muscular energy as pleasure does, eventually lowers muscular power by lowering those vital processes on which the supply of energy depends. hence we cannot, i think, ascribe the prompt desistance from muscular movements causing pain, to decrease in the flow of energy; for this decrease is felt only after an interval. conversely, we cannot ascribe the persistence in a muscular act which yields pleasure to the resulting exaltation of energy; but must, as indicated in § , ascribe it to the establishment of lines of discharge between the place of pleasurable stimulation and those contractile structures which maintain and increase the act causing the stimulation--connections allied with the reflex, into which they pass by insensible gradations. chapter vii. the psychological view. § . the last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their relations 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. § . 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 toward 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 opacity; 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 co-ordinated 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, etc., 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. § . 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. afterward 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 co-ordinating 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 toward 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 to-day'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 sensations 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 re-representative 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 co-ordinations 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 co-ordination 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 co-ordinations 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 co-ordinations; 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 preservative 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 re-compounded 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. § . 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, rise afterward, 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 scepticism 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 snow-storm, 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 to immediate 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, sub-human 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. § . 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 pre-social 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 co-extensive and undistinguished, yet, in the course of social evolution, 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 warfare, 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, become 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 headship gets settled, and the ghosts of dead chiefs, thought of as more powerful and 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, which their correlative sanctions, though becoming separate in consciousness, remain co-extensive, 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 co-operation; and co-operation is prevented by antagonisms among those who are to co-operate. 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 offences: 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. § . 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, non-necessary 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--firstly, of being re-representative; secondly, 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 quite 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 organizations--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. § . 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, etc.? 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, cancelled 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 cancelling 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, etc., 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 toward 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 of 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 those 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. § . 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 _c 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 co-ordination simply, but as a co-ordination 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: co-operation 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. chapter viii. the sociological view. § . 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 pre-social 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 co-operation 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-conversation. conversely, because these desires prompt activities that often conflict with the activities of others; and because the sentiments responding to other's 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. § . 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 toward 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. § . 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 co-exists a kindred irreconcilability between the sentiments answering to the forms of co-operation 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 _régimes_. 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 co-operation 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 toward 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 co-operation 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 hinderances 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 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. § . if, excluding all thought of danger or hinderances 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 offences generally, but minor offences, 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 co-operation for defensive purposes (which is here excluded by the hypothesis) there is also no co-operation 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 co-operation necessitated by war, which is unknown to them, lead lives such that each family is substantially independent of others, occasional co-operation 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 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 co-operate, certain limitations to their individual activities are necessitated by their association; and, after recognizing these as arising in the absence of co-operation, we shall be the better prepared to understand how conformity to them is effected when co-operation begins. § . for whether men live together in quite independent ways, careful only to avoid aggressing; or whether, advancing from passive association to active association, they co-operate, 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 co-operate there must not only be no resulting hinderance but there must be facilitation; since, in the absence of facilitation, there can be no motive to co-operate. what shape, then, must the mutual restraints take when co-operation begins? or rather--what, in addition to the primary mutual restraints already specified, are those secondary mutual restraints required to make co-operation 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 co-operation in the order of ascending complexity. we may distinguish as homogeneous co-operation ( ) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are simultaneously enjoyed. as co-operation that is not completely homogeneous we may distinguish ( ) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are not simultaneously enjoyed. a co-operation of which the heterogeneity is more distinct is ( ) that in which unlike efforts are joined for like ends. and lastly comes the decidedly heterogeneous co-operation ( ) 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 co-operation being also that which is least differentiated from militant co-operation; for the co-operators are the same, and the processes, both destructive of life, are carried on in analogous ways. the condition under which such co-operation may be successfully carried on is that the co-operators 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 co-operation 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 co-operation 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 or 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 co-operation will cease. individual hunters will prefer to do the best they can for themselves separately. passing from this simplest case of co-operation 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 co-operation 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 co-operation 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, co-operation 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 co-operation, and therefore to social development. from these simple forms of co-operation 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 co-operation be harmoniously carried on when division of labor becomes established. and as in the simplest co-operation, 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 co-operating; as in the more advanced co-operation, achieved by exchanging equal labors of like kind expended at different times, aversion to co-operate is generated if the expected equivalent of labor is not rendered; so in this developed co-operation, 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 co-operation 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. § . 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_, § ) well-developed animals are so constituted that each muscle or viscus, when called into action, sends to the vaso-motor 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 co-operation 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 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 co-existence 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. § . but now we have to recognize the fact that complete fulfillment of these conditions, original and derived, is not enough. social co-operation 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 ideal 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 adaption 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. § . 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 such 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 co-operation needful in dealing with external enemies becomes unnecessary, and leaves behind the voluntary co-operation which effectually achieves internal sustentation, there grows increasingly clear the code of conduct which voluntary co-operation 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 co-operation is secured, may be simply stated. the fundamental requirement is that the life-sustaining 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 co-operation 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. chapter ix. criticisms and explanations. § . comparisons of the foregoing chapters, with one another, suggest sundry questions which must be answered partially, if not completely, before anything can be done toward 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 _à 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 equi-distant 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 toward 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. § . 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_, d ed., p. . 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 happiness 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 happiness 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 so if he co-operates 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 then i 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. § . the antithesis here insisted upon between the hedonistic end 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 the two cardinal elements of ethical theory. i may conveniently initiate this discussion by criticizing another of mr. sidgwick's criticisms on the method 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. treating 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 toward 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 of our active enjoyments 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_, d ed., p. . 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 co-ordinating 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 co-operation of limbs and senses required for killing the prey; before this co-operation can take place, there needs the much longer co-operation constituting the chase; and even before this there must be persisted 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 others 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 an 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. § . 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 money-making, and just as the end of money-making 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 money-making, 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? § . 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, casually 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."[c] let us first consider the assertion here made respecting the relative intelligibilities of these two ends, and let us afterward 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 counter-assertions 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."[d] 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."[e] and aristotle, like plato, comes to the remarkable conclusion that the pleasures of the intellect, reached by the contemplative life, constitute the highest happiness![f] 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 any one after observing the various pursuits into which some eagerly enter, but which others shun, and after listening to the different opinions concerning the likeableness 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 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," etc. 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 of _æquus_: the word _æquus_ 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 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 more intelligible. for justice, or equity, or equalness, is concerned exclusively with _quantity_ under _stated 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 pre-supposes 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 of 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. § . 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 æsthetic 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 co-operation, 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 equi-distant 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.[g] § . 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 toward which the power manifested throughout evolution works; then, since evolution has been, and is still, working toward 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 mast 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 or 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 contact 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 ultimate supreme end, happiness special and general. chapter x. the relativity of pains and pleasures. § . 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. § . 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 lacerates 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 pains. 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.[h] 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 travelers 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,[i] 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. § . 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 carcass 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 esthonians 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 only 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. § . 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, plows 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 nervo-muscular 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, every one 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. § . 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 every one'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 scepticism, 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 co-operating 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 _à priori_ argument by an _à 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 upon 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 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. chapter xi. egoism versus altruism. § . if insistance on them tends to unsettle established systems of belief, 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 makes life 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. § . 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 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. § . 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--directly by the pain consequent on the overtaxing of inadequate faculty, and indirectly by the non-fulfillment, 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 over-strained 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. § . 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 plow--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 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 insistance 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 inflicts on the unborn, and the incalculable good laid up for the unborn by attention to personal well-being. of all bequests 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 for 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. § . 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 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 from 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. life-long 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 over-straining, 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. § . 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. every one 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 toward 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 non-acquirement 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. § . 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, every one, 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 co-exists 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. chapter xii. altruism versus egoism. § . if we define altruism as being all action which, in the normal 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 kind, 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 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 benefitted 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 semi-conscious 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. § . 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. tribes 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 co-operation which demand due subordination of self to others. only where monogamic marriage has become general and eventually universal--only 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 afterward 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. § . 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 co-operation 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 aggressions of his fellows on one another. the prevalence of antagonism 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 every one knows, the larger the number of a shop-keeper'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 brings 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, firstly in being just, secondly in seeing justice done between others, and thirdly, in upholding and improving the agencies by which justice is administered, depend, in large measure, the egoistic satisfactions of each. § . 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 of 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 small-pox, 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, every one 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 mal-administration 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. to-day 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. to-morrow 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 by others' carelessness, stupidity, or unconscientiousness. § . 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 any one should have formulated his experience by saying that the conditions to success are a hard heart and a sound digestion, is marvelous 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 good will 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 every one 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. § . 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 enjoyments 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 æsthetic 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 every-day 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 æsthetic pleasures, it needs but to ask whether men who delight in dog-fights may be expected to appreciate beethoven's _adelaida_, or whether tennyson's _in memoriam_ would greatly move a gang of convicts. § . 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 character 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 æsthetic 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 toward 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 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 pretences 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. chapter xiii. trial and compromise. § . 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 inference 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. in so far 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. § . 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 criticised. 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," he says, "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. ). 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. § . 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 proportioned 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 remain 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. § . 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. ). 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 to-day, 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 every one. 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, toward 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. § . 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 exultation 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 other's 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. § . 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 passed 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. § . 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 non-fulfillment 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 co-extensive 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. § . 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, 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. § . 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 ultimately 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 round-about insistance 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 co-exist. 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 co-essential. § . what form is the compromise between egoism and altruism to assume? how are their respective claims to be satisfied in due degrees? 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 happiness by individuals; while, reciprocally, the happiness 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 slowly establishing itself; and toward 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 insistance 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 co-operation, 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 toward 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 set-off; 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. chapter xiv. conciliation. § . 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 welfares 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 toward 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. § . 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 insensibilty 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 considerable 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 co-operation characterizing the militant _régime_ necessarily represses sympathy--exists only on condition of an unsympathetic treatment of some by others. but even could the militant _régime_ forthwith end, the hinderance 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 non-adaptation 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 non-adaptations 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_, §§ - ), 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 re-molding 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. § . the extent to which sympathy may develop when the hinderances 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[j]. 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 hinderances diminish, rise above that now shown by the sympathetic as much as in them it has risen above that which the callous show. § . 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 co-operation 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. § . 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 pained 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 any one, 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 toward 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 continually lessening 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 action which 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 adjustment to environing actions complete. § . 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 every one a vivid intuition of his neighbor's enjoyments. while pain prevails widely, it is undesirable that each should participate much in the consciousnesses 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 early 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. § . 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. chapter xv. absolute and relative ethics. § . 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. § . 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_ ( st ed., p. ) 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 who perform any processes of moral reasoning."[k] 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. § . 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 pre-social 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. § . 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 result 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 second-hand knowledge gained through books should begin to supplement the first-hand knowledge gained by direct observation, only when a good stock of this has been acquired, he will, with active sympathy, aid in the 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 laborers 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 set-off 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 co-operation, 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 æsthetic 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 by-stander: 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 set-off 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 evils 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. § . 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 any one more than guessed. the transgressions or short-comings 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, nor 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 unfrequently 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, range 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. § . 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 toward 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 afterward 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 the imperfection of existing natures, we may ascertain with approximate correctness what is the relatively right. § . 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 definitions--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 from strict 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 to 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 learned 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. , sec. ed.) beginning with the first of these two statements, which concerns geometry, i must confess myself surprised to find my propositions called into 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" definite? 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 pre-existing 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 an 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. § . 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 ærated. 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, pre-suppose 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 non-adaptation (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. § . 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 downward we find in ethical speculations, references to the ideal man, his acts, his feelings, his judgments. well-doing is conceived by socrates as the doing of "the best man," who, "as a husbandman, performs well the duties of husbandry; as a surgeon, the duties of the medical art; in political life, his duty toward the commonwealth." plato, in _minos_, as a standard to which state law should conform, "postulates the decision of some ideal wise man," and in _laches_ the wise man's knowledge of good and evil is supposed to furnish the standard: disregarding "the maxims of the existing society" as unscientific, plato regards as the proper guide, that "idea of the good which only a philosopher can ascend to." aristotle (_eth._ bk. iii. ch. ), making the decisions of the good man the standard, says: "for the good man judges everything rightly, and in every case the truth appears so to him.... and, perhaps, the principal difference between the good and the bad man is that the good man sees the truth in every case, since he is, as it were, the rule and measure of it." the stoics, too, conceived of "complete rectitude of action" as that "which none could achieve except the wise man"--the ideal man. and epicurus had an ideal standard. he held the virtuous state to be "a tranquil, undisturbed, innocuous, non-competitive fruition, which approached most nearly to the perfect happiness of the gods," who "neither suffered vexation in themselves nor caused vexation to others."[l] if, in modern times, influenced by theological dogmas concerning the fall and human sinfulness, and by a theory of obligation derived from the current creed, moralists have less frequently referred to an ideal, yet references are traceable. we see one in the dictum of kant--"act according to the maxim only, which you can wish, at the same time, to 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 co-existence of a perfect man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two co-exist, 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 borne 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, notwithstanding marked individual diversities, be preserved such community as prevents any one 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 of self, 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 co-exist 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. chapter xvi. the scope of ethics. § . 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 sub-human, 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 sub-divisions 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. § . 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 co-operation. 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 may be. under the ethics of personal 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. § . 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 co-existing, and who achieve their ends by co-operation. 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. § . 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 co-extensive 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 every one 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. footnotes: [a] _leviathan_, ch. xv. [b] i can count up more than a dozen such cases among those personally well known to me. [c] _constitutional code_, chap. xvi, supreme legislative--section vi. _omnicompetence_. [d] _republic_, bk. ix. [e] _nicomachean ethics_, bk. i, chap . [f] bk. x, chap. . [g] this universal requirement it was which i had in view when choosing for my first work, published in , the title _social statics_. [h] _on idiocy and imbecility_, by william w. ireland, m. d., p. - . [i] for instances see _fortnightly review_, vol. xxiv (_new series_), p. . [j] see essay on "the origin and function of music." [k] i do not find this passage in the second edition; but the omission of it appears to have arisen not from any change of view, but because it did not naturally come into the recast form of the argument which the section contains. [l] most of these quotations i make from dr. bain's _mental and moral science_. * * * * * * transcriber's note: punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired quotation marks were retained. ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. there are two section 's, 's and 's; and no section . page : "pharynx" was misprinted as "phayrnx".; changed here. page : "pouring half the night" may be a misprint for "poring". page : missing closing quotation mark added after 'a means of happiness?'. the text from this was quoted ends in a period, not a question mark. page : "this all all-important factor" was printed with the word "all" duplicated and was not corrected. social rights and duties _the volumes of the series already published are_:-- +civilisation of christendom, and other studies.+ by bernard bosanquet, m.a. (oxon.), hon. ll.d. (glasgow). s. d. +short studies in character.+ by sophie bryant, d.sc. (lond.). s. d. +social rights and duties.+ by leslie stephen. vols., s. other volumes to follow by-- professor a. sidgwick, professor d. g. ritchie, and j. h. muirhead, esq. (the editor). the ethical library social rights and duties addresses to ethical societies leslie stephen in two volumes vol. ii. [illustration: logo] london swan sonnenschein & co., limited new york: macmillan & co. aberdeen university press. note. the following chapters are chiefly a republication of addresses delivered to the ethical societies of london. some have previously appeared in the _international journal of ethics_, the _national review_, and the _contemporary review_. the author has to thank the proprietors of these periodicals for their consent to the republication. l. s. contents. page heredity, punishment, luxury, the duties of authors, the vanity of philosophising, forgotten benefactors, heredity. i found, the other day, that an address upon heredity had been announced, of which i was to be the deliverer. i admit that i was fully responsible for the statement, although, for reasons with which i need not trouble you, i was not quite prepared for it in this form. i mention this fact in order simply to say that the title may possibly give rise to false expectations. i am quite incompetent to express any opinion of the slightest scientific value upon certain problems suggested by that rather ugly word "heredity". the question as to the precise relationship between any organism and its parents or remoter ancestors, is one of the highest interest. the solution, for example, of the problem, whether is it possible for a living being to transmit to its descendants qualities which have only been acquired during its own lifetime, has an important bearing upon the general theory of evolution. but i have nothing whatever to suggest in regard to that problem. i simply take it for granted that there is some relation between parents and children: and a relation, speaking in the most general way, such that the qualities with which we start in life, resemble more or less closely those of our ancestors. i may also assume that, in some form or other, the doctrine of evolution must be accepted: and that all living things now in the world are the descendants, more or less modified, of the population which preceded them. i proceed to ask whether, as some people appear to believe, the acceptance of this doctrine in the most unqualified form, would introduce any difficulty into our primary ethical conceptions. i will also at once give my answer. i do not believe that it introduces any difficulty whatever. i do believe that the general theory of evolution tends in very important ways to give additional distinctness to certain ethical doctrines; although, to go at all fully into the how and the why would take me beyond my present purpose. all that i have to argue to-day is, that a belief in "heredity" need not be a stumbling-block to any reasonable person. i cannot doubt that the popular mind is vaguely alarmed by the doctrine. i read, the other day, a novel by a well-known author, of which, so far as i can remember, the main substance was as follows: a virtuous doctor (his virtue had some limitations) studied the problem of heredity, and had read darwin, and herbert spencer, and weissmann, and all the proper authorities. his own researches are carefully described, with the apparent assumption that they were both profound and of tremendous significance. he had, it appears, accumulated a vast amount of material; and his method was to cut out slips from newspapers, whenever they recorded any events in his own family history, and to preserve them in a mysterious cabinet. these investigations proved that there was a decided family likeness running through the descendants of a common ancestor. as a general rule, they had all belonged to the class "blackguard". from this result he inferred that there was no god and no soul. his relations were dreadfully scandalised: one was converted to his views; but the others contrived diabolical plots for setting fire to these marvellous collections and so stopping the contagion of these dreadful doctrines at their source. it struck me, i confess, that instead of burning the collections, they would have done better to ask him what was the connection between his premisses and his conclusions. what was this terrible, heart-paralysing truth which the poor man had discovered? has any human being ever doubted, since mothers were invented, that children are apt to resemble their parents? i do not personally remember the fact, but i should be prepared to bet, if the point could be settled, that, before i was a month old,--and in those days neither darwin nor weissmann had published a line,--my nurse and my mother had affirmed that the baby was like his papa. that, at any rate, is a remark, the omission of which would show more originality than the assertion. if i desired, again, to produce classical authority for the importance of race, i should not have to extend my researches beyond the latin grammar. if, once more, we look into the writings of famous theologians, we meet it everywhere. i take the first that comes to hand. "good men," says calvin, "and beyond all others, augustine, have laboured to demonstrate, that we are not corrupted by any adventitious means but that we derive an innate depravity from our very birth." the denial of this was an instance of consummate impudence--reserved, as calvin shows, for such wicked heretics as pelagius. the doctrine of heredity, in short, in a theological version, is essentially involved in the dogmatic foundations of the orthodox creed. i have no doubt that an investigation of the reasonings of augustine and others would exhibit much affinity to modern controversy, though in a very different terminology. whatever we may think of its merits, the doctrine of original sin implies that a depraved nature may have been transmitted to the whole human race; and, if the commonly alleged cause of the original depravity strikes us as insufficient, it is, at least, a very familiar argument of divines, that the doctrine corresponds to undeniable facts. why should it startle us in a scientific dress? if we can transmit depravity, why not genius and bodily health? in one respect, modern theories tend rather to limit than to extend the applicability of the principle. no one ever doubted, nor could doubt, that the child of a monkey is always a monkey; and that the child of a negro, or even of a mongol, has certain characteristics which distinguish it from the child of a european. but the difference is that, whereas it used to be held that there was an impassable barrier between the monkey and the man, it is now widely believed that both may be descendants from a common ancestor. should this belief establish itself, we shall have to admit that, in spite of heredity, organic forms are capable of much wider variation than was believed by our fathers to be even conceivable. let us try, then, to discover some more plausible explanation of the fear excited by the doctrine. now, i wish to give as wide a berth as possible to that freewill controversy which perplexes so many minds, and is apt to intrude at this point. i will try to assume,--though it is not my own position,--the doctrine of the freedom of the will in the widest sense that any reasonable person can devise. no such person will deny that there is a close connection--the terms of which have not yet been defined--between the physical constitution and the moral or intellectual character. the man plainly grows out of the baby. if the baby's skull has a certain conformation it can only be an idiot; with another skull and brain it may be developed into a shakespeare or a dante. the possibilities ranging between those limits are immovably fixed at birth. and what determines the constitution with which the child is born? surely it can be nothing but the constitution and circumstances of its parents. whether i can be a great man, or cannot be more than a commonplace man, or a fool,--nay, whether i shall be man or monkey or an oak,--is settled before i have had any power of volition at all. now, it is curious how, even at this early period, we are led to use delusive language. the difficulty is quaintly indicated in a remark by jonathan swift. the dean "hath often been heard to say" (says a fragment of autobiography) "that he felt the consequences of his parents' marriage, not only through the whole course of his education, but during the greater part of his life". if they had not married, he apparently implies, he would have been born of other parents, and certainly would have felt it for life. what the word "he" means in that connection, is a puzzle for logicians. i fell into the difficulty myself, the other day, when i had occasion to say that a man's character had been influenced, both by his inheritance of certain qualities and by the later circumstances of his education. having said this, which, i think, aimed at a real meaning, it occurred to me that the phrase was grossly illogical, and i shall be still obliged if any one will put it straight for me. the difficulty was, that i had used the same form of words to indicate the influence of a separable accident, and to describe one aspect of the essential character. to say that a man is influenced by his education is to say that he would have been different had he gone, for example, to another school. that is intelligible. but to say that "he" would have been different if he had been born of other parents is absurd, for "he" would not have been "he". he would not have existed at all. "he" means the man who has grown out of the baby with all its innate qualities; and not some, but all those qualities, the very essence of the man himself, is, of course, the product of his progenitors. such phrases, in short, suggest the fancy that a man had a pre-existence somewhere, and went about like er the pamphylian in plato's myth, selecting the conditions of his next stay upon earth. in that case, no doubt, there might be some meaning in the doctrine. the character of the future incarnation would depend upon the soul's choice of position. but as we know nothing about any pre-existent soul, we must agree that each of us starts as the little lump of humanity, every characteristic of which is determined by the characteristics of the parents, however much its later career may be affected by the independent powers of thought and volition which it develops. so much, it seems to me, must be granted on all hands, and is perhaps implicitly denied by no one. but granting this very obvious remark, what harm does "heredity" do us? it is the most familiar of all remarks that you and i and all of us depend upon our brains in some sense. if they are pierced, we die; if they are inflamed, we go mad; and their constitution determines the whole of our career. a grain of sand in the wrong place, as the old epigrams have told us,--in cæsar's eye, for example,--may change the course of history. that unlucky fly, which, as fuller remarks, could find no other place to creep into in the whole patrimony of st. peter except the pope's throat, choked the unlucky man, and, for the time at least, altered the ecclesiastical order of christendom. in other words, we are dependent at every instant upon elements in the outside world,--bacteria, for instance,--and the working of our own physical organism. but, that being so, what conceivable difference does it make whether the brain, which we certainly did not ourselves make, has a fixed resemblance to that of our parents, or be, if it be possible, the product of some other series of processes? it is important, no doubt, to recognise the fact; it would be of the highest importance if we could define the exact nature of the fact; but the influence upon any general ethical doctrine of the recognition of the bare fact itself seems to be precisely nothing at all. it is part of the necessary data of all psychological speculation, and has been recognised with more or less precision from the very first attempts to speculate. trying, once more, to discover what it is that alarms, or is said to alarm, some people, we are reminded of certain facts, which again are of profound interest in some respects. i take a special instance,--not, unfortunately, a rare or at all a strange instance,--to illustrate the point. many years ago i knew a clergyman, a man of most amiable character and refined tastes. one morning he shocked his friends by performing the church service in a state of intoxication, and within a few months had drunk himself to death. the case was explained,--that is, a proper name for it was found,--when we learnt that more than one of his nearest relations had developed similar propensities, and died in much the same way. then we called it an instance of "hereditary dipsomania," and were more or less consoled by the classification. we were not, i think, unreasonable. the discovery proved apparently that the man whom we had respected and admired was not a vulgar debauchee, who had been hypocritically concealing his vices; but that he had really possessed the excellent qualities attributed to him, only combined with an unfortunate constitutional tendency, which was as much a part of his original nature as a tendency to gout or consumption. now this, as i think, suggests the problem which puzzles us at times. a man develops some vicious propensity, for which we were quite unprepared. in some cases, perhaps, he may show homicidal mania or kleptomania, or some of the other manias which physicians have discovered in late years. they say, though the lawyers are rather recalcitrant, that a man suffering from such a mania is not "responsible"; and if asked, why not? they reply, because he was the victim of a disease which made him unable to resist the morbid impulse. but then, we say, are not all our actions dependent upon our physical constitution? if a man develops homicidal mania, may not a murderer of the average type excuse himself upon the same ground? you have committed an action, we say, which shows you to be a man of abnormal wickedness. you are a bloodthirsty, ferocious, inhuman villain. certainly, he may reply; but if you could examine my brain you would see that i could not be anything else. there is something wrong about its molecular construction, or about the shape of the skull into which it was fitted, which makes bloodthirstiness quite as inevitable in me as a tendency to drink is in others, or perhaps as the most ardent philanthropy may be in some. in short, i am a murderer; but wickedness is so natural to me that you must in all fairness excuse me. this is, of course, a kind of excuse which would not free a man from the gallows. it would simply suggest that punishment should not be considered from the moral, but, if i may say so, from the sanitary point of view. we should hang the murderer--not to satisfy our sense of justice, but to get rid of a nuisance. i will not now inquire what may be said upon that undoubtedly difficult problem; but i must touch upon the previous question which is raised by the argument. would our supposed murderer make out a good case for himself? is there no difference between him and the maniac; or, rather, what is the nature of the difference which we clearly recognise in practice? in the extreme case which our ancestors took as the typical case, the madman kills because he is under some complete illusion: he supposes that he is only breaking a glass when he is really taking a life, and so forth. he is therefore not wicked, but accidentally mischievous. we have now come to recognise the existence of many states of mind intervening between this and complete sanity. among them, for example, is the state of mind of the homicidal monomaniac, whose propensity is considered to be the cause of his actions, and which may be consistent with his being in many other respects capable of acting upon the ordinary motives and judging reasonably in most of the affairs of life. what, then, is the meaning of the statement that he is a madman, and therefore excusable? the contention must, of course, be, in the first place, that his character is in some way abnormal. he is not governable by the ordinary motives which determine human action. but, beyond this, it is evident that the abnormality is taken to mean something more than the mere deviation from the average. a man may be abominably wicked, and yet not in the least abnormal in the sense here required. he may be deficient in the higher motives, and the more brutal passions may be unusually developed; and yet we do not hold that he therefore deviates from the type. so, in a different sphere, we may have one man possessing enormous strength and another exceedingly feeble, one very active and another very clumsy; and yet they may all be perfectly normal, they are free from physical disease, and all their physical functions may be performed according to the normal system. entire freedom from disease, in short, is perfectly compatible with exceedingly wide deviations from the average, with capacity for walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, or with inability to walk a single mile; and yet such deviations do not imply a departure from a certain common type. to say precisely what symptoms indicate mere differences within the normal type, and what imply an actual deviation from the type, is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible; and yet that such a distinction exists has to be constantly recognised. "so-and-so is delicate, but not diseased; feeble, but not deformed," has a definite meaning, though we may be unable to define the precise meaning of our words, or to decide which statement is true in particular cases. the great difficulty in the case of insanity corresponds to this. the physician tells us that the madman's mind works abnormally, but not abnormally in the sense merely of having some faculties weaker and others stronger than is common; but in such a way as to indicate disease, and, moreover, a particular kind of disease, or one, perhaps, of several particular kinds of diseases. the vagueness of this statement provokes lawyers, who have a natural love of definite external tests to govern their decisions; and it has led to a number of delicate discussions, upon which i need not enter. the legal problem seems essentially to be, what tests should guide us in determining whether a man should be regarded as a normal human being, or as a being so far differing from the normal type that he should be treated exceptionally, and especially put under the guidance of other persons, and excused from legal responsibility, that is, liability to punishment. i have to do with the moral problem alone. it is a still more difficult problem; but it has this advantage, that we do not require so definite an answer. we have not, happily, to decide whether our fellows shall go to heaven or to hell, though we have to decide whether they shall be hanged or locked up; and we must be content as a rule with very vague estimates as to their moral character. what we practically have to take, more or less roughly, into account is simply this: that our inference from conduct to character has often to be modified by the existence of these abnormal cases. a man is drunk on an important occasion; i infer, as a rule, that he has all the qualities which go with low sensuality; but in some cases the inference is wrong; the man may be really a person of most admirable feelings; but one of his instincts has suddenly taken an abnormal development, owing to a set of causes entirely different from the usual causes. another man suddenly and causelessly kills a friend. the natural inference that he must be a bloodthirsty brute is erroneous, if it turns out that he has acted from impulses not generated by any habitual want of benevolence, but from some special defect in the constitution of his brain. in other words, our moral judgment must vary in the two cases, and may vary so much that the same action may rightly suggest only pity in one case and abhorrence in the other; although, in many cases, where it may be very difficult to say what is the precise implication as to character, the judgment must, if we are properly diffident, remain obscure. the moral problem always depends ultimately upon this: what is the character implied by this conduct? if the moral conduct shows malignity within the normal type, it justifies condemnation; if it shows only a blind instinctive impulse, due to a deflection from the type, it may justify no other feelings than those which we have for the poor maniac who fancies himself a king, and takes his limbs to be made of glass. if we hold that such responsibility implies free will we shall argue that the madman is deprived of free will, or that his freedom of will is more or less restricted, and that he is therefore irresponsible. in my own opinion, that proposition would be by no means an easy one to establish. i fancy that a man may be insane and yet capable, within very wide limits, of being good or bad, and that therefore we must at any rate hold that he has still some power of free will. the bearing of this upon the question of moral responsibility brings us within sight of some delicate problems. but, however this may be, the criterion by which we shall have to judge whether we are believers in free will or determinists will be the same. the problem is essentially, is this man accessible to the motives by which normal men regulate their conduct? or does he so far deflect from the typical constitution, however that constitution may be precisely defined, that his conscience or his affections or his intellectual powers are unable to act according to the general laws of human nature? having said so much, i think that i may proceed to this conclusion, that the theory of heredity can make no real difference whatever to our problem. there is a difficulty for the metaphysician--the difficulty which is involved in discussions between materialists and idealists, determinists and believers in free will. i do not deny the existence of that difficulty. i only say that the question of heredity is altogether irrelevant to the difficulty. the desire to treat ethical problems by the methods of science may predispose a thinker to materialism, and may at the same time lead him to attach particular importance to the doctrine of heredity. but that doctrine only takes note of facts which every theory has to state in its own phraseology, and do not alter the ultimate problem. let us, in fact, go back to our murderer. i am not responsible, he says, because i am determined by the processes in my brain. i am a mere machine, grinding out one set of actions or another as external accidents set my wheels and pulleys in motion. if that argument be fatal to moral responsibility, or to the belief that any truly moral action exists (a point which i do not argue), it will no doubt remove the moral element from the treatment both of murderers and madmen. they might still require different measures, just as we treat a machine differently when we consider that it is not of the normal construction, or that its various parts have somehow got out of gear, so that we can no longer, for example, expect that the mainspring will transmit its motion to the wheels. but, in any case, if the dependence upon the body be a fatal objection to morality in the highest sense, the circumstance that the body is made upon the plan of previously existing bodies makes no additional difficulty. if we could suppose every brain to be started afresh by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the difficulty would be neither increased nor diminished. the problem, are we automatic? and the validity of the inference, is morality meaningless? are questions altogether independent of the question, what particular kind of automata are we? and do we or do we not resemble a previous generation of automata? if, however, we reply to the criminal that he is not a machine or an automaton, but a responsible, reasoning, and thinking being, we do not get away from the facts. we then assert that he is responsible because he possesses a certain moral constitution. but whatever words we may use to express the facts correctly, we must still allow that there is such a correlation between soul and body (if those old-fashioned words be admissible) that the health of his moral constitution depends at every instant upon the health of his nervous system and his brain. it may be shattered or destroyed by an injury; and, if this be so, what does it matter whether the injury--say the defective shape of the skull, which causes pressure on the brain--is due to some accident or to a connate malformation due to his parents? the difficulty, if it be difficulty, is that the want of responsibility is due to some cause, accidental relatively to him; and it matters not whether that cause be in his parents' constitution or in some other combination of circumstances. in any case, we have to suppose, whatever the relation of mind and body, we must at least assume that a man is born with some character. like everything that exists, he has certain definite qualities which he did not make for himself, and upon which his subsequent development depends. and, if that be once admitted, the whole difficulty still occurs, and the question as to whether the origin of these innate qualities be derived from his parents or from a something else is a mere matter of detail. in fact, the confusion seems to me to arise from the vague phraseology which induces us to accept, virtually at least, the mental attitude of dean swift in er the pamphylian. we speak as if the man were an independent entity, lying somehow outside the chain of cause and effect, and arbitrarily plunged into it; nay, as if even his inner constitution were something superinduced upon his nature. it is really an absurd abstraction to distinguish between the man and his character, as though he meant a something existing without a character, and afterwards run into a mould by fate. the character is the man in certain relations, and he can never exist without it, any more than a piece of matter can be outside of all particular times and places. if the doctrine of free will and moral responsibility be so interpreted as to imply our acceptance of such fallacies, i can only say that it appears to me to be irreconcilable with the most undeniable facts. but i am very far from supposing that any intelligent supporter of the doctrine would state it in such a form. he would admit as fully as i do the facts, and, if they can be admitted and reconciled to the doctrine of moral responsibility, certainly the doctrine of heredity can be so reconciled. the only peculiarity of the doctrine is, that it has called attention to an order of facts which must in any case be recognised by every philosopher; and that it helps, therefore, to disperse a fallacy which only requires articulate statement to show its radical want of logic or even conceivability. we are, beyond all doubt, affected somehow, and affected profoundly, by our environment; and this particular form of relation to other beings has no more bearing upon the problem than the other forces which have been recognised ever since speculation began. there is, however, another side from which i must briefly consider the question of heredity; and it is a side which, i think, is really more important, because it involves issues of facts, and has suggested some more reasonable prejudices. it is, undoubtedly, very common that when a theory has obtained a certain currency it should be applied rashly beyond its proper limits. when the speculations of darwin encouraged us to believe that the natural selection might be analogous to artificial selection, that different species of animals have been produced as varieties of dogs and pigeons have been produced by breeders, it was, at least, tempting to apply the same formula directly to other cases. some men of science have endeavoured to show that genius or criminality is hereditary; and that, if one man writes a great poem and another picks a pocket, it is always in virtue of their hereditary endowment. within certain limits, this statement is not surprising, and i shall be very glad when men of science can tell us what those limits may be. without being a man of science, i fully believe that our congenital characteristics form, as i have said, certain impassable limits to our development. one baby is a potential shakespeare, and, probably, only one in a million. the qualities with which he starts, again, are, no doubt, derived from his parents, though we do not, as yet, understand in what way; whether, for example, we should infer that shakespeare's parents had more than usual capacity, or were especially healthy, or had some peculiar form of one-sided development which generated the disease called poetical genius; or whether he may have inherited qualities from a remote ancestor, which had remained latent for several generations. in any case, he was at birth only a potential shakespeare. he might have died of the measles, or been made stupid by a sunstroke, or have taken to drink in bad company, or have run away to sea, or been sent to the university and become a mere bishop or professor of casuistry; in short, though he could not easily have done very much better work than he did, he might have done inconceivably less. that is to say, his congenital qualities implied certain powers; but what he would do with them remained to be partly determined by an indefinite variety of external circumstances acting upon him in various ways. hence, we have always the complex problem, what, given certain raw material in the shape of new-born babies, will be the characteristics of the finished product in the shape of a grown-up population? if the social state is determined from the inherited qualities directly, we should be able, for example, to infer from a given proportion of criminals, that a certain number of children were born with a corresponding physical constitution, with "foreheads villainous low," and prognathous jaws, and with the other peculiar signs which mark the felon from his birth. in that case, again, we should infer, i suppose, that the only possible means of improving the social state would be by somehow improving the breed; perhaps, by appointing some of the inspectors who play so great a part in modern society, to examine infants, and get rid of those who were thus distinguished, by the means now adopted in the case of superfluous puppies. one objection to this system is, of course, that men of science have not yet shown that they are qualified for exercising such a supervision; and there are other difficulties upon which i need not dwell. this much, indeed, we may grant without any scientific prepossessions whatever. it is clearly very desirable that every generation should raise up for its successors as many children with sturdy bodies and vigorous brains as possible; and it is to be hoped that the objection to transmitting disease and imbecility may be more generally recognised, and, in some shape or other, have an influence even upon the strongest passions. but i am only concerned with the general theory, which, if i understand it rightly, would appear to imply that the characteristics of a society are irrevocably fixed by the characteristics of the children born into it; and, whether this theory be true or false, we must admit that it has a considerable bearing upon morality. if, in fact, we hold it to be rigidly true, we should have to suppose that no serious improvement can be produced in society at large, except by breeding a superior race of men. this, again, is a discouraging prospect. let me quote what has been said by an authority who expresses, i believe, the accepted scientific view. "there can be no doubt," says professor huxley, "that vast changes have taken place in english civilisation since the days of the tudors. but i am not aware that there is a single particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion that this evolutionary process has been accompanied by any modification of the physical or the mental characters of the men who have been the subjects of it. i have not met with any grounds for suspecting that the average englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those that shakespeare knew and drew." the statement, i imagine, might be very much extended. i do not suppose that the average cockney of to-day is a superior animal, physically or morally, to the average athenian of the days of pericles, or even, it may be, to the pre-historic savages who made flint implements for the amusement of our antiquaries. briefly, whatever change has taken place, within historical period, has been a social change, not a change in the structure of the individual. this is surely conceivable. we need only consider, for example, how vast a change has been made in all the conditions of life by the modern applications of practical science. whether, in other respects, we are better or worse than our forefathers, we have an enormously greater aggregate of wealth now than we had, say, two centuries ago; we can support four times the population, though the condition of the lowest stratum may not be better. and this amazing advance of wealth is not due to the fact that englishmen of to-day have better brains for mathematics than the englishmen of newton's time; but to the accumulation of capital, the improvement of the natural conditions of the soil, the turning to account of vast masses of material, previously neglected; to the invention of machinery, and so forth; all of which imply, not necessarily the very slightest improvement of natural capacity, but simply the growth of knowledge, and the fact that each generation has preserved more than it has consumed. what we call progress or civilisation, which means, whatever else it may or may not mean, a gigantic increase in the power of man over nature, is due, therefore, to the one fact that man can accumulate. he can modify the earth in such a way as to facilitate the labours of the coming generations; he can make tools which last beyond his own time, and which themselves become, as it were, the ancestors of incomparably superior tools; he can, moreover, accumulate and transmit knowledge, not merely the knowledge of facts, but the knowledge of scientific laws and of useful inventions, and of the right methods of investigating facts. when newton made a discovery, he made it for all the following generations; and, though it may well be that no superior or even equal intellect has since arisen to carry on his work, the dwarf now stands on the shoulders of the giant. it is not simply that we know more facts. the modes of mathematical inquiry differ as much from those which newton could employ, as the latest steam engine from the crude fire machine before the time of watt; and an average undergraduate can solve with ease problems which once puzzled the greatest intellects that ever appeared among men. man, then, can accumulate; and that simple fact enables every generation enormously to surpass its predecessors. accumulation, again, is, of course, a form of inheritance. we are born heirs to the intellectual as well as to the material fortunes of our ancestors. but, it is obvious, this is something very different from heredity. it supposes an alteration, not in the man, but in his surroundings or his education in the widest sense; not in his intellectual capacity, but in the knowledge which it can attain and the rules which it has worked out. in order that a man may be capable either of bequeathing or inheriting, he must have certain faculties; he must be an observing, remembering, reasoning animal; but he may become indefinitely richer, not from any improvement in his powers of observing and remembering and using, but simply from the change in his position. people's memories, it is sometimes suggested, have been weakened by the invention of printing. but, weakened or not, we have an incomparably greater knowledge of the past than was formerly possible, because we can now keep our memories upon our bookshelves, in the form of histories and encyclopædias, and know every fact that we want to know when we want it, without troubling ourselves to fill our minds with all the knowledge that may ever be possibly useful. a library is an external and materialised memory. but without illustrating so plain a point any further, i simply take note of what it implies: that is, that, as professor huxley has pointed out, all that distinguishes the present state of things from the state of things in the time of elizabeth, or, perhaps, at the time of remote egyptian dynasties, may be due, not to any change in the individual, but to what is called the social factor. the inference from the individual to the society, or from the society to the individual, is, therefore, rigidly impossible, because, given the man, the position in which he is placed and the stage of development of the society to which he belongs, are relevant facts which exercise an incalculably great influence. if this be true, what follows? we remark, in the first place, that the evolution of which we speak in regard to natural history, the process by which the present population of the globe has gradually grown out of the population of remote geological epochs, is slow. the changes which it may produce are not sensible within a generation--for, indeed, the very nature of the case implies that they must take many generations--not perhaps even within such a period as is covered by all authentic history. it is not, of course, on that account to be overlooked for scientific purposes. monkeys must have grown into men before they could begin to accumulate capital, either material or spiritual. the faculty of accumulating must itself have been developed. only when once it was developed, another process would begin, the process of social evolution, which, however it may resemble the other, or possibly be in some sense its continuation, proceeds, at least, at a totally different rate. the difference is comparable, one may say roughly, to the difference between the speed of an express train and the speed of a four-wheeled waggon. beneath the surface, it may be, the slower process is still continuing; men, for anything i can say to the contrary, may be acquiring larger brains and more sensitive bodies; and it is further possible, or rather obvious, that if we can do anything to facilitate this proceeding, to behave so as to give nature a better chance of turning out better work, we ought to do so. only nature is pretty sure to take her time about it. how far, again, one process is to be considered as a continuation of the other, or as a modification, or even as in opposition to it, is a point which i cannot now touch. what i have to say is simply this: that if we take any two periods of society, the present, for example, and that of a thousand or five thousand years ago, we shall find enormous or incalculably great differences in the social structure, in the amount of knowledge, in the character of the ethical, religious, and philosophical beliefs, and in the relations between the individuals of which the society is constructed; but between the individuals at the two periods we may find hardly any definable difference whatever. for anything we can say, we should be able, if we could move people about in time as well as in space, to exchange a thousand infants of the nineteenth century a.d., for a thousand of the nineteenth century b.c., and nobody would be able to detect the difference which would result. hence it follows, in my opinion, that the evolutionary process with which moralists and political philosophers have practically to deal, is what i have called the social, and not the individual process. we inherit thoughts as we inherit wealth; we inherit customs and laws and forms of worship, and indeed our whole mental furniture; we can add enormously to our inheritance, and can transmit the augmented fund to our descendants. but the other process of inheritance, to which the word "heredity" is taken to apply, is not, immediately at least, cumulative. we inherit the old faculties, bodily and mental, unaltered, or with infinitesimal alterations, though we live in a different environment, and are ourselves as much altered as our environment. the modern social organism is built up, if i may say so, of cells almost identical in their properties with those of the old organism, although the mode of combination gives entirely new properties to the whole, and brings out new actions and reactions among the constituent cells themselves. i have been touching the edge of certain problems of great interest but enormous complexity, and i shall venture to indicate the difference between these views and some which have recently attracted much attention. mr. kidd's work upon "social evolution" has made the phrase popular; but, instead of using it in my sense, he speaks as though "social evolution" involved what i have called individual evolution. in order to keep within limits, i will confine myself to one case upon which he lays great stress. it will show sufficiently why i hold his mode of reasoning to be inconclusive. mr. kidd has achieved success by very excellent qualities, by remarkable literary ability, and by his uniformly high tone of moral feeling. i should, therefore, be very sorry to speak of him otherwise than respectfully. mr. kidd, however, chooses to maintain a thesis in which he has certainly no personal interest,--the thesis, namely, that a little stupidity may be a very good thing. this view is, perhaps, intelligible when we observe that he also maintains that the progress of the race depends upon its holding "ultra-rational," which i think he would find it hard to distinguish from "irrational," beliefs. in support of this view he writes a chapter to prove that "progress is not primarily intellectual". the argument of which i have spoken is part of this proof. the greeks, he tells us, were a race intellectually superior to ourselves. they were, so mr. galton informs him, two degrees above modern englishmen in the scale of intelligence, and as superior to us as we are to the negro. and yet, says mr. kidd, this marvellous race died out, and no trace of its blood is now to be found in the present population of the world. let us look shortly into the logic of this argument, and consider how far it is entitled to be regarded as scientific reasoning. first of all, i should ask, what precisely is meant by "the greeks"? the argument is founded partly on the number of great thinkers, poets, and artists, in proportion to the population. now, it is obviously essential to a scientific statement that we should know what is the population indicated. if we compare the number of great men at athens in its best period with the number of free athenians, we shall get one ratio; if we admit the athenian slaves, or add boeotia and other greek states to our population, we get quite a different ratio. and the difference is of immense importance. the smaller the population, the higher the excellence indicated by a given number of great men; but, also, the smaller the population, the less is the wonder that it should have died out or been swallowed up in the whirlpools of political, religious, and social convulsions. a similar remark applies in regard to the period during which this race flourished. when did they begin and when did they cease to be superior to other people? till the statement is more precise we do not even know what are the phenomena to be explained; and the case is susceptible of any number of explanations. did the superior race cease to be prolific; or was it prolific, but of inferior descendants; and, if so, was it because it was mixed with races of an inferior stamp; or was it because its position exposed it to the attacks of more numerous enemies; or because its energy led it to attempt impossible feats? has it died out, or has it been swamped by other races? to answer such questions is absolutely necessary before we can say positively that the higher organisation was the cause of the decay, or that it did not cause the decay by some indirect process due to the special combination of circumstances. but to answer such questions, if they be answerable at all, would require the investigations of a lifetime, and a mastery of a whole series of studies, historical, statistical, ethnological, and so forth, in which i am an absolute ignoramus. but i cannot perceive that mr. kidd claims more than second-hand information. but, secondly, there is another obvious question to which an answer is necessary. mr. kidd and mr. galton deduce their view about greek intellect, first, from the proportion of great men. does, then, the occurrence of a group of great men at a certain period prove a superior organisation in the race? that leads to a very familiar problem: what were the causes of what we may call the flowering times of arts and sciences? we are all familiar with the phenomenon; with the sudden display of astonishing excellence at athens, at florence, or in the england of elizabeth. it seems to be the rule that processes which may have been going on quietly for centuries suddenly culminate; that artistic, poetic, or philosophic excellence becomes unprecedentedly common for a generation or two, and that the impulse then dies away as rapidly. it is the kind of problem which is satisfactorily solved by the authors of university prize essays, which somehow fail to convince the world or to be republished by their writers. are we, then, entitled to argue from the great works an organic superiority in the race? must we suppose, for example, that englishmen at the time of shakespeare and bacon and spenser and raleigh were an abler race than their descendants, because, when there was a very much smaller number of educated men, they produced more first-rate authors than have been produced by generations much more numerous and more generally cultivated? this seems to me at least to be a very rash hypothesis; and some of the obvious remarks made in our university essays seem to me to indicate considerations which, though not conclusive, cannot be neglected. it is clear, for example, that particular stages of intellectual progress are abnormally stimulating; that, as the last step to a pass in the mountains suddenly reveals vast prospects, while a hundred equally difficult steps before made no appreciable change, so there are mental advances which, as at the time of bacon, seemed suddenly to disclose boundless prospects of knowledge. it is the pisgah sight of the promised land which causes a burst of energy. or, again, a certain social condition is obviously required; philosophers and poets may exist potentially among barbarous tribes, but they cannot get a chance to speak, and they have no opportunity of communication with other thinkers. the intellect may be impelled in various directions, some of which leave no trace of a tangible kind. the amount of intellectual power implied in building up the roman empire may have been as great as that implied in developing greek art; and in america, as we are often told, intellect turns to dollar-making, instead of book-writing. so, conversely, the outburst of power may indicate, not greater faculties, but special opportunities, or special stimulus, applied to already existing faculties. everybody who has written an æsthetic treatise has pointed to all manner of conditions which were in this sense favourable to the greeks. how far such conditions were sufficient i cannot even guess; but at least an allowance must be made for them before we can argue from the achievements to the intrinsic power of the race which achieved. i do not see that it is even "proved" that the average athenian was in the least superior in this sense to the average englishman. it would require a lifetime of study to pronounce any opinion worth having. i fully confess that, so far as a vague impression is worth anything, it is the most obvious impression, after looking at the elgin marbles, that the greeks were possessed of a finer organisation than ourselves. still, i cannot accept as certain the quasi-mathematical formula that the greek is to the englishman as the englishman to the negro. this, however, suggests another and very difficult series of problems. mr. kidd is arguing against intellectual superiority. he, of course, does not argue that the general superiority of a race leads to its disappearance; but that a one-sided superiority--an improvement of one set of faculties at the expense of others--may have that result. this at once suggests a whole series of psychological problems. the intellect and the emotional nature are not two separate organs, each capable of independent development. every mental process involves both, and neither faculty can be developed without reference to the other. mr. kidd accepts the conclusion that certain primitive races were as clever as ourselves, because their brains were as large. if the argument be sound, it proves equally that their emotional nature was as well developed as ours; for no one can doubt that the brain is the physical condition of feeling as well as of thought. even the most abstract thought, as he elsewhere notices, implies certain moral qualities. newton remarked that he was superior to other men, not because his intellect was clearer, but because he attended more persistently to his problems. the statement, i think, involves a fallacy. newton himself, no doubt, did better the longer he kept a problem before him. he inferred, unjustifiably, that of two different men, the one who could keep up his attention longest would be the best. that does not follow. the difference may indeed be moral as well as intellectual; and it is quite true that a power of sustained attention is of the highest importance in mathematics, and that that power supposes a moral quality; but, conversely, the power of attention probably implies also the power of clear intellectual vision. a muddle-headed man would find attention useless. this is, of course, still clearer in the case where the mind is exercised upon questions of human interest. the statesman and the dramatist both depend upon their power of sympathy and the strength of their emotions, as much as upon their logical capacity. to feel for others i must imagine their position: if i imagine it, i can hardly avoid feeling for them. "altruism" is the product, in other words, of a process both intellectual and moral. now, remembering this, we see the difficulty of pronouncing upon the nature of the greek organisation. perhaps the commonest of all remarks upon greek work is the symmetry and harmony, the "all-roundness," if i may say so, of the development implied. poetry and philosophy, art and science seem to be so blended in their work that we cannot tell which faculty is predominant. what, then, is the inequality of development which is essential to mr. kidd's argument? they were wanting, he seems to answer, in "altruism". what does this mean? the astonishing power of the greeks was certainly as conspicuous in poetry and art as in anything else; and that power surely implies development of the emotional as well as of the intellectual nature. by a defect of "altruism," i take him to mean that these emotions did not flow along the channel of general philanthropy. they were wanting then, as i should put it, rather in cosmopolitanism than in altruism. if altruism means care for something outside yourself, where could we find better examples of altruism than at thermopylæ or marathon? was it not due to greek altruism in this form (some historians would say) that mr. kidd is not now living under the rule of a persian satrap? the altruism, no doubt, meant an intense and patriotic devotion to a small state, or an interest in greek as against barbarian, and was compatible with much brutality to individuals and acquiescence in slavery. but this does not indicate an absence of the emotions themselves, but simply their confinement within narrow limits, by the conditions under which they were placed. slavery, for example, is abominable; but i see no reason for supposing that the slave-holders in america were worse men by innate constitution than their opponents. they were corrupted by their position. this, in any case, leads to another problem. were the greeks more or less altruistic than other races? if you could show that altruistic races had survived while the greeks perished, there might be a presumption that the want of altruism was the cause of their decay. but this again does not seem to be the case. hardly one of the ancient races, indeed, has survived unvaried. the romans were at least as brutal as the greeks, and, one would say, as far from "altruistic". yet they overpowered the greeks. how, then, can it be inferred that the greeks perished because of defective altruism? the struggle for existence was between races equally defective to all appearance in that quality; and it must be a sophistry to signalise its absence in one as the cause of its disappearance. there is, indeed, one race to which every one would turn as the most prominent example of survival, namely, the jews. the jews have enormous merits and great intellectual endowments; but can anybody say that they were altruistic in the sense of being cosmopolitan? are they not conspicuous, beyond any race, for the narrower forms of altruism, rejection of a cosmopolitan creed, even when it arose among them, and exclusive devotion to the welfare of their own people? i think that it would be perfectly easy to argue that the greeks died out just because of their cosmopolitan and therefore dispersive tendencies, and that the jews have held out from a judicious adherence to narrower views of self-preservation. but personally i regard all such "arguments" as really belonging to the extra-scientific regions of rhetorical illustration. this suggests one other point which requires consideration. mr. kidd regards it as proved that progress has been due to the christian religion, which revealed the new moral doctrine. the christian religion introduced, it seems, that belief in the supernatural which is essential to altruism. it seems to me to be inconsistent with his own principles, that he should attribute progress to what is essentially, on his own showing, an intellectual change: that is, to a change in belief and even to a change which, in comparison with the old polytheism, was distinctly sceptical and rationalistic. but one point is clear. the introduction of christianity may be interpreted more consistently in a totally different way. the greek who became a christian was not provided with a new set of emotions, but his emotions were directed into new channels. he ceased to care for athens, because athens had ceased to be an independent state; he began to be cosmopolitan when he was forced to be part of a cosmopolitan empire. the important distinction was no longer the distinction between athenian and spartan, but between the different classes in the world-wide system. that is to say, the "altruism" which came in with christianity was not the product of a new dogma suddenly dropped from heaven; but of the new social condition, which made it inevitable that the forces which previously stimulated a local patriotism should now exert themselves nearer a cosmopolitan organisation. this is, of course, a commonplace; but, for that reason, it should not be simply ignored. it suggests one other consequence of mr. kidd's theory. it is proved, he says, that the progress of the western world is due to christianity. his "proof," as i suppose, is that the states which have sprung out of the old empire of the west have been christian and have progressed. how, then, about the empire of the east? if the great kingdoms of the west are the unique example of progress, what is the unique example of decay? surely, the regions where christian dogmatic theology was defended by athanasius and chrysostom. if you wish to point out a region where the race has actually gone backwards, you would refer to the turkish empire. why, if christianity was the sole cause of progress in one quarter, was it comparable with complete decay in the other? does the eastern theory about the _filioque_ explain it? or were the mohammedans more "altruistic" than the christians? or is it that it is absurd, especially upon mr. kidd's own doctrine, to assign the dogmatic creed of a race as the sole cause of its character and its success in the struggle for existence? i do not lay any stress upon the argument, except in a negative sense. i do not see, that is, how mr. kidd can make his theory fit the facts. but i infer one other remark. it is impossible to divine the causes of the rise and fall of empires, the success or decay of a race, from any of these sweeping generalisations about ill-defined qualities. if we ask why the greeks died out, we should have to take into account another and a totally different set of considerations: what i may call the accidents of their position. we should have to consider all the arguments by which historians have tried to explain the events; the facts of physical geography, for example, which account for the division into small separate states; the relations of the greeks to the eastern races on the one side, and to the romans on the other; and, briefly, to all the material conditions, those different from the intrinsic character of the race, by which the whole course of political development and of the conflict between different peoples, is moulded and directed into particular courses. i do not say, for i cannot guess, what would be the result of such an inquiry; but i think it just as possible that it would lead us to wonder at the persistence of the greek states for so long a period, as that it would lead us to wonder at their disappearance. our conclusion might be, that nothing but the astonishing intellectual powers of the greeks enabled them to play so great a part in the world's history, not that their intellectual superiority was the cause of their decay. i consider, therefore, that the alleged fact is stated so vaguely that we have no distinct problem set before us; that we don't know what is the process to be explained; that the suggested intellectual superiority is doubtful, at least in degree: that the excess of intellectual above other development, which the superiority is supposed to have created, is not proved, and, still less, that such excess was more conspicuous among the greeks than among their rivals; that, even if it existed, it is not proved that it would have produced the effect ascribed to it; and, finally, that the other causes which undoubtedly operated, are simply overlooked. i confess, therefore, that the whole argument seems to me to illustrate the danger of rashly applying certain scientific formulæ,--themselves, perhaps, still doubtful,--to new and exceedingly complex questions. if darwin had reasoned in this light-hearted way, no one would have been moved by his conclusions. but i must still add, what brings me back to my point, that even if the proposition were proved, it would not establish the conclusion. it may be, that races of abnormal intellectual development are at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence. that does not prove that "progress is not primarily intellectual". buckle, who argued that progress was due to intellectual causes exclusively, always assumed that human nature was constant, or that the faculties did not change. though i do not accept his view, any more than mr. kidd's, i do not see that he was inconsistent. i take the most obvious case to illustrate the point. no one can doubt that one of the most important influences in modern social evolution was the set of mechanical contrivances devised by arkwright and watt and their contemporaries. without them, the enormous development of great cities, of a population of artisans, and of the bringing together of all quarters of the globe, would have been impossible. the inventions, again, were due to no moral purpose in the inventors. they wanted to make money, and represented what is called (i do not say justly) the most egoistic impulse of modern times. one condition, then, of the great social change was essentially intellectual. this does not mean that watt was a cleverer man than archimedes. i don't know whether he was or not; but it does mean that the mechanical sciences had improved; and, consequently, that watt, though not possessed of intrinsically greater powers, was, in this direction, a more intellectual person. he had inherited the truths discovered by archimedes and many generations of successors. that science should be efficient, it is not required that men should be greater geniuses than their predecessors; but simply that they should know more of the facts and laws of nature, and have, so to speak, better intellectual tools. mr. kidd thinks that the inability of a savage to count three does not prove him to be stupid, only to be without certain rules discovered by the higher races. yet, he will not deny that by the help of arithmetic we can work out sums inconceivable to the savage; and that our power affects our whole social position. does not the existence of a currency affect mankind; and if we could not count, could we make use of it? i therefore hold that in many cases the causes of progress are "primarily intellectual". the mechanical discoveries of which i have spoken have revolutionised the whole world. i agree, indeed, fully, that the causes are not exclusively intellectual. a certain social condition--the existence, to say nothing more, of peace and order over wide regions--was as necessary as the intellectual condition to the development of commerce and manufactures. this, of course, implies the growth of corresponding sentiments, including, no doubt, what mr. kidd means by altruism. but the change may, and, i fancy, generally does, originate in intellectual movements. the new ideas shake the world. reason, says mr. kidd, is the great disintegrating and egoistic force. i should say that reasoning is essentially altruistic: my discoveries are mentally discoveries for you; i cannot keep a truth for my private consumption, as i can keep a material product. but it is true, to use eulogistic instead of dyslogistic language, that reason is the great force of movement, and breaks up the old social conditions, not only by getting rid of the ultra-rational, but by spreading the power of the rational; and therefore it inevitably brings about a state of things in which the old moral impulses have to run in new channels; a narrow patriotism, to widen into a regard for the interests of other races; and the class distinctions which repose upon no reasonable ground, to disappear in favour of a wider humanity. when we are arguing about an organism, it is surely a mistake to fix our minds upon one aspect of the problem: to deny with buckle the moral evolution, and with mr. kidd to disparage the intellectual evolution. mr. kidd's doctrine appears to me, though, of course, not to him, to be eminently discouraging. if he worked it out logically, his argument, i think, would come to this: that the progress of mankind has resulted from the accidental, that is, inexplicable, appearance of a quality called altruism, which gave to those who possessed it an advantage in the struggle for existence. it would be far more consistent to say that the religious dogma was determined by this new element, than that it was the cause. altruism, again, was only produced in effect on this hypothesis by the slow results of a process necessarily lasting through many generations; and our only hope must be in a slow organic change of the primary characteristics of mankind. now, it is, of course, true that those characteristics, whatever they may be, impose definite limits upon our progress. the raw material limits the product; and the new-born baby is the raw material of society, as wool is of cloth: you cannot convert it into tissue of gold. so much is undeniable. we, it is said, have been developed out of an arboreal animal, and i have sometimes regretted that we were not developed out of a flying animal. the course of civilisation would have been very different if we had not been forced to come into contact by crawling and swimming, instead of the much freer methods of aerial travelling. however, as things were, the choice was apparently between wings and hands; and if we could not have both, perhaps hands were preferable, and may in time lead to flying machines. the speculation, it may be, borders upon the fanciful. i mention it only by way of illustrating the unevitable conditions imposed upon us by "heredity". we have to be content with walking instead of flying; and similarly we have to be content with having only the five senses of our forefathers, and the various old-fashioned apparatuses for eating, drinking, digesting, and so forth, which they unconsciously elaborated. no material change can possibly be made in this system within any period to which we can look forward. to regret these limitations is just as idle as to regret that we cannot fly, or that we cannot extend our voyages to the moon. they are part of the primary data of the problem with which we have to deal; and to regret that that problem was not differently contrived is to propose to set about reconstructing the universe. but when we go on to ask how far this limits any possibilities of achieving really desirable, because distinctly conceivable results, i say that we have ample room for hopes large enough to animate our loftiest desires. we inherit, it is true, certain faculties which scarcely alter, or do not perceptibly alter, for the better. we do not see or smell or hear better than the savage, and in some of these faculties we are surpassed by the dog. we inherit also certain intellectual powers, and, if they improve, the improvement is so slow as to be perceptible only after many generations. but then this intellect carries with it another power,--the power of inheriting thoughts, beliefs, methods of reasoning and rules of conduct. and, therefore, to the organic evolution is added the social evolution, which enables us to accumulate our vast spiritual inheritance. the inheritance is everything, or almost everything, that makes the distinctions between the civilised races of to-day and the wandering savages who roamed the fens and the forests which were supplanted by fields and towns. and this, i think, makes room enough for all reasonable aspirations, though it certainly does not open any prospect that we shall ever become gods or angels. thus, for example, we look with sorrow, sometimes with something like despair, upon the masses of the criminal or degraded population which grovels at the base of modern society. if we were bound to say, the crime and the stupidity are the necessary expression of the shape of the skull and the organisation of the brain; if we had therefore to infer that the only possible remedy is by so modifying the struggle for existence that the inferior forms may be killed off and a better breed of humanity take the place of the present; we should certainly feel that we were confined within very narrow limits. i do not for a moment say, that such considerations may not point to important practical conclusions. i should be very glad to hear of any practical suggestions for so applying these doctrines as to increase the probability that the next generation may be stronger, healthier, and more intelligent than the present. but i also assert that the most obvious facts also show that there are enormous possibilities of progress without supposing any such organic transformation. if all that makes the difference between the england of to-day and the england of two or three centuries back is the presence of the social factor, not of the organic change, it shows in the most striking way the vast educability of mankind, even without any ultimate change of human nature. we must all, i think, have been impressed lately by one of the most singular phenomena which have ever taken place in history. we have ourselves seen the transformation of the japanese--whom we so recently regarded as semi-barbarians--acquire almost at a bound all the arts of western civilisation, and able not only to use with singular effect that most complex and delicate piece of machinery which forms a modern warship, but to adopt systems of military organisation and the strategy of a moltke. that is not because the japanese have changed any one of their physical characteristics, for they are the very same men who the other day were chiefly known to us as performing the "happy despatch". they have changed simply because they were able to assimilate european results. now, if that be a perfectly possible result, consistently with all the so-called laws of heredity, the same laws cannot be inconsistent with changes of a similar character within ourselves. you take a thorough ruffian,--a drinking, rowdy, fighting brute, who has stamped his wife or his friend into a jelly. you say that he is an illustration of slavism, or the reproduction of an ancient type which once had its place among his ancestors. the fact may be quite true; that he is, for example, acting-still in the spirit of those ancient vikings who have been idealised by our romantic writers; but who, when they landed in an old british village, behaved pretty much as the modern roughs or some of those noble blackguards who are described in mr. rudyard kipling's novels. but if you mean that he is divided from civilised beings by an impassable gulf, and is doomed to be a scoundrel by the shape of his skull, i venture to dispute the assumption. the viking in a generation or two became the norman knight, capable of the highest cultivation of his time; and even the rough, according to mr. rudyard kipling, is capable, under judicious discipline, of developing some very fine qualities, chiefly, it is true, in the shape of devotion to his colours. to wean him from some of his weaknesses it is probably necessary to catch him rather younger. all, however, that i desire to say, for the present, is this--as it seems to me--very undeniable fact: that the difference between a civilised man and a barbarian, between the highest types of modern life and the apparently irreclaimable brutes who are exhibited in our police-courts, is not dependent upon the mark of the beast irreclaimably fixed upon them at their birth; but to certain later influences, which may or may not be brought to bear upon them effectually. there is nothing, for example, in the doctrine of heredity inconsistent with the belief that if such influences could be properly directed, the standard, say, of sobriety and prudence among the lowest classes might be improved, as much as the standard of the same virtues has been improved in classes above them. the consequences of such a change would, i suspect, be incomparably greater than the consequences of whole systems of laws regulating the hours of labour and whole armies of official inspectors. but into this i need not go; and i have only one thing to say in conclusion. i have spoken of the enormous results of what we call progress and civilisation. that they are in one sense enormous is, i suppose, undeniable. that the power which we generally describe as the command of man over nature has been immensely increased is too palpable a fact to be denied; that there has been a corresponding change in many political and social respects is a fact which i only mention without seeking to say how far it has been in all respects a change for the better. further, i urge that this change, whatever it is, has not been due to a change in the individual constitution, but to a change in the social factor. and, this being so, i simply suggest that, considering how vast is the total change thus effected, we may reasonably hope, or, at the very least, we may reasonably endeavour to justify the hope, that a change of great magnitude may be brought about in those directions where we all have to regret the survival or even the development of so much that is melancholy: of regeneration going on alongside of amelioration. i think that the doctrine of heredity is sometimes interpreted in such a way as to suggest the hopelessness or at least the extreme difficulty of introducing any sensible improvement within any limited time; and what i have tried to urge is that, if properly understood, it does not in the least degree tend to justify such forebodings, or to imply that we are to abandon ourselves to a demoralising fatalism. punishment. i invite you to consider a rather dry problem. i ventured to select this topic because it has lately been my duty to occupy myself with certain legal writings, which, perhaps, took me a little beyond my depth. they touched, however, problems which are common to the lawyer and to the moralist. although not a lawyer, i am interested in some moral problems which have also a legal aspect: what i propose to do this evening is, to consider certain questions which lie in the region common to both provinces of inquiry, and especially this question: what is the true ethical theory of punishments inflicted by the criminal law? how, and in what sense, are they to be regarded as just? there is, obviously, a relation between the two codes--moral and legal. murder is both a sin and a crime: a breach of the moral law, and of the laws of every civilised country. yet, there is one broad and deep distinction between the two systems of law. the moral law is essentially concerned with a man's motives. to say that a man's conduct is wicked, is necessarily also to say that it is the action of a bad man, or due to evil passions. murder is wicked, as it is the manifestation of the murderer's hatred of his neighbour. the criminal law, on the other hand, has to deal, in the first instance, with the external facts. it contemplates, primarily, what a man does, not what he is. it does not attempt to punish every man who hates his neighbour, but every man who has, in fact, killed, whether the action springs from hatred or some other motive. every one who deliberately kills, unless the act falls under certain definite exceptions, is guilty of murder. this, of course, does not imply that the moral aspect is of no account. the exceptions are so arranged that the legal classification corresponds roughly to the moral classification. under certain exceptions, killing is regarded as justifiable homicide, and under others, it is only manslaughter, and, therefore, receives none, or a slighter penalty. the coincidence between the codes may thus be very close. in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the action condemned by the criminal law will be condemned by the moralist. the man who is legally guilty of murder is also, almost invariably, guilty of a great moral offence. although, again, the moral law applies to large classes of conduct, which are not within the cognisance of the criminal law, it is, at least, plainly desirable that the criminal law should condemn nothing which is not also morally wrong. the sway of the moral law is universal; it applies to all conduct, and, of course, to the conduct of legislators and judges: they and the law which they define and apply should be consistent with the general law of right and wrong. they and all of us are bound not to make virtue more difficult nor vice easier. but, further, the questions as to the relations between the two codes arise in various directions. it is obvious that the criminal law has to employ very rough and ready methods. it cannot estimate, with any accuracy, the degree of immorality implied by any given action. it cannot, and it does not attempt to, look closely into the secrets of a man's heart. it cannot inquire, as a rule, how far a man's crime is the result of bad education or bad surroundings; how far it implies thorough corruption or only superficial faults of temper, or a misunderstanding of some fact or doctrine. it cannot take into account a number of metaphysical or psychological considerations which are connected with the theory of moral responsibility. to settle such points you would have to empanel a jury of philosophers, and the only thing of which you could be certain would be, that such a jury would never agree upon a verdict. again, there are whole classes of virtues and vices with which the criminal law is not concerned. ingratitude, to take the common example, is a grave vice, but one which it would be absurd to punish legally. not only would such an attempt involve impossible inquiries, but the attempt would be self-defeating. if the duty of gratitude to a benefactor were turned into a legal obligation, gratitude proper would cease to exist. to confer a benefit would be the same thing as to acquire a right to repayment. a man who allows his best friend to starve, or to go to the workhouse, may be, morally, far worse than a thief; but you could not punish him legally, without adopting a principle which, even if practicable, would, so far as it operated, be destructive of all disinterested friendship. the law, again, can deal only with criminals who are found out. what proportion they may bear to the whole class of moral offenders is not discoverable; but it is, at least, safe to say that, for every man whom you convict of a crime, you must leave unpunished, because undetected, another sinner who is equally deserving of punishment. and, finally, it is apparently impossible to say, upon any intelligible grounds, what should be the proportion between crime and punishment. how many years' imprisonment does a man deserve for putting out his neighbour's eye? i do not see how such a rule of three can be stated. the good old theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, seems to suggest a possible criterion. but it was difficult to carry out. deloraine, in the _lay of the last minstrel_, has, as he points out, killed musgrove's brother; but, on the other hand, musgrove has killed deloraine's nephew, and, besides, got a thousand marks ransom out of deloraine himself. is the account to be regarded as accurately balanced? is one brother just equal to a nephew plus a thousand marks? the theory, of course, is an application of an inappropriate analogy. if we regard crime simply as a case of private injury, we may say that it is fair that the wrong-doer should restore the thing that he has taken, and so put matters where they were before. but this is obviously to take a view which is quite inapplicable in most cases, and in all cases becomes inadequate when we take the moral view, and regard crime as an offence against society--not simply as a wrong to another individual. for such reasons, it is apparently impossible to say that a legal punishment can be just, in the full sense in which the moralist would use the words. no doubt we may say,--and we wish that we could always say,--that a man "deserves" what he has got; and that implies that we recognise as desirable some satisfaction to our sense of justice. and, of course, too, we demand that justice should be done in another sense of the word; that the case, for example, should be impartially investigated; that a man should not be punished severely because he is poor, or because he is unpopular, or let off easily because he is a private friend of the judge. such demands mean that justice should not be perverted by applying irrelevant considerations; but they leave our previous questions untouched. the criminal law, from its nature, cannot impose equal penalties upon all men who are equally wicked; but only upon those who have made themselves liable: and that always involves elements of accident; it cannot take into account at all some of the elements upon which the depth of moral depravity essentially depends; and it is, at least, very difficult to say what specific meaning can be given to the proportion between crime and the suffering imposed upon the criminal. if, then, the legislative action must, of necessity, be very imperfect from the moral point of view, we may try what will be the effect of dismissing the moral question altogether, or, at least, reducing it to a secondary place. we may, that is, consider crime not in so far as immoral, but in so far as mischievous. here we have the doctrine worked out very consistently by bentham and his followers. pain, they said, is an evil, the only evil; pleasure, a good, and the only good. to inflict needless pain--pain which does not cause a balance of pleasure--upon any one, be he a good man or be he a bad man, is, so far, wrong. for the same reason, it is justifiable, and, indeed, right, to inflict pain, so far as it prevents some greater evil. hence, you should punish criminals just so far as the pain which you inflict is less than the pain which you prevent. it is wrong to give a single useless pang even to the worst of men. if (according to a sentiment attributed to bentham) a fine of five shillings would prevent a man from committing murder, it would be wrong to fine him seven shillings and sixpence. this gives a justification of punishment, in so far as deterrent. it is obviously connected with another doctrine. a man is the best judge of his own pleasures and pains. therefore, in so far as a man's actions affect himself alone, they are not to be forbidden by the law. we may think them bad or degrading; but so long as they do not affect others, the fact that a man chooses them is a proof that they give him pleasure; and we shall, therefore, only diminish the sum of happiness by interfering. now, it is plain that this distinction does not draw the line between what is morally bad or good. every habit which affects a man's own character, affects, also, his capacity to fulfil his duties to others. but this theory overlooks immorality, except so far as it happens to involve certain extraneous consequences. we are, upon this showing, to punish a criminal precisely in the same spirit as we are to abate a nuisance. the thief is to be suppressed, as we are to extirpate a mischievous weed, and to be suppressed by just as much severity as is required for the purpose. the drunkard, so long as he confines himself to making a beast of himself in his own room, does his neighbours no direct injury, and must be left to enjoy the pleasure which is shown, because he chooses it, to be a pleasure to him. of this theory, it may, i think, be said that, however imperfect, it is tolerably consistent, and, moreover, that it undoubtedly does express one legitimate end of punishment. there can be no doubt, that is, that the punishment of murderers may be rightly defended, among other grounds, at any rate, on the ground that it discourages the practice; though we may not fully agree with the famous saying of the judge, "you are not hanged for stealing sheep, but hanged in order that sheep may not be stolen". and, further, though there are various difficulties about the distinction between "self-regarding" and "extra-regarding" conduct, we must also, i think, allow, in general terms, that the fact that a man's conduct has a direct and assignable influence upon his neighbour's happiness, must always be one reason, and, frequently, the only sufficient reason, for suppressing it by legal penalties. this doctrine of simple deterrence, however, seems, to most critics, to be insufficient. it omits the moral element too completely. when a man is punished for some revolting offence, we are not simply providing him and his like with reasons for abstaining in future. we are, as a fact, exposing him to infamy, sometimes more painful to bear than the immediate penalty, and are thus, in fact, invoking the sanction of the moral sentiment. therefore, it is urged, we must still, whether we like it or not, be moralists. the purely utilitarian argument has omitted one element of the calculation. the punishment not only deters offenders, but gratifies the feeling of resentment to moral indignation, which has been approved by many moralists. hence, it is urged, besides the deterrent theory, we must make room for the vindictive theory. it is legitimate and right to hate crime, and, therefore, to hate criminals; and legal punishments are defensible, not merely as adding to the motives for refraining from crime, but as gratifying the desire for revenge, which, in early ages, was assumed in the rude modes of putting down violence, and which, even now, should be not eradicated but confined within legal channels and directed towards the desirable ends. postponing, for the present, a consideration of this proposed emendation, let us consider, a little more closely, the objection made to the theory of deterrence. in what way does it come into direct conflict with a moral theory of punishment? it looks upon immorality as mischievous, or as diminishing happiness; and upon the utilitarian view immorality means the diminution of happiness. now, without discussing ultimate moral questions, i may assume that, for practical purposes, this seems to be a sufficiently tenable position. after all, we admit, to whatever school we belong, that crime is mischievous, and, whatever deeper meaning may be assigned to it, may be considered in that light by the legislator. he cannot--certainly he ought not to--forbid actions which do no harm to anybody, or which nobody, at the time and place, feels to be injurious to happiness. even, therefore, if utilitarianism be unsatisfactory as an ultimate theory, it may represent adequately the point of view of the practical legislator. he tries to suppress violence and fraud because, as a fact, they cause what their victims unanimously agree to be painful consequences; and he need not look any further for a reason. people, it is said, have very different standards of pleasure. still, we all dislike having our throats cut or our pockets picked; and that fact supplies a sufficient ground upon which to base the whole criminal law. when we go a little further, a point of divergence may be noticed, a short consideration of which may help to clear the case. let us assume the legitimate end of all punishment to be deterrence. it will follow, that we must annex as a consequence to crimes an adequate counterpoise, and a counterpoise not more than adequate to the criminal's motives. the fine to be paid must be just sufficient to prevent the transgression. now, it has been urged, this necessarily implies a conflict with morality. the degree of moral guilt implied in a given crime varies inversely as the temptation. the greater the inducement to the offence, the less the wickedness shown in committing the offence. a man may have enough virtue to refrain from a gratuitous injustice, although he has not virtue enough to resist a large bribe, or the threats of a man in power. but, if the legislator is to provide simply a counterpoise, he will have to follow the opposite rule. the greater the temptation, the greater must be the force of the motive which must be added to counterbalance the temptation. if there be a crime by which a man might make a million of money, you must, if you would prevent it, hold out the prospect of such pains as would, in his estimation, be cheaply avoided at the sacrifice of a million; or, making allowance for the uncertainty of detection, by the sacrifice of more than a million. but if, by the same crime, he only got a five-pound note, the prospect of paying a hundred pounds in case of detection might be a sufficient preservative of his honesty. yet, the man who is tempted by the million gives less proof of dishonesty than the man who commits the same crime for a paltry five pounds. therefore the punishment must be increased, as the wickedness is less. i must first set aside one ambiguity which perplexes this argument. when we speak of a temptation as varying, we may mean one of two very different things. to say that i am more "tempted" than you to commit a given crime, may mean that the gain expected by me is itself greater; or, it may mean that i am more predisposed to the crime. i may be more tempted, let us say, to poison my uncle than you are to poison yours. that may mean that my uncle is a rich old sinner and i am his heir, whereas your uncle is a poor saint and you will get nothing by his death. or it may mean that i am more tempted because, our uncles being alike, i am spiteful, and you affectionate, by nature. in the first case, to say that i am under the stronger temptation would, perhaps, tend to alleviate the gravity of my crime; in the second, it would simply be another way of saying that i was the greater brute. in both cases, of course, it is true that the greater temptation would require the greater counterpoise. in one case, this only means that the worse the man, the stronger the restraints which he requires; and, if you could make different laws for bad men and good, it would follow that the bad would require the heaviest penalties. but this does not conflict with the moral view. it is no excuse for a murderer to say, "i am so bloodthirsty that i really could not help murdering". no contradiction to morality arises from punishing his crime more severely. in the other case alone,--the case in which we made distinctions founded upon the difference of surrounding circumstances,--it is true that we should, from the point of view of simple deterrence, require heavier penalties where the temptations were greater, and, therefore, the intrinsic malevolence proved to exist less. for most purposes, this argument seems to have very little practical application. the law is made for people in general; we cannot have one law for bad men and another for good; partly because good and bad people do not carry about tangible marks of their quality written upon their faces. no doubt, indeed, the atrocity of a crime is recognised, if not by the general law, by the nature of the sentence. an assault may show unnatural ferocity or merely a rather excessive warmth of temper; and, though the offence may be forbidden under the same clause of the criminal law, the judge may be empowered to give sentences of varying severity, varying more or less according to the moral depravity implied. so far, the worst offences (in a moral sense) get the heaviest punishment; and the deterring influence is rightly exerted by proportioning the penalty to the temptation, that is, to the predisposition to crime. the other case, again, requires some qualification. it is not true, as an absolute proposition, that the criminality is always, or generally, diminished, in proportion to the greatness of the temptation; for we must remember that both the temptation and the crime will generally be greater in proportion to the amount of mischief inflicted. it is more tempting, no doubt, to appropriate a thousand pounds than a shilling; but we cannot infer that the man who takes the larger sum is, therefore, less wicked; that he has a conscience which would have kept him honest under the smaller temptation, and has only yielded to the greater. compare, for example, the case of the petty pilferer who appropriates my watch, with the case of the man of business who appropriates securities worth many thousand pounds and ruins widows and orphans by the dozen. we should all agree, i imagine, that the perpetrator of the more gigantic fraud would require the stronger deterring motive to be kept straight. he is playing for heavy stakes, and we cannot hold out too strong a threat of infamy and suffering, if our aim is simply to prevent the crime. but neither, if we consider him from the purely moral point of view, would it be fair to argue that he was a better man than the pickpocket, because the plunder which tempted him was greater. the opposite, i fancy, would be true. he shows a callousness to human suffering, and an amount of deliberate hypocrisy and treachery which proves him to be not only the more dangerous, but the more thoroughly corrupt of the two. the two ends of providing a sufficient counterpoise and of punishing the worst men most severely, would, therefore, coincide in this case also; and the argument that the greater temptation implies less wickedness is plainly inapplicable. without going further into this, which may briefly indicate some of the perplexities involved, i may mention certain cases in which there seems to be a real divergence of the two principles. there are cases in which the temptation may be fairly held to lessen guilt, and in which punishment has, notwithstanding, been made severer in consequence. the criminal law of the last century, for example, imposed a penalty of death upon persons who stole certain kinds of property left in specially exposed positions. the ease of taking it would very possibly tempt to theft men who would elsewhere be honest; and it was sought to compensate for the strength of the temptation by more savage punishment of those who yielded to it. or, again, there are certain problems of a similar kind connected with political offences. a man who gets up a rebellion from sincere political motives is generally far better morally than the man who gets up a rebellion for the sake, say, of simple plunder. ought the motive to be allowed as an extenuation of the offence? it ought, it may be said, from a moral point of view; but, from the point of view of simple deterrence, we might rather consider that the patriotic rebel is the more dangerous person of the two, and, therefore, requires the prospect of at least as heavy a punishment to keep him quiet. so, again, it has been asked, whether it should be admitted as an excuse for a rioter, that he has joined in violent courses under threats from the riotous mob. this is, of course, an excuse from the moralist's point of view; the man is only attacking the police in order to save his own house from being burnt, not from a disorderly or disaffected spirit. but it is replied, from the deterring point of view, that, if such an excuse be allowed, you are ceasing to threaten at the precise moment when the threats are most required. if the law is not to press from one side, all the pressure will come from the other, and every argument will be in favour of joining the side of disorder. hence, it is argued, we ought to proportion the punishment, not to the offence, but to the temptation. now, i may say, very briefly, that such a divergence of the two principles appears to me to be possible; and, further, that cases may be put in which it might be necessary to deter, at all hazards, even to the neglect of moral considerations. a general who is defending a town must sometimes burn the houses of innocent people, without stopping to consider whether they can ever be compensated; and i think that there may be analogous cases even in regard to law, where the consideration of the absolute necessity of putting down mischievous conduct may override the normal moral considerations. but the general answer is, i think, different, and may help to clear the principle. the law to which i have referred, for the protection of exposed property, obviously suggests one remark. the true remedy for the evil would have been not to increase the penalty, but to increase the protection. you ought to have provided more watchmen, or to have forbidden owners to put temptation in the way of their neighbours, and not to have tried to make the hangman do the work of the policeman. so our ancestors erred when they protected their fields, not by putting up fences, but by setting mantraps to mutilate occasional trespassers. in that, as in other cases, the mistake is to confuse between the deterring influence of punishment and the preventive influence of protective measures. arguments, questionable when used on behalf of punishment considered as deterring, are perfectly applicable to the preventive measures. it is obviously right that such measures should be proportioned to the temptation. when a starving man steals a loaf, he is not so bad as a man who steals when he is not starving. we should, therefore, think it morally wrong to punish him as severely. but, if we thought that he ought not to have the loaf, we should take stronger precautions in proportion to the probable temptation. if, for example, we were sending supplies to relieve a starving district, it would be clearly right to send such a force with them as might prevent their appropriation by the strongest, or the first comers. but, at the same time, we should also think it right to save the men from temptation, by providing as much as possible against the danger of starvation. so, again, it would be monstrous to punish a poor man more severely than a duke, for stealing a watch; but, as a matter of prudence, i should take more precautions if i were dining in a poor public-house, than if i were dining in a ducal palace. this suggests the true application of another doctrine, about the responsibility of society. society, it is sometimes said, has no right to punish, because it ought to have suppressed the causes of crime. this doctrine is often stated very illogically, and would sanction a great deal of false sentimentalism. if society includes many corrupt and dangerous elements, that is no reason at all for not suppressing them by all available means. but, no doubt, it is a very good and sufficient reason for trying, as far as possible, to remove the cause as well as the effects; for getting rid of the temptations to crime, and training people so as to make them less disposed to crime, instead of simply punishing more severely those who have yielded to temptation and given play to instincts which have not been properly disciplined. this applies conspicuously to the case of the political criminal. it is generally essential to the welfare of a nation, that order should be preserved by a settled government. it is the duty of every government, not only to crush resistance, but to take such precautions as will make resistance hopeless. but a correlative duty is suggested when a rebellion actually occurs, and especially a rebellion which excites the sympathy of otherwise moral people. such a case, that is, affords the strongest presumption that there are real grievances to be redressed, and that the rebel should not be confounded with the vulgar criminal. it may be, and often is, quite necessary to shoot him down, so long as he is actively attacking authority; but, when he is disarmed, he cannot be regarded simply as a thief or murderer, but as a man who has given a useful, though a disagreeable, hint that the times are out of joint. i have gone so far into these questions--which might lead to a great many other problems of legal casuistry--with the desire of bringing out one essential part of the question. the difficulties which have arisen point, i think, to the impossibility of treating the problem exclusively, from a simple consideration of the deterring influence of punishment. that, however, remains an essential element. if the sole reason for punishing a sheep-stealer be not the prevention of sheep-stealing, that is, at least, a very excellent reason as far as it goes. but it seems to me an insufficient reason from the moral point of view, and, in particular, to fail in assigning a sufficiently distinct ground for determining the desirable degree of punishment. the principle was advocated as limiting the severity of the old laws; but it is not quite easy to define the limit suggested. there is a necessary clumsiness about the method. a punishment only becomes operative in the cases in which the threat has failed to deter. the fact that a man has committed a crime demonstrates the inadequacy of the system in his case; we have not given him a sufficient motive for abstaining. when bentham says, that if a fine of five shillings would prevent a murder, you ought not to fine the murderer seven and sixpence, he says what is, in a sense, obviously true. if i could prevent a murder, or, indeed, achieve any other desirable object, for a given sum, why should i throw away another penny? but the fine is not inflicted till somebody has committed a murder, and, in that case, the threat of fining has obviously failed. the question arises, therefore, how far am i to go? am i to go on raising the tariff till murder becomes altogether obsolete? but we have already got as far as capital punishment, without achieving that result. and, if we consider the case upon this method, we begin to find a difficulty in the method of calculation. we are to compare the pain inflicted upon the criminal with the pain saved to the victim. but the greater the pain inflicted, the smaller, according to the assumption made, will be the number of criminals, and the greater the number of victims saved. if we could adopt the draconic system, and be sure of punishing every crime with death, crime ought to disappear; for hardly anybody would break the law if he were quite certain of the gallows. but, in that case, the pain, both of the criminal and the victim, would disappear, for there would be no one in either class. the result, therefore, would be a pure gain: no crime and no punishment. against this practical conclusion, indeed, bentham was one of the first to protest; and he uses one very sound argument. punish all crime equally, he says, and you put a premium on the worst crimes. if both robber and murderer are to be hanged, the robber will have a good reason for destroying evidence, by adding the murder to the plunder of his victims. but, though the argument is very much to the purpose, it seems to make our calculations rather difficult. we cannot look simply to the deterring influence of a given punishment, but have to consider its place in the general tariff, and its influence in inducing people to prefer one variety of crime to another. and if we try to find our way out of this difficulty, we shall have, i think, to find that the mode of reasoning requires some modification. the theory on which the calculation goes may, perhaps, be represented thus: it is supposed that by hanging a murderer, you prevent, say, ten murders which would otherwise happen. the suffering saved to the ten victims is greater than the actual suffering of the single criminal. therefore, the infliction of the penalty gives a balance on the side of happiness. the argument seems to me to be sound as far as it goes, and, in some cases, it would, i think, be sufficient. if, for example, it were proved that the use of a certain remedy, such as inoculation, caused a certain number of deaths, while, on the other hand, it prevented ten times as many, we should consider that a good case had been made out for its adoption. and, similarly, if we attended simply to the number of executions and to the number of crimes, and could make the necessary arithmetical comparison, we should be able to estimate the balance of good or evil in terms of pain and pleasure. but this mode of considering the case is obviously inadequate; and, indeed, bentham (though i cannot now go into his teaching) feels and makes allowance for its inadequacy. for, to say nothing else, the mere deterrence of a certain number of crimes is an entirely insufficient measure of the effect of the law. the one obvious remark is that, by suppressing violence, you not only save a certain number of lives, but you secure an essential condition of all civilised life. i came here to-night without a revolver in my pocket; and i am not aware that i showed any particular courage by doing so. but it would have been foolhardy to have shown the same negligence, a few years ago, in some of the western states of america. if i had lived in such conditions, i should not only have taken a revolver, but have, very possibly, thought it a duty to join a vigilance committee, with a view to the suppression of crimes of violence. there are still regions where the fact that a man lives in a neighbouring village is a sufficient justification for shooting him down as soon as he comes in sight, for the simple reason that, otherwise, he would shoot you. so, when private war was still part of the regular custom, there was an obstacle which had to be crushed before any progress could be made in industrial development, which presupposes peaceful intercourse and mutual confidence. the formation of all that is meant by social order, the bringing about of a state of things in which men can meet habitually without fear or precaution, counting with complete confidence upon the absence of any hostile intention, is, obviously, an essential condition of everything that makes life worth living in a civilised country. the fact is too obvious to require much illustration; but it requires notice, for it is very imperfectly recognised when you regard murder, for example, simply as a kind of sporadic disease, which breaks out here and there, and can be kept within limits by killing some murderers, and so frightening other would-be murderers. the criminal law, no doubt, includes that consideration; but it includes infinitely more. it is a necessary corollary of that state of social relations which alone gives a secure base for every conceivable kind of satisfactory social relation. it might, perhaps, serve as a sufficient defence of the old system, when, in the absence of any settled order, the system of private vengeance, of blood-feuds, and so forth, served to restrain the prevalence of actual violence. but it is a totally insufficient measure of the real advantage gained by enforcing order. we have to compare, not only the number of murders and the number of victims which would exist in a given social order, supposing the penalty to be inflicted or not inflicted; but to compare two radically different social states, and to ask, whether it is better to live in a society where peace is the almost invariable rule, and violence the rare exception, or in one in which there is a chaos of little societies, each of them being in constant fear of all its neighbours. the construction of a central authority which will keep the peace is a necessary part of the process of civilisation, and the criminal law is involved in the process. for, of course, it follows that, so long as anti-social elements exist within the borders of society, and some people resort to the old methods of the knife or the bludgeon, they must be put down; and the hangman and the jailer, clumsy as the action may be, represent the only kind of machinery which has hitherto been invented for the purpose. it follows that we must understand "deterrence" in a wider sense than we have hitherto given to it. when we speak of punishment as deterring from crime, we must consider, not merely the effect upon the individual of the prospect of punishment following detection, but the total effect of a systematic adherence to the law upon the preservation of a peaceful state of society at large. we do not simply wish to provide a sufficient motive to decide the individual who is asking himself, shall i steal or not steal? but to maintain an organisation under which property shall be normally respected, and stealing become as exceptional as we can make it. this, in turn, involves much more than a simple execution of the criminal law; it involves the support of agencies for prevention, education, and reformation; though it does, also, involve an inflexible adherence to the criminal law. the law has to use rough means, and cannot possibly affect to adhere precisely to the moral deserts of individual cases. but it is justified by the simple ground that the only alternative is a chaos of barbarism. if you ask, therefore, in what sense is a criminal law just? we must confess that, in certain respects, it is impossible that it should be strictly just; it must deal with the found-out exclusively and with those who are found out in certain definite cases of criminality, and it must, therefore, impose penalties which do not precisely correspond to the degree of criminality implied. but the relation to morality is, nevertheless, intimate. for the growth of the social order depends upon the growth of the corresponding social instincts; or rather, the two processes are correlative. if i love my neighbour i shall not wish to cut his throat; and, in order that i may love him, i must be pretty sure that he does not mean to cut mine. the external framework provides a protection under which the primary moral instincts can expand; and the expansion of the instincts supposes a correlative modification of the external framework. the moral requirement in regard to the criminal law is, therefore, essentially, that it should be such a law as is favourable, when considered in connection with the whole order, to the strength and development of the existing morality. if the criminal asks, how do you justify yourself for punishing me? the reply must be, because the inflexible administration of the law is an essential precondition of the whole system, under which alone progress is possible. a society in which peace and order are preserved is superior, in morals as in other respects, to a society in which peace and order are made impossible by violence; and the suppression by punishment of offenders is involved in the system. the advantage of belonging to such a society is not to be measured by counting up the working of individual cases; but by the whole characteristics of the social state, taken as a whole, and including, as one essential part, the administration of criminal law in such a way as to be in conformity with the conditions of healthy social development. the difficulty, i think, though i can only indicate the argument briefly, results from a common illusion, which is illustrated by the once famous social contract theory. you suppose a number of independent individuals, agreeing to join and expecting to receive a precise equivalent for every sacrifice that they make in consequence. the reply is, that the individual is the product of the society, and it is a mere fiction to consider him as possessing any antecedent rights whatever. his rights are to be deduced from, not to supply the premisses for deducing, the social order. the only considerations which are relevant are those which affect the welfare of the social organism, taken as a whole; and we must regard them as determined, before we come to the distribution of benefits and burdens among its constituent facts. otherwise, we should be falling into the same fallacy as if we argued about the health of separate bodily organs, legs, and arms, and stomachs, as though they were independent things, fastened together to make a single machine. since the leg implies the stomach, any consideration of the leg's separate rights would be absurd. so the individual member of a political society cannot be regarded as though he had existed outside society somewhere, and was entitled to a precise equivalent for the sacrifice of his independence. the doctrine involves impossible considerations. i have to contribute to certain sanitary regulations, though i may be stronger or weaker than my neighbours, and therefore less or more in need of them. or, i have to pay a school-rate, whether i have a dozen children or none at all. do those facts give me a right to complain if i am taxed equally with my neighbours? if so, every benefit which i receive from society must be set down as a separate item in an account to be balanced by itself. obviously, the advantage which i receive in such cases is the whole advantage received from living in a healthy place or among educated people; and it is essentially impossible to cut that up into a number of different bits of happiness conferred in return for separate payments on account. if i use the contract formula, i must interpret it to mean that amenability to various regulations, including the criminal law, is part of the whole bargain, which would have been made, if it had ever been real, when i decided, if i ever had decided, to join the society. the instinct for punishing criminals guilty of violence is one of the fundamental instincts of civilisation, and we must accept it just as we accept any other fundamental instinct. the question of justice, however, is not a whit the less essential because it presupposes this social characteristic instead of supplying the primary axioms from which it is to be deduced. it is undoubtedly of the highest importance that every difference in our method of treating different classes should have its sufficient reason, to be assigned as clearly as possible. the preservation of the peace is essential; but that does not settle the methods by which it is to be preserved. on what ground, then, are we to deal with the problem of justice as regards different classes of crime? if the calculation of pain and pleasure, as already stated, seems to be unsatisfactory, what is the right principle of proportioning punishment to offence? i have noticed one argument which bentham applied, and, as i think, with very good reason. to punish crimes equally, he said, is virtually to put a premium upon the worst. the "in for a penny in for a pound" maxim becomes at once applicable. moreover, as every one now admits, the old brutal system is condemned by experience. to punish a great number of offences with death led to a mixture of excessive brutality with excessive uncertainty. the cruel punishment of some criminals was balanced by the complete escape of others. but this practical failure clearly resulted, in great measure, from an obscure sense of justice. it was grossly unjust, it seemed, to hang a man for stealing a loaf, when you could only hang another for the brutal murder of his wife. the penalty in the first case, was, it was felt, altogether out of proportion to the offence. this instinctive sentiment was, as i think we all feel, substantially right. in any case, it would have to be taken into account by the legislator, for the obvious reason that punishments which outrun public opinion, tend to make martyrs of criminals. they are either not inflicted, or they set the sympathy of the people on the side of the offender. but to say this, is not to prove the sentiment to be just, only to take account of its existence. and the question, therefore, remains, how it is to be logically justified, for it may seem to imply the theory to which i have objected--the hypothesis of a sort of debtor and creditor account--of the old "eye for an eye" doctrine, which, as i have argued, involves a misconception of the true doctrine. my reply would be, in general terms, that the doctrine requires restatement, and, if properly stated, will not lose but acquire new forces. let us consider the consequences of my previous statements. the essential condition of social development is enforcement, where necessary, of peace and order by adequate means. the criminal law corresponds to one part of this process. the whole social system includes machinery for prevention, for reformation and for education, as well as for punishment; and it is only when taken in its relation to other parts of the system, that we can give the full justification. its methods are, as i have said, obviously full of imperfections, from the purely moral point of view. if we consider it as an isolated fact, comparably to the interference of a quasi-supernatural power, which clutches an offender here and there, and punishes him simply to frighten others, the arbitrary and unequal nature of the proceeding assumes an air of injustice. in fact, if you take the extreme individualist view, according to which each man is an independent unit, while society represents a force impinging upon him from without, it always becomes difficult to introduce the conception of justice without ending in the approval of anarchy. when, however, we consider the social organisation as including all the means of civilising society, of strengthening the general spirit of order, as well as acting upon the fears of the disorderly, we have to take wider considerations into account. we become sensible, in the first place, of the importance of the principle that punishment should never be substituted for prevention. wherever it is possible to remove temptations, or take precautions which make crime impossible, we can have no excuse for adopting the blundering and unsatisfactory system of punishing those who have committed it. we admit, that is, that the criminal law, though absolutely necessary, is an essentially clumsy contrivance, to be used only when other methods fail. when certain punishments have been condemned as brutalising, it has been replied that the persons punished were already so brutal that it is impossible to make them worse. but the brutalising influence is even more objectionable as it applies to the legislator than as it applies to the criminal. to make up for neglect of appropriate precautions by severity against the offender, is to adopt the necessarily arbitrary method in which chance must always play a part in place of more effective and civilising methods. frugality in applying punishment is desirable as a guarantee that we are acting in the proper spirit. an indian official was asked why the native police were disposed to use torture for the detection of crime. the cause was, he said, mainly from laziness: it was so much easier to sit in the shade, rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's eyes, than to go about in a hot sun collecting evidence. so, it would be very much easier to inflict cruel punishment than to try to remove the causes of crime; and a resolution never to use the more brutal methods is not, as i think, to be regarded as a proof of weak sentimentalism, but as a judicious self-denying ordinance, imposed upon society by itself, as binding it always to adopt, as far as it possibly can, what is at once the more humane and the more scientific method. the same principle involves the careful graduation of punishment. there are, indeed, as i believe, though i cannot give reasons, cases in which crimes ought to be punished with death. there are persons of whom we may say that it would have been better, especially for their neighbours, if they had never been born. "i am worth inconceivably more for hanging than for any other purpose," said the heroic john brown; and the words may be applied, in a very different sense, to some of the wretches who occasionally make their appearance in the courts. to hang such a man is to act upon the assumption that murderers represent elements which are entirely and radically anti-social. the only remedy for them is extirpation. but, if this be admitted, it suggests a sufficient reason for not applying it to the cases of less gravity, in which such radical incompatibility has not been demonstrated. punishment by death, even if necessary, is certainly a confession of impotence. we are admitting that we can do nothing better with the man than convert him into a scarecrow for the benefit of his like. what more, it may be asked, can we do with a criminal? the obvious reply would be, reform him. although no one can doubt that reformation would be an extremely good thing, wherever practicable, it may be urged that the enterprise is exceedingly difficult; that, in many cases, it is hopeless; and that we might spend our money and our efforts to better purpose upon more hopeful materials. and yet, i think that the answer is the true one, if properly understood, and will suggest the right meaning to be given to the word "deterrence". so long as we consider the individual case alone, and merely mean that we are giving motives to bad men for refraining from particular lines of conduct, the results, however desirable, are of limited value. but if we consider deterrence as including or coinciding with reformation, as indicating a part of the general system of moral pressure by which the classes exposed to temptation may be gradually raised in the scale of civilisation, we recognise an acceptable meaning. in fact, if we ask what is the deterring influence of punishment, we must observe that at one extreme it will always fail, or only induce a bad man to take precautions against detection; and that, at the other end of the scale, there are a great many cases in which it does not come into active operation at all. you and i, i hope, are not in the least disposed to assault each other, even though no policeman is present. the bare thought of resorting to violence, pelting me, say, with rotten eggs, has not even suggested itself to you, even though i may be making a very provoking use of my tongue. but there is also an intermediate class of people upon whom the possibility of having to appear in a police court, and the strong sense of shame attached to such appearances, is an active restraining force, tending to limit, and, in cases where the proper conditions exist, gradually to narrow, the sphere of violence. we, the peaceable and law-abiding citizens, have gained a right to those epithets, because we have lived in a sphere where the law has been habitually enforced. we have ceased to carry deadly weapons about us, and have established a general condition of good order. the deterring influence of the criminal law acts, or ought to act, by gradually spreading that state of mind through a steadily widening circle. the classes which are still in need of such a support to their moral instincts are clearly capable of reformation, whatever may be the case of some of the individuals who break the law. a fighting tribe, which has been in the habit of resenting every injury by the use of the knife, may learn, in a very short time, that a court of law settles disputes more agreeably than a free fight; and may become a most admirable and efficient part of the society to which it belongs. and the same may be said of large classes in our own society, which are perfectly capable of being converted into good citizens, though they may retain certain propensities developed under a rougher and more brutal system. to employ excessive and brutalising punishments in order to suppress small offences, is, therefore, to abandon the aim of civilising, to declare internecine war against the class, and to regard them simply as a nuisance to be abated. the effect might be, if the law could be carried out, to prevent a certain number of crimes; but it must also be to generate a more dangerous spirit in the class which you regard simply as dangerous, instead of regarding it as the possible raw materials of a more civilised and orderly society. without attempting to dwell upon a familiar argument, i merely say that this view of the case implies that the governing power should be regarded, not simply as a machinery for catching and killing noxious criminals, but as a great civilising influence, suppressing all temptations to crime, where possible; preferring prevention, in every practicable case, to punishment, and making use of the clumsy, though necessary, weapons in the last resort; and acting by a steady and regulated pressure upon all anti-social elements. it is only possible to give a satisfactory theory of the jail and the gallows, when you take them as a subordinate part of the system which includes reformatories and schools, and due precautions for the regular preservation of order. the ultimate criterion of justice is not to be found in any attempt to form a debtor and creditor account between the government and the individual; but in the civilising influence of the system, taken as a whole. and, finally, i come back to the other theory which i have noticed. to supply the defects of the simply deterrent theory, it has been found necessary, as i said, to invoke the vindictive theory. we should go, it was suggested, upon the theory that a criminal is hateful, and, therefore, that it should be a pleasure to punish him. the feelings of resentment and moral indignation are parts of our nature, to which the punishment of the offender affords them a legitimate gratification. now, to this, i should reply that, in the first place, i do not admit that the desire for revenge, as usually understood, can ever be legitimate. revenge, as i understand the word, implies a personal feeling. it is taking pleasure in giving pain to a man because he has given pain to me. according to my view of morals, any pleasure in causing pain is, so far, wrong; and the public punishment should be free from all personal motive. i quite agree with bentham that we ought not to take a positive pleasure in the sufferings, even of the worst criminal; and to admit the legitimacy of such pleasure is to admit an element of pure sentiment to which it is difficult to assign any precise limits. if you allow yourself to hate a man so as to take pleasure in his sufferings, you might justify the infliction of superfluous torture and the old methods of hanging, drawing, and quartering. to do so is precisely to approve the ferocious old treatment, to which, as i conceive, the theory of simple deterrence was an excellent corrective, in so far as it at least implied a definite limit to the indulgence of fiercer passions. there is, however, i think, an element of truth in the doctrine. i admit, that is, that the punishment of a criminal should carry a moral approval, and not be regarded purely as a measure of convenience. successful crime should be regarded with abhorrence. if a man convicted of a grave offence should be allowed to go without punishment, we should be rightly aggrieved. it is not, however, that we should take pleasure in his suffering, but that we should be pained by an example of the practical impunity of anti-social conduct. the escape of a murderer would, as we should feel, be a blow to the security of all innocent people. in that sense, we may take pleasure in his punishment, not in the sense of positive enjoyment, but, certainly, in the sense of relief from positive sense of evil. it is, and should be, painful to see the rogues flourish and honest men droop, and to observe "captive good attending captain ill". but the pleasure of seeing the necessary equilibrium restored is different from the pleasure of dwelling upon the sufferings of the disturber. the practical difference is that, while we regard the infliction of suffering as necessary, we admit it to be a necessary evil, and are keenly alive to the inability of keeping it within the limits fixed by the general necessities of the law. luxury. professor sidgwick has been discussing the ethics of luxury, and, according to his wont, has been giving fresh interest to a well-worn topic. i do not wish to dispute anything that he has said, nor do i hope to clear up problems which he professedly left unsolved. in one sense, they obviously cannot be solved precisely. luxury is a relative term, which cannot be defined in absolute terms. a luxury, in the first place, is distinguished from a necessary. but, then, one man's necessary may be another man's luxury. my very existence depends upon conditions with which another man can dispense. if, again, we admit that there are many things which, though not absolutely necessary, may rightly be used, if they can be used without injuring others, we see that we must also take into account the varying social conditions. if we use luxury, in what bentham called the dyslogistic sense, we must distinguish between necessaries and superfluities, and then divide superfluities into comforts which may be rightfully enjoyed, and luxuries which cannot be enjoyed without incurring some degree of moral censure. but the dividing lines are always shifting. scott tells somewhere of a highlander sleeping on the open moor in a winter night. when he tried to roll the snow into a pillow his companion kicked it away, as a proof of disgraceful effeminacy. most of us would come to a speedy end if we lived in a social state where such a standard of hardiness was rigidly enforced. we admit that some kind of pillow may be permitted, if not as absolutely necessary, as, at least, a pardonable comfort. we shall probably agree, also, that nobody is to be blamed for using clean sheets and securing a certain amount of warmth and softness--as much, at least, as is desirable for sanitary reasons. but if we endeavour to prescribe precisely how much may be allowed in excess of the necessary, how often we are to send our sheets to the wash, whether it is right to have lace upon our pillows, and so forth, we get into problems where any attempt at precision is obviously illusory. we are the more perplexed by the question, whether the provision of a bed for ourselves causes other people to go without a bed, and, perhaps, without supper, or how far we are bound to take such consequences into account. without aiming, therefore, at an impossible precision, i shall try to consider--not what objects should be called luxuries, or comforts, or necessaries, but what are the really relevant considerations by which we should endeavour to guide our judgments. luxury is, as i have said, a well-worn topic. saints and philosophers in all ages, have denounced the excessive love of material enjoyments, and set examples of a more or less thorough-going asceticism. it was--to go no further back--one of the favourite topics of our ancestors, in such papers as the _spectator_ and the _rambler_. addison, in his _cato_, described the simple numidian, whose standard appears to have resembled that of scott's highlander. the numidian, he says, rests his head upon a rock at night, and, if next day he chances to find a new repast or an untasted spring, "blesses his stars and calls it luxury". general oglethorpe quoted this passage, in an argument about luxury, to johnson, and added, "let us have _that_ kind of luxury, sir, if you will". johnson himself put down all this declamation as part of the cant from which we ought to clear our minds. no nation, he said to goldsmith, was ever hurt by luxury. "let us take a walk from charing cross to whitechapel, through the greatest series of shops in the world: what is there in any of these shops (if you except gin-shops) that can do any human being any harm?" "i accept your challenge," said goldsmith. "the next shop to northumberland house is a pickle-shop." to which the excellent johnson replied, first, that five pickle-shops could serve the whole kingdom; secondly, that no harm was done to anybody either by making pickles or by eating pickles. i will not go into the ethics of pickles. i only quote this to remind you that this was one of the stock questions of the period; and not without reason. the denunciation of luxury was, in fact, the mark of a very significant tendency. goldsmith had expressed the prevalent sentiment in the _deserted village_, as in the familiar passage beginning:-- ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay. and goldsmith, like many contemporaries, was only versifying the sentiments uttered most powerfully by rousseau in his famous exaltation of the ideal man of nature above the man of a corrupt civilisation. the theory has some affinity to the ancient doctrine already expounded by classical writers, according to which each form of government includes a principle of decay as well as of life. one stage in the process of corruption of plato's ideal republic is marked by the appearance of the drones, people who take a surfeit of unnecessary pleasures, and, to obtain satisfaction, associate themselves with the fierce and rapacious. in rousseau's time, this view became connected with the growing belief in progress and "perfectibility". it was a symptom of warning to the drones of his day. it showed that the thoughtful classes were becoming dimly sensible that something was wrong in the social organisation; and that a selfish and indolent aristocracy should be called upon to put its house in order. the denunciation of luxury meant, in short, that the rich and powerful were accused of indulgence in pleasures which they had not earned by services, but by the rigid enforcement of class privileges. considered from this point of view, as the muttering of a coming storm, as the expression of a vague foreboding that the world was somehow out of joint, we may see more meaning than appears at first sight, in the old-fashioned commonplaces of our great-grandfathers. the language has changed its form; but the discontent at the misuse of wealth in various forms has certainly not diminished since that time. obviously, then, the question of luxury is connected with very wide and deep problems as to what is the proper use of wealth, and might lead us into ultimate questions as to the justification of the right to private property at all. i shall try, however, to keep as closely as may be to the particular aspect of such problems, which is immediately relevant to this particular question. and for this purpose, i think it will be convenient to take two points separately. the objections to luxury may be stated either with reference to the individual or with reference to the society. that is to say, that if we consider a man by himself, we may ask with johnson, whether expenditure upon pickles is injurious to the constitution, or at what point it becomes injurious. and, in the next place, we may ask whether, if we see our way to decide that pickles are wholesome as well as agreeable, some of us may not be getting more than our fair share of pickles, and so diminishing the total sum of pleasure, by inordinate consumption. first, then, i discard, for the moment, all social considerations. i take for granted, for the sake of argument, that my indulgence does no harm to any one else; that i am not depriving others of a means of enjoyment, but simply adding to my own; or, at any rate, that i am not, for the moment, to take into account that set of consequences. how far, on this hypothesis, or, say, setting aside all question of duty to my neighbour, should i be prudent in accumulating wealth? i sometimes amuse myself with the problem, how rich should i like to be, supposing that i were perfectly wise in that sense in which wisdom is compatible with thorough-going egoism, or with what is called enlightened self-interest? the obvious answer is that, in that case, there would be no limits to my desires. an imaginative american, we are told, defined competence as "a million a minute and all your expenses paid". the suggestion is fascinating, but not, to my mind, quite satisfactory. it recalls a doctrine which used to be put forward by the old political economists. they had to meet the theory--a preposterous theory enough--of the danger of a universal glut; the danger, that is, that a nation might produce so much that nothing would have any value, and, therefore, that we should all be ruined by all becoming enormously rich. to meet this, it was often urged--along with more satisfactory arguments--that human desires were illimitable; and, therefore, that however rich a man might become he would always wish to become a little richer. according to this doctrine, the desire for wealth cannot be satiated. the millionaire would still choose an extra half-crown rather than refuse it, although the half-crown brings him incomparably less additional pleasure than it brought him when his pockets were empty. but it is also true that long before we were millionaires, the pleasure obtainable by additional wealth may be infinitesimal, or absolutely non-existent. the simple desires may be easily saturated. pope asks, "what riches give us, let us then inquire". and he replies, "meat, fire, and clothes--what more? meat, clothes, and fire." this is, in fact, a pithy summary of our most elementary and necessary wants. now, our demand for meat is obviously strictly limited. as soon as we have eaten, say, a pound of beefsteak, we do not want more; by the time we have eaten, say, three pounds we do not only not want more, we loathe the very thought of eating. so, when we are clothed sufficiently for comfort and decency, more clothing is simply a burden; and we wish only for so much fire as will keep our thermometer within certain limits; a heat above or below would mean death either by burning or by freezing. our ultimate aim, therefore, in regard to desires of this class, is not to increase the stimulus indefinitely, but to preserve a certain balance or equilibrium. if we want more food after our appetites are satisfied, it must either be with a view to our future consumption, which is still strictly finite, or else with a view to exchanging the food for something else, in which case it is desired, not as food, but as the means of satisfying some other desire. if, then, pope's doctrine were really sound, which actually amounts to saying, if our desires were really limited to the physical conditions necessary to life, we should very soon reach the state in which they would be completely glutted or saturated. it may be worth while to note the circumstance which rather obscures our recognition of this fact. we may distinguish between the wealth which a man actually uses and that which remains, as i may say, only potential. a man may desire an indefinite quantity of wealth, because he may wish to have rights which he may yet never turn to actual account. there is a certain satisfaction, no doubt, in knowing that i have a vast balance at my banker's, though i have no desire to use it. i may want it some time or other; and, even if i never want it, i may enjoy the sense of having a disproportionate barrier of money-bags piled up between me and the yawning gulf of actual poverty. therefore, though a very limited amount may be enough to satiate all our existing desires, we may like to know that there is more at our disposal. if possession carried with it the necessity of using our property, if we could not have potential as distinguished from actual wealth, we should be so far from desiring an indefinite increase of wealth that we should regard the increase beyond a certain limit as only one of two intolerable alternatives. the question, therefore, how rich should i wish to be? requires an answer to the previous question, how rich can i be? a man, even if on the intellectual level of a savage, can be indefinitely rich in potential wealth: he may, that is, have a right to millions of pounds or be the owner of thousands of acres; but in order to use them he must have certain capacities and sensibilities. it is a curious question, for example, how much of the wealth of a country would cease to be wealth at all if the intelligence of the possessors were lowered certain degrees in the scale? a large part of the wealth of england consists, i suppose, of machinery. if nobody knew more of machines than i do--and my whole notion of a machine is that it is something that goes round somehow if you happen to turn the right handle--all this wealth would become as useless as an electric telegraph in the possession of a hairy ainu. and if nobody had any better artistic perception than mine, and we were therefore unable to see the difference between a raphael and the daub in an advertising placard, the pictures in the national gallery would have an average value, say, of eighteen-pence. a man, therefore, who is at the lower levels of intelligence is simply unable to be actually rich, beyond a narrow limit. the fact is occasionally forced upon us by striking examples. i heard the other day a story--i am afraid we all hear such stories too often--of a man who had become enormously rich by a freak of fortune. his only idea of enjoyment happened to be gin. he could, therefore, only use his wealth by drinking himself to death; a proceeding which he accordingly felt to be only a proper tribute to his improved social position. a similar result happens whenever a sudden rise of wages to an insufficiently civilised class leads to the enrichment of publicans, instead of increased indulgence in refined and innocent pleasures. the man, in short, whose idea of pleasure is simply the gratification of the physical appetites in their coarser forms is incapable of becoming actually rich, because a small amount of wealth will enable him to saturate his desires by providing a superfluity of the material means of gratification. it is, perhaps, here that we may take into account the remark so often made by moralists, by adam smith among others, as professor sidgwick reminds us, that happiness is more evenly distributed among different classes than we suppose. the king, according to shakespeare, cannot-- with all the tide of pomp that beats upon the high shore of this world ... sleep so soundly as the wretched slave who with a body filled and vacant mind gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread. the "body filled" and the "vacant mind" make up for the "distressful bread". it is as well, that is, to have no wants except the want of mere physical comfort, as to have higher wants and the means of gratifying them, and yet to be saddled with the anxieties and responsibilities which the higher position involves. the doctrine, "i am not really better off than you," is, indeed, not a very graceful one from those who are actually better off. there was some excuse for the fox who said the grapes were sour when he could not get them; it argued a judicious desire to make the best of things: but if he made the remark while he was comfortably chewing them, by way of pacifying the grapeless foxes, we should have thought him a more objectionable hypocrite. the pauper may fairly reply, "if you really mean that your wealth brings no happiness, why don't you change places with me?" i will, therefore, not defend the statement, considered as an exhortation to content; but i accept it as a recognition of the obvious fact, that if happiness means a satisfaction of all our desires, a man of small means may be as happy as the man of the greatest means, if his desires are limited in proportion. but is it for our happiness to increase them? does our principle hold when we suppose a man to have the necessary sensibilities for the actual enjoyment of wealth? if he acquires the tastes which imply greater intellectual cultivation, a power, therefore, of taking into account sources of pleasure more complex and more distant in time and space, does it then become true that his power of using wealth will be indefinite? i should reply, in the first place, that we must still admit the same psychological truth. any desire whatever, that is, is capable of yielding only a strictly finite amount of enjoyment; the pleasure which we can derive from it must be limited both by the necessity of gratifying other desires and by the fact that no desire whatever is capable of an indefinite increase by increased stimulation. after a certain point of excitement is reached, we cannot get more pleasure by any accumulation of internal conditions. we assume for the present that our aim is simply to extract the greatest possible amount of gratification out of life. we must then take for our data our actual constitution, capacities, sensibilities, and so forth, and calculate how much wealth could be actually applied in order to keep us moving always along the line of maximum enjoyment. this would be to study the art of life on purely hedonistic principles. we should ask, what career will on the whole be fullest of enjoyment? and then, what material conditions can enable us to follow that career? i imagine that the amount requisite would vary indefinitely according to our characters. suppose, for example, that a man has strong intellectual tastes, a love of art or science or literature. he will require, of course, enough wealth to enable him to devote himself without anxiety to his favourite pursuits, and enough, moreover, to train himself in all requisite knowledge. but granting this, the material conditions of happiness will be sufficiently fulfilled. i think it was agassiz who observed when he was devoting himself to science that he had not time to get rich. wealth to him would have been rather an impediment than an advantage. a man like faraday, who placed his whole happiness in the extension of scientific knowledge, and who was not less honoured because he lived upon a modest income, would not have had a greater amount of that kind of happiness had he possessed the wealth of a rothschild. a man whose pleasure is in reading books, or contemplating works of art, or listening to music, can obtain the highest enjoyment at a very moderate price, and could get very little more if he had the most unbounded wealth at his disposal. if we inquired what men possessing such tastes had derived from them the greatest happiness, we should, i fancy, find ourselves mentioning men comparatively poor, whose enjoyments were even comparatively keen, because they had to devote a certain amount of care and contrivance to obtaining full play for their capacities. charles lamb, plotting and contriving to get an old volume from a bookstall, possibly got more pleasure from his taste than if he had been the possessor of a gigantic library. the sociable man, again, the man whose pleasure in society is the genuine delight in a real interchange of thought and sympathy, who does not desire magnificent entertainment, but the stimulus of intimate association with congenial friends, would probably find the highest pleasure in comparatively simple social strata, where the display of wealth was no object, and men met, as johnson met his friends at the club, to put mind fairly to mind, and to stimulate intellectual activity, instead of consuming the maximum of luxury. milton's sonnet to lawrence gives perhaps a rather severe but a very fascinating ideal of refined luxury:-- what neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, of attic taste with wine, whence we may rise to hear the lute well touched, or artful voice warble immortal notes and tuscan air? he who of these delights can judge, and spare to interpose them oft, is not unwise. nor need we be accused of inordinate boasting if we should say that we would rather have made a third at such a feast than have joined a dozen rowdy courtiers at the table of charles ii. there are, however, pleasures which undoubtedly suppose an indefinite capacity for using wealth. there is, for example, such a thing as the pure love of splendour, which is represented so curiously in some of disraeli's novels. one of his heroes, if i remember rightly, proposed to follow the precedent actually set by beckford, who built at fonthill a tower feet high--not because it was wanted for any other purpose, but simply for the sake of building a tower. of course, if one has a taste for towers feet high, there is no particular limit to the quantity of wealth which may be found convenient. one of the gentlest and most delicate satirists of modern society, mr. du maurier, has given us admirable illustrations of a more vulgar form of the same tendency in his portraits of sir gorgius midas. when that worthy denounces his servants because there are only three footmen sitting up till two o'clock to save him the trouble of using a latch-key, we may admit that his pleasures, such as they were, were capable of finding gratification in any quantity of expenditure. it might be a question, indeed, if we had time to ask it, whether the pleasure derived from such expenses by the millionaire be really so great as the pleasure which he had when he first turned the proverbial half-crown, with which he must have come to london, into his first five shillings; and it is certainly also a question whether his expenditure was ethically right. but at present we are only considering facts, and we may admit that there would be no filling such a gulf of desire by any dribble of bullion; and, further, that there are pleasures--not, on the face of them, immoral--in procuring which any quantity of money may be spent. if a man is simply desirous of obtaining influence, or, in some cases, political power; or if he decides to muddle away his money upon charity, there are no limits to the sums he may spend, especially if he has no objection to corrupting his neighbours. before saying anything upon this, however, i must pause to deduce a conclusion. keeping still to the purely hedonistic point of view, i ask, at what point does expenditure become luxurious in a culpable sense? meaning by "culpable" not morally culpable, but simply injudicious from the point of view of enlightened self-interest. to this i think that one answer is already suggested, that is to say, that since, on the one hand, a certain finite quantity of wealth will enable us to keep to the happiest or most philosophic career; and since, on the other hand, a man may possess a quantity of superfluous wealth which he can only use on penalty of deviating from that career, he becomes foolish, if not immoral--upon which i say nothing--when he tries to use more. that people frequently commit this folly is undeniable. wealth ought to be (i mean would be by a judiciously selfish person) regarded as a means of enjoyment. therefore the superfluous wealth should be left in the potential stage--as a balance at his banker's or accumulating in the funds. but though the possession does not imply a necessity of using, it does generally imply a sort of tacit feeling of responsibility--responsibility, that is, to a man's self. i have got so much money; surely it is a duty to myself to use it for my pleasure. so far as a man yields to such an argument, he becomes the slave instead of the master of his wealth. what ought to be machinery for furthering an end, becomes an end in itself: and, at that point of conduct, i think that we are disposed to call a man's life luxurious in a distinctly bad sense. the error, as i have suggested, is perhaps at bottom much the same as that which leads a poor man to spend an increase of wages at a gin-shop. but we do not call the gin-drinker luxurious, but simply vicious. for luxury seems to apply less to conduct which we can distinctly call bad in itself, than to conduct which only becomes bad or foolish as implying a disproportion between the end attained and the expense of attaining it. it applies when a man has, as we say, so much money that he does not know what to do with it. we speak of luxuries in the case of sir gorgius, where the prominent fact is that the man has been gorged with excessive wealth, and is yet too dull to use it in any manner which would increase the happiness of a reasonable or refined being. so it is generally regarded as characteristic rather of the upstart or newly-made millionaire than of the man born to higher position, whose life is perhaps as selfish and hardly superior morally. but the nobleman by birth has inherited a certain art of life; he has acquired traditional modes of arranging his pleasures, which give him the appearance, at least, of possessing more judicious and refined tastes; and we are less shocked than by the man who has obviously wealth which he knows not how to use, and which he, therefore, deliberately devotes to coarse and vulgar ostentation. the upstart may not be more selfish at bottom; but he dashes in your face the evidence of his selfishness, and appeals for admiration on the simple ground that he has a larger income than his neighbours. luxury means, on this showing, all such expenditure as is objectionable, not because the pleasure obtained is intrinsically bad, but because we are spending for the sake of spending, and could get more real enjoyment at a lower sum. i need not dwell upon the fact that men of moderate means may fall into the same error. the fault of exaggerating the importance of machinery is not confined to those whom we call rich. thackeray's discourses upon snobs are full expositions of the same weakness in the middle classes. when we read, for example, of colonel ponto being miserable because he tries to make an income of a thousand a year support the pomp accessible to persons with ten thousand, we see that he has as false a view as sir gorgius of the true ends of life. and i refer to the same great satirist for abundant illustrations of the weaknesses which too often make society a machinery for wasting money on display, and entirely oblivious that it should be a machinery for the promotion of intellectual and refined pleasures. now, if i have given a fair account of luxury as considered simply from the point of view of an enlightened selfishness, i may proceed to the ethical question. so far, i have only asked, in substance, at what point our expenditure upon pickles becomes foolish. but, of course, the more important question arises, at what point it becomes selfish. a man may be silly for spending money upon erecting towers; but if he does no harm to his neighbours we hardly call him wicked. we cannot say that it is unconditionally wrong to build a tower. we must inquire, therefore, how far luxury necessarily involves a wrong to others. here we must begin by listening to all the philosophers and divines of whom i spoke at starting. any number of wise and good men will tell us, in various dialects, that pleasure is in itself bad, or, at least, that all the pleasures obtainable by wealth are bad, or, at any rate, beneath the notice of the higher spirits. there are the thorough-going ascetics, who strive, not to regulate, but to suppress all except the absolutely necessary physical instincts, and think that even those desires savour of evil; who consider the best man to be the man who lives upon bread and water, and, if possible, upon mouldy bread and ditch-water. there are, again, spiritually-minded people, who consider all happiness to be worthless, except such happiness as results from aspirations to another world; who regard all riches as chains binding the soul to earth; who take the words "blessed are the poor" in the most literal sense, as defining the true aim of life. we should seek, they say, for happiness elsewhere than in this transitory stage of existence, remember that the world is a mere screen hiding the awful realities of heaven and hell; and despise even such pleasures as are generally called intellectual pleasures, the pleasures, for example, of art or science, for they, too, belong really to the sphere of illusion, and are simply more subtle temptations than those of the flesh. and, besides these, we have the philosophers, who would have us live in the world of pure intellect, and tell us that the true moral of life is to make ourselves independent of external circumstances by suppressing all the corresponding desires. renunciation, therefore, is the first lesson to be learned by the wise man; and the practical rule, as has been said, is that we should endeavour not to increase our numerator but to lessen our denominator. i cannot now discuss such doctrines. i am content to say that i regard them not as simply false, but as distorted views of truth. for my part, i am content to say that, even as a moralist, i wish to see people as happy as possible; that being, after all, a poor utilitarian after my own fashion, i desire--however erroneously--the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and, in particular, that i should like to see, not a feebler, but a much keener appreciation of all the pleasures derivable from art, or science, or literature, or rational society, even, if i may say so, from good cookery and athletic sports. briefly, the ideal society seems to me to be one in which even our lower instincts should not be suppressed, but regulated; and the typical man of the future to be one whose whole faculties and their corresponding sensibilities should be cultivated to the utmost possible degree. what is the application of this to our special question? i do not know that i can do better than refer to the writings of bernard mandeville, who in his _fable of the bees_--one of the cleverest books in the language--succeeded by the help of much paradox, and under a cloak of cynicism, in stating the problem with singular vivacity. private vices, that was his way of putting it, are public benefits. his meaning, put less paradoxically, was this: accept, on the one hand, the ascetic doctrine that pursuit of pleasure is intrinsically vicious, and you condemn all the impulses by which the structure of society, especially the industrial structure, has been built up. accept, on the other hand, the doctrine that civilisation is, on the whole, a good thing, and you admit that the instincts, which, upon this hypothesis, correspond to private vices, are the only means of producing a public benefit. in other words, if we took the language of theologians in its natural sense, and really regarded the world as worthless, we should have no industry, no trade or commerce, and be still living in swamps and forests, digging up roots with our nails, living upon acorns and shell-fish, and scarcely even painting ourselves blue, for to the savage blue paint was a luxury. now, apart from any question as to the fairness of this version of theological doctrine, we may ask, what is the real underlying difficulty--or that aspect of it which is still worth considering? we may grant, in the first place, to mandeville, that, in point of fact, the construction of a civilised society presupposes the development of numerous desires, many of which are more or less condemned by severe moralists. if the savage comes to value blue paint, he may take to planting something to exchange for it, instead of simply lying on his back to digest his last handful of acorns; and, in so doing, he makes the first step towards the development of an industrial system. the desire for wealth is, of course, implied in all stages of progress if men are to create wealth; and we can partly answer mandeville's paradox by throwing over the ascetic and declaring that a desire for good meat, and fire, and clothes, even for pictures, and books, and music, or for such comforts as most of us enjoy, is not in itself immoral; and that, on the contrary, the more there is of such enjoyment the better for men's bodies and minds, and therefore, on the whole, the better for their morality. but the moral difficulty returns in a new shape. the desire for wealth, let us say, is not in itself bad; it is simply natural--it is a desire for one essential condition of a tolerably happy life. but is it not bad, in so far as it is selfish? do not the desires which have been the mainspring of all modern development imply a desire of each man to get rich at the expense of others? have they not been the source of all that division between rich and poor which makes one side luxurious and the other miserable? has not dives become rich and bloated by force of the very same process which has made lazarus a mass of sores and misery? suppress the desire for wealth, and we should still be savages "running wild in woods". but was not even the noble savage better than the pauper who now hangs on to the fringes of society? and is his existence compensated by the existence of other classes who have more wealth than they can use? and so the old problem comes back; and we have, as of old, the most contradictory answers to the problem. i am, i confess it, one of those old-fashioned people who believe in progress, and hold that their own century is distinctly better than any which preceded it; who would on no account go back, if they could, to the days of the noble savages or even to the brutalities and superstitions of the ages of faith. but i do not think that i need argue that question for our present purpose. we have got to this century somehow, and we can only get out of it by living till the twentieth. meanwhile, we should make the best of the interval. i will, therefore, only permit myself one remark. if we suppose, with mandeville, that the instincts which have developed modern society have been, to a great extent, selfish desires, that is, for the personal comfort of the agent, irrespectively of consequences to others, it does not follow that the corresponding development has been mischievous. good commonplace moralists have been much in the habit of condemning the selfish passions of kings and conquerors. what can be an easier mark for denunciation than such a man, for example, as louis xi. of france, and the wily and cruel rulers of past ages, whose only aim was to enlarge their own powers and wealth? and yet, if we consider the matter historically, we must admit that such men have rendered enormous services to mankind. a ruler, let us say, had for his only object the extension and concentration of his own authority. still, it was by the conflicts of rulers that the great nations have been formed out of a chaos of struggling clans; that peace and order, therefore, have been substituted for violence, throughout broad territories; that law has taken the place of private war; moreover, that the privileges of selfish orders have been suppressed through the development of a larger and more civilised national organisation; and that, although the immediate victory was won by the selfish ruler, the ultimate benefit has accrued to the people upon whom he was forced to rely for support against the oppressive subordinate powers. the ruler, perhaps, did not look beyond his own interests; but his own interest forced him to find allies among the mass of the population, and so gradually led to the formation of central organs, representing not the personal interest of the king, but the interest of the whole nation in which they had arisen. we may make a similar remark upon industrial development. the great merchant and capitalist and inventor of new methods and machinery has not looked, it may be, beyond his own interest; but, intentionally or not, he was helping to construct a vast organisation, which, whether it has, on the whole, improved the world or not, has, at least, made it enormously richer. perhaps watt, when he was improving the steam-engine, thought only of the profits to be derived from his invention. but the profit which he gained after a laborious life was but an infinitesimal fraction of the enormous increase of efficiency which resulted to the national industry. we cannot doubt that the whole gigantic system which at least maintains a population several times multiplied, which maintains part of it in wealth and a large proportion in reasonable comfort, has been due to the labours of many men, each working for his own interest and animated chiefly by the desire of wealth. so much remains true of the economist's doctrine of the natural harmony between individual and public interest. in this case, as in the case of governments, we may, perhaps, say that men acted from motives which must be called selfish, in this sense at least, that they thought of little but their own interests; but that, at the same time, their own interests compelled them to work in a direction which promoted, more or less, the interests of others. i add, briefly, that these are only instances of what we may call the general rule: namely, that morality begins from an external or unrecognised conformity of interests, and ends by recognising and adopting, as motives, the consequences which, in the earlier stage, seemed to be internal or accidental consequences. i begin by helping a man because circumstances make it useful to myself, and i end--and only become truly moral when i end--by doing what is useful to him, because it is useful to him. when, indeed, i have reached that point, my end itself is profoundly modified; it becomes much wider, and yet only regulates and directs to new channels a great deal of the corresponding conduct. the consideration of this modification--of the change which should take place when a man not only pursues such conduct as is beneficial on the whole to a country, but pursues it with a view to the beneficial consequences--brings us back to the question of luxury. the bare pursuit of wealth as the end of existence implies, of course, indifference to the means by which it is produced; an equal readiness, for example, to grow rich by cheating my neighbour, or by actually producing a greater quantity of useful produce. it is consistent with a simple desire to enlarge my business without reference to the effect upon the persons i employ, as when manufacturers enriched themselves by cruel exploitation of the labour of infants. but if we hope for a state of things in which an employer should consider himself as essentially part of the national organism, as increasing his own wealth only by such means as would be also advantageous to the comfort of the nation generally, the pursuit of wealth would become moralised. here, in fact, we must once more consider mandeville's paradox. desire for wealth, he substantially says, must be good because it stimulates industry. when your lazy barbarian, who has no pleasure but gorging himself with food, comes also to desire fine clothes, he is not only a degree more refined in his tastes, but his increased industry leads him to produce enough food to support his tailor, and provision is made for two men instead of one. but desire for wealth, it is replied, is bad, because it leads our barbarian not only to consume the product of his own labour, but to consume that of somebody else. mandeville gained piquancy for his argument by confusing the two cases. since the desire is good, all its manifestations must be good. extravagance, for example, is good, and, as he put it, the fire of london was a benefit to industry because it set up a greater demand for the services of carpenters and bricklayers. i need not say how frequently an argument substantially the same has been adopted by good writers, and simple extravagance been praised because it was supposed to be "good for trade". political economists have been forced to labour the point that extravagant consumption does not increase wealth; but the only curious thing is that such a point should ever have required demonstration. the conclusion, which is sufficient for our purpose, is simply that an absolute denunciation or an absolute exaltation of the desire for wealth is equally impossible; for the desire may have contrary effects. in one shape it may stimulate to enjoyments which actually diminish wealth in general, or, at any rate, to those which lead to the actual exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few; and, on the other hand, to denounce it, simply would be to denounce all the springs of action which raise men above the barbarous state of society. when we look at the contrasts between the rich and the poor, we must rightfully desire a greater equality of distribution; but we may be tempted to approve too easily any means which may lead to such equality. it is, indeed, obvious that if all the national resources which are now applied to producing superfluities could be turned to the production of necessaries, we could support the same population in a greater comfort, or support a much greater population at a point just above starvation level. but it does not at all follow that a society in which every man's labour was devoted entirely to the task of providing necessaries would in fact be either more comfortable or more numerous. historically speaking, the fact is the very reverse. the only societies in which there is such an equality are societies in which the level is one of uniform misery, and whose total industrial efficiency is incomparably smaller than that of the more civilised races. it has been only in so far as a nation has been able to support classes with sufficient means to devote themselves to science and art, and the cultivation of the higher faculties generally, that it has acquired the vast powers of production which enable some to be disproportionately rich, but which also enable numerous masses to support themselves in tolerable comfort where there were once a few wandering barbarians. that the more cultivated classes have sought only their own advantage instead of the general benefit, may be too true; but the conclusion is, not that they should cease to have the desires which entitle a man to be called a civilised being, but that these desires should be so regulated and moralised as to subserve directly and necessarily the ends which they have only promoted indirectly and accidentally. a society which has grown rich by mechanical discoveries and industrious organisation has acquired the power of greatly raising the average level of comfort. if, in point of fact, its power has been greatly misused, if a great development of poverty has taken place side by side with a great development of industrial efficiency, the proper inference is not that we should denounce the desires from which the efficiency is derived, but that we should direct them into such channels as may lead to the more universal distribution of the advantages which they create. it is, i think, from this point of view that we can best judge of the moral objection to luxury. for, as i previously suggested, luxury begins when a man becomes the slave instead of the master of his wealth; when that which ought to be a mere machinery becomes an end in itself; and when, therefore, there is a tendency to cultivate and stimulate to excess those lower passions which, though necessary within limits, may beyond those limits distort and lower the whole character, and make the pursuit of worthy objects impossible. we know that the king who had the reputation of being the wisest of mankind, after building a splendid temple and a gorgeous palace, and filling them with vessels of gold, and importing ivory and apes and peacocks, could find nothing better to do with the rest than to take wives and concubines--a measure which hardly increased his domestic felicity, but no doubt got rid of a good deal of money. although few men have solomon's opportunities of affording a typical instance of luxury, many of us show ourselves capable of weakness similar at least in kind. i need not multiply examples. the great mystery of fashion is perhaps a trifling but a significant example. when people, instead of considering dress as a means of displaying the beauty of the human frame, consider their bodies as mere pegs upon which to display clothes, and are ready to distort their own forms to fill arbitrary shapes, changed at short intervals to increase the cost, they are clearly exemplifying the confusion between means and ends. when a young gentleman spends a fortune upon the turf, or upon gambling, he shows that he has no more conception than the poor boy who plays pitch-and-toss with halfpence of the ways in which wealth might be made conducive to undertakings worthy of absorbing human energy. when, on pretence of cultivating society, we invent a whole cumbrous social apparatus which makes all rational conversation impossible, we know that the display of wealth has become an end to which we are ready to sacrifice our ostensible purpose. now, i suggest that such luxury, such exaltation of the machinery above the ultimate good, corresponds pretty nearly to the distinction between the desires which lead to the rightful use and those which lead to the shameful misuse of wealth in a social sense. human nature, indeed, is singularly complex, and it is impossible to deny that the hope of acquiring such luxuries may incidentally lead to that increase of industry and development of national resources which, as we have seen, is the ground upon which it is defended. the industrious apprentice may have been stimulated to become lord mayor by the odours from his master's turtle-soup; arkwright, perhaps, was induced to invent the machinery which revolutionised the cotton manufactures by the hope of becoming sir richard, and rivalling the coarse luxury of some stupid squire western. but we cannot doubt that upon a large scale the love of the grosser indulgences is bad, even from its purely economical point of view. if, incidentally, it encourages industry, it far more directly and necessarily encourages wasteful expenditure. if a rich man can only spend his thousands at a gambling-table, the poorer man cannot be blamed for gambling with a thimble-rigger. when solomon set up his domestic establishment, every shopkeeper in jerusalem might be encouraged to marry an extra wife. if a rich man, who has enough to saturate a healthy appetite, tries how much money he can spend, like the old classical epicures, upon new dishes of nightingales' tongues, you can hardly expect the poorer man to refrain from an extra glass of gin. briefly, so far as the resources of a nation are spent upon the mere ostentation--which we call vulgar, to imply that it is spending for the sake of expense, foolishly trying to get more pleasure for an appetite already gorged to excess, by simply increasing the stimulus--it is encouraging all the forces which make rather for waste than increased productiveness, and justifying the natural jealousy of the poorer. so far, that is, as a desire for wealth means a desire to consume as much as possible on supersaturating the lower appetites, the commonest argument against private property in general is not only plausible but justified. i should say, then, that luxury in a bad sense begins wherever in expenditure it indicates an insufficient sense of the responsibility which attaches to all wealth. this does not condemn an expenditure which may seem, from some points of view, luxurious; though, as i have said, i cannot profess to draw any distinct line in what is essentially a question of degree and of actual possibilities, i can only suggest in general that a man is _primâ facie_ justified in all such expenditure as tends to the highest possible cultivation of his faculties and of the faculties of those dependent upon him. i hold it to be a matter of the highest importance that there should be a thoroughly civilised class--a class capable of all intellectual pleasures; loving the beauties of art and nature; studying every possible department of knowledge, scientific and historical; maintaining all such modes of recreation and social enjoyment as are naturally appropriate to such a class. and i do not call any man luxurious for maintaining his position in such a sphere, or for enabling his children to follow in his steps. i believe that, as things are, the existence of such a class is a necessary condition of national welfare and of the preservation and extension of the whole body of cultivation which we have received from our ancestors. what is requisite is, that the class should be not only capable of refined enjoyment, but of discharging its functions relatively to the nation at large, and spreading a higher standard of enjoyment through the whole community. so far as the richer class maintains certain traditions, moral and intellectual--traditions of personal honour and public spirit, of artistic and literary cultivation--it may be discharging an invaluable function, and its existence may be a necessary means of diffusing a higher civilisation through the masses who have not the same advantage. whatever employments of wealth contribute to make a man more efficient as an individual member of society, to strengthen his understanding and his perceptions, to widen his intellectual horizon and interest his sympathies, and the enjoyments which correspond to them, are not to be condemned as luxurious. they are, at present, only within the reach of the richer classes, ardently as we may hope that the power of partaking them may be extended as rapidly and widely as possible. but the growth of luxury, in the bad sense, is the indication that the class which should act as the brain of the social organism is ceasing to discharge its functions, and becoming what we call a survival. it is a kind of moral gout--an aristocratic disease, showing that the secretions are becoming disordered for want of a proper application of the energies. it was in that sense, as i said before, that our grandfathers denounced the luxury which proved that the ruling classes, especially in france, had retained their privileges while abandoning the corresponding duties. if in england we escaped so violent a catastrophe, it was because, with all their luxuries and levities and shortsightedness, the aristocratic classes were still playing an active part, and, if not governing well, doing whatever was done in the way of governing. but every class, and every member of a class, should always remember that he may be asked whether, on the whole, he and his like can give any sufficient reason for his or their existence, and that he ought to be prepared with a satisfactory answer. when he has to admit that his indulgences are in the main what may be called luxuries in the bad sense, he may consider that he is receiving notice to quit. this may suggest the last remark that i need make. it is impossible, i have said, to say definitely this is, and that is not, a luxury: and, in general, that is not the way in which the question presents itself. we have rather to decide upon our general standard of life, and to adopt a certain scale of living more or less fixed for us by our social surroundings. we can all do something towards rationalising the habitual modes of expenditure, and adapting the machinery to such ends as are worthy of intelligent and cultivated beings. so far as inclination is in the direction of vulgarity, of ostentatious habits, of multiplying idle ceremonies and cumbrous pomposities, we can protest by our own conduct, at least, in favour of plain living and high thinking. but so far as social life is really adapted to the advancement of intellect, the humanising and refinement of our sympathies, it promotes an improvement which cannot but spread beyond the immediate circle. even such pursuits, it is true, may incidentally become provocative of an objectionable luxury. a man who is a lover of art, for example, occasionally shuts himself out all the more from the average sympathies, and indulges in pleasures, less gross but, perhaps, even more enervating than some which we should call distinctly sensual. the art, whether literary or plastic, which is only appreciable by the connoisseur, is an art which is luxurious because it is on the way to corruption. nothing is clearer in the vague set of guesses which pass for æsthetic theory, than this: that to be healthy and vigorous, art must spread beyond cliques and studios, and express the strongest instincts and emotions of the society in which it is developed. this, i think, is significant of a general principle. luxury is characteristic of a class with narrow outlook, and devoted to such enjoyments as are, by their nature, incapable of communication. whenever the enjoyments are such as have an intrinsic tendency to raise the general standard, as well as to heighten the pleasure of a few, they cannot be simply stigmatised as luxurious. the old view of the responsibilities of wealth was chiefly confined to the doctrine that the rich man should give away as many of his superfluities as possible, to be scrambled for by the poor, in order to appease the fates. we have come to see that charity, though at present a necessary, should be regarded as a degrading necessity; and, therefore, not in the long run a possible alternative to luxury. too often it is itself a kind of luxury as mischievous as selfish disregard to the natural consequences of our expenditure. the true direction of our wishes should rather be to direct social energies into such channels as have a natural affinity to public spirit. a man who really loves art because he has a keen sense of beauty, not because he wishes to have the reputation of a skilful collector, would surely try to beautify the world in which we all live, to get rid of the hideous deformities which meet us at every turn, and not simply to make a little corner into which he may retire for simple self-indulgence. a lover of truth should not be content, as some philosophers were forced to be content, with discussion in an esoteric circle, but should endeavour, now that thought is free, to stimulate the intellectual activity of all men, confident that the greater the number of investigators, the more rapid will be the advance of truth. i do not venture to suggest what special direction should be taken by those who have the privileges and responsibilities of great wealth. i have never had to consider that problem in any practical reference. still, considering how vast a part they actually play in social development, how great is their influence, and how many people and enterprises seem to be in want of a little money, i cannot help fancying that a rich man may find modes of expenditure other than reckless charity or elaborate pampering of his personal wants, which would be not only more useful to the world, but more interesting to himself than many of the ordinary forms of indulgence. but i am only speaking of general tendencies, and have disavowed any capacity for laying down precise regulations. if i have stated rightly what is the evil properly attacked when we speak of luxury as vicious, it will, i think, come mainly to this: that the direction in which we should look for improvement is not so much in directly prescribing any spartan or ascetic system of life, as in cultivating in every one who possesses superfluities, the sense of his implicit responsibility to his fellows, which should go with every increase of wealth, and the conviction, not that he should regard pleasure as in itself bad, but that he should train himself to find pleasures in such conduct as makes him a more efficient member of the body corporate of society. if, indeed, there should be any man who feels that he has no right to superfluities at all, while so many are wanting necessaries, and should resolve to devote himself to the improvement of their elevation, i should say, in the first place, i fully and heartily recognise him to be one of the very large class which i regard as my superiors in morality; although, in the next place, i should insinuate that he is one of those heroes who, while they deserve all honour, cannot be taken as models for universal imitation, inasmuch as i cannot help thinking that the ultimate end is not the renunciation but the multiplication of all innocent happiness. the duties of authors. i propose to speak to you to-day upon a subject which, though i may perhaps be tempted to exaggerate its importance, possesses some real importance. i have undertaken to speak upon the duties of the class to which i belong. i make, however, no claims to the position of censor. i have no such claim, except, indeed, the claim of possessing some experience. there are two ways, i may observe, in which a man may acquire a sense of the importance of any moral law. one is by keeping the law, and the other is by breaking it. in some ways, perhaps, the systematic offender has acquired the most valuable experience. no one can speak more feelingly about the evils of intemperance than the reformed drunkard, unless it be the drunkard who has not reformed. the sober gentleman who has never exceeded can realise neither the force of the temptation nor the severity of the penalty. on the other hand, i must admit that some writers upon ethical questions have been men of fair moral character. i only make the statement by way of explaining that, in speaking of the duties of authors, i do not assert, even by the most indirect implication, that i personally have either observed or disregarded the principles which i shall discuss. whether i am a model for imitation or an example of the evils to be avoided, matters nothing to this discourse; though the question to which of these classes i belong has a certain interest for myself. there is one other matter which i can deal with very briefly. i have said that the subject has a certain importance. upon that it is needless to dilate; for, in the first place, authors have been engaged for generations, and never more industriously than in this generation, in preaching the vast importance of authors to mankind. i could not hope to add anything to their eloquence upon a topic with which they are so familiar. we may, however, assume that the enormous mass of literature which is daily produced, whether its abundance be a matter of regret or exultation, is at least a proof that a vast number of people read something, and are, we may suppose, more or less affected by what they read. it cannot be indifferent to inquire what are the duties of those who undertake to provide for this ever-growing demand. one matter has been lately discussed which may serve as a starting-point for what i have to say. a french author who came the other day to observe our manners and customs, was impressed by the fact that so much of our writing is anonymous. the public, that is, reads without knowing who are its instructors, and the instructors write without incurring any definite personal responsibility. the problem is naturally suggested, whether such a system be not morally objectionable. ought not a man who undertakes to speak as an authority let us know who he is, and therefore with what authority he speaks? the question could hardly be answered satisfactorily without some study of the facts; and especially of the way in which the system has grown up. i can only notice one or two obvious reflections. a century ago we boasted--and we had reason to boast--that the english press was the freest in europe. it was already a very important factor in political life. but at that period the profession of letters was still regarded as more or less disreputable. the great author--the poet, divine, or historian--was indeed fully as much respected as he is now; but to write for money or to write in periodicals was held to be not quite worthy of a gentleman. byron, for example, refused to take money for his poetry, and taunted others for taking money, until so much money was offered to him that he swallowed his scruples. burns, though as much in need of money, had shortly before refused to write for money; and wordsworth held that his high calling imposed upon him the duty of rather repelling than seeking the popularity by which money is to be won. we have changed all this, and the greatest modern authors are less apt to disavow a desire for pay, than to complain that their pay is insufficient. the employment--it can hardly be called the profession--of periodical writing, again--the only kind of writing which could make literature a source of a regular income--was long regarded as a kind of poor relation of the respectable or so-called learned professions, clerical, legal, and medical. jeffrey, whose fame now rests upon his position as the editor of _the edinburgh review_, was for a long time anxious to conceal his employment as not exactly creditable. in the year the benchers of lincoln's inn passed a resolution that no one should be called to the bar who had written for money in a newspaper. writers in newspapers since that time have frequently risen to the bench, and have been not the least honoured of cabinet ministers. yet the sentiment which involved a certain stigma has only disappeared in this generation. and the historical cause seems to be obvious. the newspaper press had gradually grown up in spite of authority. it had first been persecuted, and writers had escaped persecution by consenting to be spies or dependants upon great men. half the hack-authors aspired to subsidies from the secret-service money, and the other half were looking for a reward when their patrons should have a turn in the distribution of good things. the press was freer than elsewhere, for the english system of government gave importance to public discussion. both ministers and opposition wished to influence voters through the papers. but the authors were in the position of dependent auxiliaries, prosecuted for libel if they went too far, and recompensed by pensions for the risks they had to run; they were despised, even by those who used them, as a set of mercenary guerillas, employed to do dirty work and insinuate charges which could not be made by responsible people, and ready, as was supposed, to serve on whichever side would pay them best. according to a well-known anecdote, two writers of the eighteenth century decided by the toss of a halfpenny which should write for walpole and which should write for his adversary pulteney; but the choice was generally decided by less reputable motives. now, so long as the press meant such a class it was of course natural that the trade should be regarded as discreditable, and should be carried on by men who had less care for their character than for their pockets. in england, where our development has been continuous and traditions linger long, the sentiment long survived; and the practice which corresponded to it--the practice, that is, of anonymity--has itself survived the sentiment which gave it birth. i do not, indeed, mean to insinuate that the practice may not have better reasons than that which led to its first adoption. the mask was formerly worn by men who were ashamed of their employment, and who had the same reasons for anonymity as a thief or an anarchist may have for a disguise. it may now be worn even by men who are proud of their profession, because the mask has a different significance. when a journalist calls himself "we" instead of "i," the word really represents a fact: the fact that he speaks not simply as an individual, but as the mouthpiece of a corporation, which itself claims to be the organ of a party. the plural covers whatever additional weight may be due to this representative character. to consider the value of this justification would take me too far. i have spoken of this historical fact because i think that it illustrates a more general problem. for, in the first place, i think that there were some elements in the older sentiment which deserved respect. when an author was as anxious to disavow the charge of writing for money as an author at the present day is to claim his reward, i cannot, for my part, simply set him down as silly. "my songs," said burns, "are either above price or below price, and, therefore, i will accept nothing." i respect his feelings. he may not have been quite logical; but he was surely right in the belief that the poet whose inspiration should come from his breeches-pocket would never write true songs or embody the very spirit of a nation. i do not doubt that authors ought to be paid; but i certainly agree that a money reward never ought to be the chief aim of their writing. and i confess that some utterances about copyrights in these days have jarred upon me, because they seem to imply that the doctrine is not disavowed so unequivocally as it should be by our leaders. i am, indeed, happy to believe, as i fully believe, that there has never been a time at which more good work has been done for pure love of the work, independently, and even in defiance, of pecuniary considerations. but i cannot help thinking that in their desire to establish a right to the profits of their work, authors have condescended at moments to speak as if that reward constituted their sole motive to work, instead of being desired--as it may most properly be desired--simply as the means of enabling them to work. the old contempt was aristocratic, and in these days we have come to use aristocratic as a term of abuse. my own impression is that we ought to be just even to aristocrats; and in that contempt for all such work, i think that there was a genuine element of self-respect. the noble despised the poor scribe who had to get his living by his pen. we, my lords, as chesterfield put it, may thank providence that we do not depend upon our brains. it is wrong, no doubt, to despise anybody; and especially mean to despise a man for poverty. but the sentiment also included the belief--surely not so wrong--that the adventurer who joined the ranks of a party for the sake of the pay was so far contemptible, and likely to join the party which paid best. the misfortune, no doubt, was that the political state involved such dependence; and the desirable solution that every one should become independent. till that solution was more or less reached, the corresponding sentiment was inevitable, and not without meaning. well, the literary class has had its declaration of independence. an author has long ceased to need a patron, and he is in little danger of the law of libel. the question occurs: what are the qualities by which we should justify our independence? have we not still a certain stoop of the shoulders, a kind of traditional shamefacedness, an awkwardness of manner, and a tendency to blush and stammer, which shows that we are not quite at ease in our new position? or have we not--it is a more serious question--exchanged dependence upon the great for dependence upon the public, rather than learnt to stand upon our own feet? have we made ourselves, and, if we have not, how can we make ourselves, worthy of our position as free men? we boast that the press does part of what used to be done by the priesthood, that we enlighten and encourage and purify public opinion. there is a whole class which depends upon us for intellectual culture; which reads nothing that is not in newspapers and magazines. do we give them a wholesome training, provide them with sound knowledge, and stimulate them to real thought? are we such a priesthood as is really raising the standard of human life; or such a priesthood as is clinging to power by echoing the superstitions of its congregations? nature is ruled by obeying her; and what is called ruling public opinion is too often servilely following its dictates. there is an old story which tells how a certain newspaper used to send out an emissary to discover what was the common remark that every one was making in omnibuses and club smoking-rooms, and to fashion it into next morning's article for the instruction of mankind. the echo affected to set the tune which it really repeated. now, there is nothing more flattering than an echo. "this must be an inspired teacher, for he says exactly what i thought myself," is a very common and effective argument. to reproduce the opinions of the average reader; to dress them so skilfully that he will be pleased to see what keen intelligence is implied in holding such opinions; to say just what everybody wishes to have said a little more neatly than everybody could say it, or, at the outside, to say to-day what every one will be saying to-morrow, is one path to success in journalism. there is, i am afraid, much so-called education which tends to nothing better than a development of this art. i was consulted the other day by a young gentleman who was proposing to put himself under a professor of journalism. so far as i could gather from his account, the professor did not suggest that the pupil should study any branch of serious knowledge: that he should become, for example, a good political economist, or read ancient or modern history, or make himself familiar with continental affairs or bimetallism, or other thorny and complex subjects. the aim was precisely to enable him to dispense with all study, and to spin words out of absolute mental vacuity. if such an art can really be acquired, it is scarcely an art to be recommended to ingenuous youth. and yet, as i understand, it is an art which is more or less countenanced even at our universities. a distinguished classman learns much, but the last thing he learns is the depth of his own ignorance. he is too often practised in the power of beating out his gold or his tinsel to cover the largest possible surface; he becomes an adept in adopting the very last new fashion of thought; he can pronounce dogmatically upon all previous thinkers after reading not their own works, but the summary given in the last text-book. success in the art of passing examinations requires the same qualities which enable a man to write off-hand a brilliant leading article upon any side of any subject. i have often heard remarks upon the modern diffusion of literary skill. ten people, it is said, can write well now for one who could write well fifty years ago. no doubt the demand for facile writing has enormously increased the supply. but i do not think that first-rate writing--the writing which speaks of a full mind and strong convictions, which is clear because it is thorough, not because it is shallow--has increased in the same proportion, if, indeed, we can be sure that it has increased at all. perhaps there are ten times as many people who can put other men's thoughts into fluent phrases; but are there ten times as many, are there even as many, who think for themselves and speak at first hand? the practice of anonymous writing affords, of course, obvious conveniences to a superficial omniscience. the young gentleman who dogmatises so early might blush if he had to sign his name to his audacious utterances. his tone of infallibility would be absurd if we knew who was the pope that was promulgating dogmas. the man in a mask professes to detect at a glance the absurd sophistries which impose upon the keenest contemporary intellects; but if he doffed the mask and appeared as young mr. smith, or jones, who took his degree last year, we might doubt whether he had a right to assume so calmly that the sophistry is all on the other side. i am, however, quite aware that this is only one side of the question of anonymity. were the practice abolished, the journalist who was forced to appear in his own character might abandon not his superficiality, but whatever power of blushing he retains. the more fluent phrase-monger might take himself even more seriously than he now does, and might persuade other people to take him seriously too. the charlatan, in short, might have a better chance, and use his notoriety as a stepping-stone to more mischievous ambition. i refrain from discussing this question: the rather because it is obvious that such changes must work themselves out gradually, and that we may assume, for the present, that the position will not be materially changed. i am, therefore, content to infer that the journalist should at least bear in mind one obvious criterion. he should never say anything anonymously to which he would be ashamed to sign his name. i do not mean merely that he should not be libellous or spiteful--i hope and believe that the underhand assassin of reputations, who at one period was common enough, has almost ceased to exist,--but rather that he should refrain from that pompous assumption of omniscience which would he ludicrous in a simple individual. he should say nothing when he speaks in the plural which would make him look silly if he used the first person singular. now, this modest requirement involves, i think, a good deal. i will try to say what it involves by an example, of which i frequently think. i remember a young gentleman, who, in my hearing, confessed, in answer to a question from carlyle, that he did a certain amount of journalistic work. the great man thereupon said, with his usual candour, and, i must add, without any personal discourtesy, that, in his opinion, the journalism of the period was just so much ditch-water. what should be a well of english undefiled poured forth streams little better than a public sewer. the phrase, like some other prophetic utterances, sounded a trifle harsh, but was all the more calculated to set me thinking. my thinking naturally led me to reflect upon carlyle's own example. i was invited some time afterwards to sign a little testimonial presented to him upon his eightieth birthday, in imitation of the gift which he had himself forwarded to goethe. in this it was said, and said, i think, most truly, that carlyle was himself an example of the heroic life in literature. and why? a good many epigrams have been levelled at carlyle, and he has more than once been ridiculed as the philosopher who preached the virtues of silence in thirty volumes. now, carlyle's utterances about silence may not have been unimpeachable; but i think that, stated in a commonplace way, they substantially come to this: that idle talk, a mere spinning of phrases, is a very demoralising habit, and one great mischief of the present day; but that the serious and careful utterance of real thought and genuine knowledge must be considered rather as a mode of action than of talk, and deserves the cordial welcome of all men. a goethe affects action as much as a napoleon. carlyle did not really mean to draw the line between an active and a literary life; for he knew as well as any man that literature may at once require the most strenuous activity, and be the source of life and vigour in active men; but between frivolity and earnestness, between the mere waste and dissipation of energy and its concentration upon some worthy purpose. judged by such a standard, carlyle's words were also deeds. he wrote a good deal, for he lived a long time, and had for many years to live by his pen. i could, i think, mention several professional authors who habitually provide as much copy in a month as carlyle ever achieved in a year. but, luckily for them, their works are not collected. carlyle appears to be voluminous because he never wrote anything which was not worth preservation, and that because he never wrote an essay without making it as good as his abilities permitted. he did so, although he was till middle life hard pressed for money, and helping to support his family out of his narrow earnings. he stuck indomitably to his own ideal of what was best, though he had slowly to form a public which could appreciate him. and through long years of struggle and hardship he never condescended to make easy gains at the price of inferior workmanship, or to lower his standard of excellence in order to meet the immediate demands of editors. in that sense, if in no other, i call carlyle a worthy hero of literature, and i reverence his example a great deal more, i fear, than i have imitated it. perhaps, indeed, a man must have an unusually, even unreasonably, strong conviction of the truth and importance of his mission before he can make such sacrifices in order to discharge it worthily. to most of us the question occurs whether it can possibly be worth while to do so. perhaps, if i devoted myself exclusively to delivering my message to mankind as forcibly as i could, and to making all necessary preparations, it might be rather more effective than the second-hand twaddle which i actually produce. but would the game be worth the candle? i have, it may be, a family to support. should i not, as an honest man, think first of my butcher and my baker and of paying the collector of rates, before i undertake to become an immortal author? probably, at the best, my immortality would be a very short one, for there is not one author in a thousand who can make his voice audible at the distance of a generation. is it not better and wiser to earn an honest living by innocent small talk, than to aim at a great success and let my children go barefoot and lose their schooling? that low man, says browning's grammarian-- that low man goes on adding one to one, his hundred's soon hit: this high man, aiming at a million, misses an unit. is it not better to hit your hundred than to aim at your million and miss it? that is a problem which i do not think it possible to answer by a general rule. we rightly honour the carlyle or the wordsworth who has forced the public to admire him in spite of critical gibes and long obscurity; but we must not forget that even success does not necessarily justify the audacity which has won it, and that a good many people who fancied themselves to be capable of enlightening the world have been empty-headed impostors who would have done better to take the critic's advice: drop their pens and mind their gallipots. devotion to an ideal, like other high qualities, may be misplaced or counterfeited by mere personal vanity. but leaving each man to decide by the concrete circumstances of his own case, i still hold that at least we should try in this respect to act in carlyle's spirit. i cannot blame the author who, under certain conditions, feels that his first duty is to pay his weekly bills, so long, of course, as he does not earn the money by pandering to the bad passions of his readers; for there are modes of making a livelihood by the pen to which starvation or the workhouse would be preferred by any high-minded man. but we will not judge harshly of the author who lives by supplying innocent, if rather insipid, food for public amusement. he might be capable of better things; but, then, he might certainly be doing much worse. yet in any case, i say that, to have a tolerably comfortable conscience, an author should try to look a little farther than this. the great mass of mankind has to devote most of its energies to employments which require nothing more than honest work; and yet even the humblest can do something to maintain and elevate the moral standard of his surroundings. the author, so far as he is simply a journeyman, a reporter of ordinary events and speeches, for example, does his duty so far as he reports them honestly; and we have no more to say to him. but the author who takes part in political and social or religious discussions has a responsibility which involves something more. probably he feels--i am sure enough that i feel--that his performance makes remarkably little difference to mankind in general; and that he is playing only an infinitesimal part in the great processes by which the huge world blunders along, struggling into some approximation to a more tolerable order. he may compare himself to one of the myriads of insects building up one square yard on the coral reef which stretches for hundreds of leagues. yet even the coral reef depends on the units, and if the insect's powers are small it concerns him to make the best of them. now, to make the best of them implies some genuine interest in his work; something that makes the reader perceive that he is being addressed by a human being, not a mere machine for vamping up old materials. i have been struck in reading newspaper articles, even my own, by the curious loss of individuality which a man seems to suffer as a writer. unconsciously the author takes the colour of his organ; he adopts not only its sentiment but its style, and seems to become a mere transmitter of messages, with whose substance he has no more to do than the wires of the electric telegraph which carries them. but now and then we suddenly come across something fresh and original; we know by instinct that we are being addressed by another man, and are in a living relation to a separate human being, not to a mere drilled characterless unit of a disciplined army; we find actually thoughts, convictions, arguments, which, though all arguments are old, have evidently struck the writer's mind, and not merely been transmitted into his pen; and then we may know that we are in the presence of a real force, and meeting with a man who is doing his duty. i refrain from mentioning, though i easily could mention, living modern instances. but on looking to the history of the past, it is curious to notice how rare the phenomenon is, and how important it is when it occurs. think for a moment, for example, of old cobbett, agricultural labourer and soldier, with nothing to help him but his shrewd mother-wit and his burly english strength. he wrote much that was poor and clumsy enough; much, too, that was pure claptrap, and much that was dictated by personal motives and desire for notoriety. but in spite of this the untaught peasant became one of the great political forces, more effective than the ninety and nine elegant _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_ reviewers, who had all the advantages which he lacked. why? partly, no doubt, because he was a really strong man; but also because he had at least one genuine and deeply-rooted conviction, springing out of his profound desire for the welfare of the class which was both the largest and the most helpless of the england of his day. he is, therefore, one example, and there are many others, of the singular power which is exercised in journalism by a man, under whatever disadvantages, who possesses, or rather who is possessed by, some master-thought, and utters it in season and out of season with perhaps disproportionate intensity, but with perfect sincerity. now, though cobbett would be in some respects a bad model, i only refer to him in this sense. when my young friends consult me as to the conditions of successful journalism, my first bit of advice comes to this: know something really; at any rate, try to know something; be the slaves of some genuine idea, or you will be the slaves of a newspaper--a bit of mechanism instead of a man. you can carry on the business with self-respect--whatever your success--if it is also something more than a business; if, for example, you can honestly feel that you are helping on the propaganda of sound principle, denouncing real grievances, and speaking from genuine belief. no man has a right to lay down the law to statesmen as though he were in possession of absolute knowledge, or as though he were a man of science talking to a class of ignorant schoolboys. but every man ought to believe that truth is attainable, and to endeavour with all his power to attain it. he should study the great problems of the day historically: for he must know how they have arisen; what previous attempts have been made to solve them; how far recent suggestions are mere reproductions of exploded fallacies; and so qualify himself to see things in their true relations as facts of a great process of evolution. he should endeavour to be philosophical in spirit, so far, at least, as to seek to base his opinions upon general principles, and to look at the events of the day from a higher point of view than that of personal or party expediency. and he must, though upon this it is hardly necessary to insist, be familiar with the affairs of the day: for no one can apply principles to politics effectively without a genuine first-hand knowledge of the actual currents of political life. unless a man can take up his calling in some such spirit, he can be but a mere retailer of popular commonplaces, and must live from hand to mouth or upon the chance utterances of people as thoughtless as himself, increasing the volume of mere noise which threatens to drown sense. but if he seriously cultivates his powers, and enriches his mind, he may feel sure that even in journalism he may be discharging one of the most important functions which a man can undertake. he may be right or wrong in the particular doctrines which he supports. indeed, the first and most obvious result of any attempt to take wider views of politics is the admission that wisdom (and as certainly, nonsense) is not the exclusive possession of any party in politics, literature, or philosophy. but something is done whenever a man of trained intellect and genuine conviction lifts popular discussion to a higher plane. at such times it rises above the region of personal invective or pure platitude, and involves a conscious reference to great principles and to the remote conditions of the little bit of history which we are actually transacting. when john stuart mill became a member of the house of commons, and was accepted as a philosopher coming among practical men, he said much that displeased his hearers; but it was observed by competent judges at the time, that the tone of parliamentary debates was perceptibly raised. members of parliament were forced to reflect for the moment, not only how their speeches would tell in next day's reports, and what traps they were setting for opponents, but also for a brief instant, how their arguments would stand the test of impartial logic. mill tells a significant story in his autobiography, which, perhaps, indicates one source of his influence. when he appeared upon the hustings he was asked whether he had not said that the english working-classes were generally liars. he replied simply, "i did," and the reply was, he says, received with "vehement applause". the incident, he adds, convinced him that the working-classes valued nothing more than thorough straightforwardness, and honoured a man for daring to tell them of their faults. i hope that it is so: i believe, in point of fact, that no quality is more heartily honoured than unflinching political honesty. and i confess that i have often wondered why it is that where the reward is so clear, so few people take the plain road which leads to it. it seems equally clear that moral courage pays better than any other quality in politics, and that it is the rarest of all qualities even to be simulated. we are all anxious to show how profound is our affection for the masses; but how many candidates for their favour dare to give mr. mill's proof of genuine respect? no doubt you must make it clear that you possess some other qualities before you can hope to conciliate the respect of a class by accusing it openly of habitual lying. indeed, this might be taken as a test of genuine independence. till you can tell men of their faults without being suspected of spite or bad temper--till you can praise them without being suspected of unworthy flattery--you are not really in a position worthy to be called independent. how many journalists--i say nothing of statesmen--stand firmly enough on their own legs to speak out without giving offence? we are often told of a great revolution of opinion, and especially of the abandonment of the old prejudice against government interference. that a great change has taken place in the opinions which men profess is undeniable; though how far that change has been due to unbiassed scientific reflection, and how far to a change in the conditions of popularity, is a very different question. i see, for example, a statement by an honourable gentleman that he approves of the eight hours bill because the principle of non-interference with adult labour is obsolete. it is too late to avow it. if the honourable gentleman means to say that experience has proved the principle to be erroneous, he is, of course, justified in abandoning it. but, if his meaning be simply that the principle has gone out of fashion, what is this but to admit that you will abandon any doctrine as soon as it ceases to be popular? do we really mean to assert that a fallacious doctrine can never get the upper hand; that the beliefs of to-day are always better than the beliefs of yesterday; that every man who has dared to stick to an opinion condemned by a majority must necessarily be a fool for his pains? that really seems to be a common opinion. we hear a great deal at the present day about "mandates," and a mandate seems to be regarded not simply as a declaration of the will of a majority which must, in point of fact, be obeyed, but as the official utterance of an infallible church which cannot in point of logic be erroneous. now, i confess that i have always had a weakness for the faithful abdiel. i believe that a man is often doing invaluable services who resists the dominant current of opinion, who denounces fallacies when they are growing and flourishing, and points out that a revolution in belief, even though it be inevitable for the time, and even though it contain an element of right reason, may yet contain errors and hasty judgments and deviations from the true line of progress, which require exposure the more unsparing in proportion to their temporary popularity. is not the ordinary journalist's frame of mind singularly unfavourable to his discharge of this function? and is it not inevitable that it should be so as long as the journalist's only aim is to gain a hearing somehow? it matters not which side he takes. he denounces some new doctrine, but only in the name of the current prejudices which it happens to shock. he advocates it, but only because it is the last new fashion of the day. in either case he falls into the ordinary party vice of imagining that his opponents must be fools or knaves, that their opinions are directly inspired by the devil or a judicial blindness inflicted by providence, simply because he will not take the trouble to understand them. the man who would try to raise himself above the position of the mere pander to passing antipathies must widen his intellectual horizon. he must qualify himself to take broad views; he must learn that his little list of commonplaces does not represent real thought, but is often the embodiment of mere prejudice, or perhaps the deposit of words left by thinkers of past generations; he must learn to do more than merely dish them up with a new sauce; he must concentrate his abilities upon definite problems, consider how they have arisen, and what is their relation to the past and the future. to do so requires some disinterestedness: some love of truth for its own sake; and a capacity for answering your opponent by explaining him, instead of a mere quickness for taunting him personally. it requires, no doubt, serious and prolonged application. even such a training will not enable a man to unlock all the puzzles of the day; but it may help towards the desirable consummation in which a solution is at least sought in connection with established principles, and with a constant reference to the organised experience which also can be a safe guide to more reasonable conclusions. even the attempt to do so may strengthen a man against the temptation to take short cuts to notoriety, and seek a momentary sensation at the sacrifice of permanent effect. we owe gratitude to all who have acted upon such principles and won the influence which comes at last, though it comes slowly, to honest work, bestowed even upon such shifting materials as political and moral philosophy. i have dwelt so far chiefly upon political journalism, because it is so characteristic a part of modern literature, and illustrates so clearly some obvious tendencies of the time. i must say something, however, of another department of literature, which is sometimes said to have nothing at all to do with morality. the poet or the novelist, it is suggested, has no duties except that duty which scheherazade discharged at the risk of her neck,--the duty of keeping her master amused. if, instead of telling him stories about genii, she had read him every morning an orthodox sermon or an ethical discourse, the one thousand and one nights would have been diminished by one thousand. am i to tell our modern scheherazades to forget the _arabian nights_, and adopt for our use passages from the homilies of tillotson? some religious persons have taken that horn of the dilemma, and perhaps with some plausibility. when the world is heaving with the throes of a social earthquake, what right have you or i to be lounging on sofas, telling silly stories about young ladies' and gentlemen's billings and cooings? perhaps the condemnation should be extended to recreations less obviously frivolous. your philosopher who tries to distinguish or to identify "is" and "is not," and to draw the true line between object and subject, has a very fascinating plaything, but is perhaps as far from influencing the world. judging from the history of past philosophical cobwebs, he might as well be framing conundrums, or learning how to throw grain through the eye of a needle. i only refer to this to say that i am not in favour of suppressing either art or philosophy. i have a kind of hankering after them in some forms myself. i assume, without further argument, that shakespeare, and milton, and wordsworth, and fielding, and scott, and dickens, did well in devoting themselves to literature, and probably did more to make the world happier and better than if they had composed sermons or systems of philosophy. i must, as i said, refrain from pronouncing any set eulogy upon the services rendered by authors. this only i take for granted. no one, i think, of any intellectual capacity can remember the early days when his faculties were ripening, when he wandered, for the pure delight of wandering, in the enchanted world of the great imaginative writers, saw through their eyes, and unconsciously caught the contagion of their sympathies, without feeling a deep gratitude to the men who not only gave him so much innocent pleasure, but who incidentally refined his taste and roused his enthusiasm, and quickened his perception of whatever is beautiful, or heroic, or pathetic, in the moral or the natural world. the highest literature embodies the instincts by which a cultivated people differs from the barbarous, and the classes are in a true sense civilised, which enjoy and appreciate the ennobling as distinguished from the coarser pleasures, and rise above the merely brutal life. one who aspires to be a leader, or to follow the steps of the leaders, in this band of crusaders against barbarism, must surely have some corresponding duties. i am here upon the edge of certain troublesome controversies which i shall refrain from discussing at length. this only i need say. some great authors explicitly accept the function of preaching. milton, and, in later days, wordsworth, identified the offices of the prophet and the poet, and set themselves deliberately to expound an ideal of life, and justify the ways of god to man. and milton gave the principle in his famous saying, that he who would write well hereafter of laudable things must be himself a true poem. yet men equally great have impressed readers by their apparent indifference to such considerations. they accept the new commandment which, as emerson tells us, the muse gave to her darling son, "thou shalt not preach". shakespeare and scott did not consciously and deliberately write to set forth any ideal; they even wrote, more or less, to make money; they were magnificent opulent geniuses, who poured out their imaginative wealth liberally and spontaneously, without a thought of any particular moral, simply because their minds were full to overflowing of great thoughts and vivid images, which they diffused as liberally as the rose gives its scent. are we to say that they were wrong or morally inferior, even if artistically superior, to those who wrote, like milton or dante, with a more definite aim? must i condemn scott because he did not write, like the excellent miss edgeworth, or even like dickens in some of his stories, to preach consciously that honesty is the best policy, or that selfishness is a vice; and, if so, must i not condemn a man from whom i have not only received an incalculable amount of innocent enjoyment, but imbibed--it is my own fault if i have not imbibed--many thoughts that have strengthened and stimulated the best elements of my nature? if i insist upon the moral influences, am i not confounding the poet and the preacher, and falling under the lash of i know not how many critical connoisseurs? if i renounce the preachers, i am renouncing some of the greatest artists, and indirectly sanctioning even such art as is worthy only of holywell street, and panders to the worst passions. i will say what i think. great writers, it seems to me, may be great in two ways; and the greatest is he who combines them most thoroughly. the first-rate writer, in the first place, must--to use a frequently misapplied word--be a thorough realist. he is great in proportion to the width and depth of the truths which he grasps, and to which he gives the most perfect expression. when we read shakespeare at his best, what strikes us is that he has expressed once for all some home-truth about human nature and the world, round which all inferior writers seem to have been blundering without ever achieving a complete utterance. more generally, every great period of our literature has been marked in one shape or other by a fresh realism, or what is called the desire to return to nature: to get rid of the phrases which have become conventional and unreal, and express the real living ultimate truth. shakespeare and the great men of his time were inspired by such a passion; they were animated by the desire to "hold the mirror up to nature" and to portray real vivid human passion, for they had burst through the old mediæval chains of theological dogma, and were aroused to a sudden fresh perception of the beauties which had been unrecognised and misconceived by ascetic monks. the men of pope's time, again, believed in what they, too, called the "religion of nature," and tried to hasten the day when enlightened reason should finally crush what berkeley called the "pedantry of courts and schools". wordsworth and his followers inaugurated a new era by proposing a return to "nature," because the language, which with pope expressed a real meaning, had again become the conventional language of a narrow class of critics and the town. it is in all ages one great function of the imaginative writers to get rid of mere survivals; to forego the spectacles used by their ancestors as helps, which have now become encumbrances; to destroy the formulas employed only to save the trouble of thinking, and make us see facts directly, instead of being befooled by words. in that sense it is their great service that they break up the old frost of dreary commonplace, and give life and power, in place of an acceptance of mere ossified or fossilised remnants of what once was thought. briefly, they teach us to see what is before us. so far the function of the poet resembles that of the scientific and philosophic observer. he differs radically in method, because he proceeds by intuition instead of analysis; shows us the type, instead of cataloguing the attributes of a class; and gives us a real living man--a falstaff or a hamlet--instead of propounding a psychological theory as to the relations of the will, the intellect, and the emotions. i take it, therefore, that realism in this sense is one essential characteristic of great imaginative power. i hold it to be more than ever necessary; more necessary because scientific methods of thought are more developed. it is less possible for a serious writer to make use of the merely fanciful symbols which were perfectly legitimate as long as they represented real beliefs, but are now fitter for only the lighter moods. the greatest writers have to dispense with fairies and fighting gods and goddesses, and the muses, and to show us a direct portraiture of the forces by which society is actually moved. but the functions of the great writer, though they involve a perception of truth, are not adequately defined by the simple condition of truthfulness. he has to be--may i say it?--a preacher; he cannot help it; and, so far as he cannot help it, his preaching will be elevating in proportion as it is truthful. he does not preach in the sense in which a moralist preaches, by arguing in favour of this or that doctrine, or expounding the consequences of opinions. it is not his business to prove, but to see, and to make you see. but, in another sense, he cannot help preaching, because his power over you is founded upon sympathy, upon his personal charms, upon the clearness with which he sees and the vividness with which he portrays the real nature of the instincts which make men lovable or hateful. what are really the most fascinating books in the language? i was impressed the other day by discovering that perhaps the most popular of all english books, judging by the number of editions, is goldsmith's _vicar of wakefield_. to what does it owe its popularity? obviously to the exquisite keenness of goldsmith's perception of the moral beauty of a simple character, which is always saved from the charge of being unctuous or sentimental by the constant play of gentle and yet penetrative humour. do we not love charles lamb for a similar reason? why, again, do we love scott, as all men ought to love him? is it not because his jeanie deans and his dandie dinmont, and a hundred more characters, show the geniality, the manliness as well as the shrewd common-sense of their creator, and his vivid perception of the elements which ennoble the national character which he loved so well? why does the british public love dickens so well? for his incomparable fun, no doubt; but also because the fun is always associated with a keen perception of certain moral qualities which they regard with, it may be, excessive admiration. but to give no more examples, i am content to say that the enduring power of every great writer depends not merely on his intellectual forces, but upon the charm of his character--the clear recognition of what it really is that makes life beautiful and desirable, and of what are the baser elements that fight against the elevating forces. we are under intellectual obligations to the man of science who will tell us, for example, how mountain chains have been raised and carved into their present shape. but we are grateful to the great poets and prose writers, to wordsworth and mr. ruskin, for interpreting and stimulating the emotions which make the vision of the great peaks a source of pure delight. we may, in the same way, thank the psychologist who can make more intelligible the principle of association of ideas, or trace the development of the moral sense or the social affections. but we love the man who, like goldsmith, and lamb, and scott, and wordsworth, has revealed to us by actual portraits of typical characters, the sweetness and tenderness and truthfulness which may be embodied in humble characters. love, says wordsworth, of his shepherd lord-- love had he found in huts where poor men lie, his daily teachers had been woods and rills; the silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is among the comely hills. the power of discovering and of making us discover such thoughts in the huts of poor men and in natural scenery is the true prerogative of the poet, and it is to that power that he owes his enduring place in our hearts. i have said this much because i think that it is in a perversion of these principles that we shall find some of the temptations to which the author is in these days most liable. i can only glance at them briefly. one perversion, for example, is indicated by the common use of the phrase "realism". this word has various meanings; but the commonest, perhaps, would not be misrepresented by saying that it involves a confusion between the functions of the man of science and the poet. in a scientific sense, it is a sufficient reason for setting forth any theory that you believe it to be true. the facts which you describe may be hideous and revolting: it is not the less desirable that they should be accurately known. the poet and novelist may be equally justified in taking hideous and revolting facts into account. that, for example, is the duty of a satirist; and i am not at all concerned to say that satire is illegitimate--i think it perfectly legitimate. i should be the last to assert that a writer should confine himself to such facts as can be discussed with decency in presence of a young ladies' school. on the contrary, i think that, if not the most enviable privilege, it is sometimes a duty of the novelist to set forth vice and crime, and even, it may be, to set them forth in impressive and startling shapes. it is his duty to represent them truly and to make them intelligible; to show how they may be natural, and not to misrepresent even a villain. all i say is, that he should also recognise the fact that they are hideous and revolting. and, therefore, this is no excuse for the man who really dwells upon such facts, not because they are facts, but because he knows that such descriptions are the easiest way of attracting morbid tastes; and that he can get a readier market by being irreverent and indecent than by other expedients. to defend such work on the excuse of realism is simply to indulge in a bit of contemptible humbug, too transparent to need exposure. the purpose of an artist, you say, is to give pleasure, not to preach. that is perfectly true; but to give pleasure to whom? if it is to give pleasure to the prurient, to the cynical, to the debauchee, to give the kind of pleasure which, to a pure-minded man, is pain, and of which even the blackguard is ashamed, then i will not quarrel over words, and ask whether it can be truly artistic, but i will simply reply that i should have a greater respect for a man who lived by picking pockets. but, you reply, it requires a great deal of skill. so does picking pockets, and so do some other kinds of human energy which i need not particularise. if the ethical judgment be really irrelevant æsthetically, the æsthetic judgment must be irrelevant ethically. if that doctrine be true, we are, therefore, quite at liberty to say that a thing may be beautiful and at the same time blackguardly and beastly. i will, however, express my own conviction, that what is disgusting to a right-minded man cannot be really beautiful, and that the sentiments which it offends cannot be put out of court simply because they are called moral. they have as good a right to be considered as any others. there is a temptation of the opposite kind: the temptation to what i may briefly call sentimentalism. the virtue of idealism is as necessary as the virtue of realism; and every great writer shows his greatness by combining the two. the contradictory of the real is not properly the ideal, but the unreal--which is a very different thing. for idealism means properly, as i take it, that quality in virtue of which a poem or a fiction does not represent merely the scientific or photographic reproduction of matters of fact, but incarnates an idea and expresses a sentiment. a great work imparts to us the impression made upon a mind of unusual power, reflectiveness, and emotional sensibility by some aspect of the world in which we all live, but which he can see more vividly than others. to be really impressive, therefore, it must correspond to facts and be the genuine product of experience. the erroneous idealism is that which perverts the truth in order to gain apparent emphasis; which deals in the impossible, the absurd, and the exaggerated; and supposes a world which cannot even be better than the actual, because it cannot exist; which, therefore, has the defect of being arbitrary and inconceivable. so political utopias are interesting in proportion as they suggest a legitimate construction, based upon actual facts and observed laws of human nature. as soon as we see that they presuppose a world of monstrosities, of impossible combinations of incompatible qualities, they become mere playthings. and the same is true of every work of imagination; as soon as it ceases to have a foundation in truth--to be other than realistic--it loses its real hold upon our sympathies. you solve no problem when you call in a god to cut the knot. this is the tendency of the sentimentalist, who refuses to be bound by the actual conditions. his creations are ephemeral because only plausible, even to the imagination, so long as the illusions to which they are congenial survive. and he probably falls into the further error that the emotion which he utters becomes as factitious as the laws which he invents. the man who weeps because he is melted at the sight of misery, touches us; but when he weeps because he finds it pleasant, or because he wishes to make a public exhibition of his tenderness of heart, we find him out by degrees and call him a humbug and a sentimentalist. sham feelings and moral facts are the staple of the sentimentalist and the cause of his inevitable decay. these remarks may serve to suggest the temptations which most beset the author in our days, though peculiar to our day only in the degree in which authorship has become more professional. for the ideal author is the man who, having discovered truth, desires to reveal it to his fellows, or, being full of perceptions of beauty, cannot resist the impulse to embody them in words or outward symbols. but when he desires also to live by his powers, he is at once in a position of which all authors know the peril. he becomes self-conscious; for he has a perpetual poultice of public favour or enmity applied to soften his fibres, and to make him feel, even in his study, that an eye is upon him and that he must so act as always to preserve attention. he is tempted to produce sensation at any cost--to shock and startle by horrors if he cannot move the sympathies by gentle arts: for a man who cannot command the pathetic, can, at least, always be disgusting. he can turn our stomachs if he cannot move our hearts. he is tempted, at least, to caricature--to show how keen is his perception by crude and glaring colours, and to indulge in the grotesque as an easy substitute for the really graphic; he can affect a facile cynicism to show how profound is his penetration, and display that marvellous knowledge of the world and the human heart, and that power of discovering the emptiness of all apparent virtues which is so common an endowment of young gentlemen upon their first initiation into real experience of life. there is nothing which the author affects so easily at his first start as the world weariness which comes from long experience and years of disappointed hope. and when a man has once gained applause for his sentiment, he finds himself his own covert rival, and is forced to substitute for the first "sprightly runnings" a fanciful pumping up of the last dregs of his old feelings. nothing, unfortunately, is more common, or could be more easily illustrated by examples of good writers, than the spectacle of the veteran trying to reproduce in cold blood the effects which he struck out spontaneously and unconsciously in youth. and, then, at every instant the poor author feels that he must keep up with the fashion; he lives in fear of that verdict which will come some day, that he is an old fogey, and that he is transgressing those eternal principles which were discovered by some ingenuous youth a fortnight ago. some such danger is, indeed, shared by others than the author. it is the misfortune of his calling that success with him is intrinsically associated with notoriety. a man may do good work in many departments of life, of which no one will ever hear beyond a narrow circle. i hold, for my part, that the greatest part of the good work which is done in the world is actually of that kind, and that the best is done for the pure love of work. the world knows nothing of its greatest men, and as little, perhaps, of its best. but what would be the good of writing even a _hamlet_ or a _divine comedy_ if nobody was to read it? some great writers, i know, have prided themselves on finding fit audience and few; and i fully agree that a man who could really influence a few seminal minds might be well content with such a result of his labours. but, after all, the genuine aim of a great author must be, directly or indirectly, to affect the world in which he lives, whether by changing its beliefs or stimulating its emotions. and, as a rule, he cannot do so without becoming known, and even known to vast numbers of readers. some religious writers, the author, for example, of the _imitation of christ_, have influenced many generations, while absolutely concealing their identity. even they must, at least, have desired that their works should be known; and the case is a rare one. for the author generally, success of the worthiest kind, success in enlightening, encouraging, and stimulating his fellow-men, is inextricably connected with success of a lower kind, the success measured by fame and popularity. that, of course, is equally the case with statesmanship: a statesman has to appeal to crowds, and is too apt to be fascinated by thunders of applause; public oratory, even in the pulpit, is a terrible stimulant to unworthy vanity. the author only differs in this, that his very function presupposes a temperament of more than average sensibility; that he does not get that case-hardening which is administered to the statesman by the opposition orator; and that publicity has a specially intoxicating effect upon the man whose proper home is in his study, and who, perhaps, leaves it only to mix with a circle of reverent admirers. i have tried to indicate some of the obvious temptations of authors, especially so far as they are strengthened by the practice of authorship as a profession. they may be summed up by saying that they tend to degrade the profession into a trade, and a trade which has as many tricks as the least elevating kind of business. it would be, perhaps, desirable to end by deducing some definite moral. but, in the first place, i think that any such moral as i could give is sufficiently indicated by the statement of the dangers. and, in the second place, i do not think that there is any moral that can be regarded as peculiar to authors. for an author, after all, is a man, and, as all men ought to be, a workman. his power comes to this, that he is a man with a special capacity for exciting sympathy. that he should be a good workman, therefore, goes without saying; and it follows that he should have a sense of responsibility in whatever department he undertakes; that he should not bestow his advice upon us without qualifying himself to be a competent adviser; nor write philosophical speculation without serious study of philosophy; nor, if possible, produce poetry or even fiction without filling his mind by observation or training it by sympathy with the great movements of thought which are shaping the world in which we live. it is a sort of paradox which cannot be avoided, that we must warn a man that one condition of all good work is that it should be spontaneous, and yet tell him that it should be directed to make men better and happier. it seems to be saying that the conscious pursuit of a given end would be inconsistent with the attainment of the end. yet i believe that this is a paradox which can be achieved in practice on the simple condition of a reasonable modesty. the author, that is, should not listen to those who would exaggerate the importance of his work. the world can get on very well without it; and even the greatest men are far more the product than the producers of the intellectual surroundings. the acceptance of that truth--i hold it to be a truth--will help to keep in check the exaggerated estimate of the importance of making a noise in the world, which is our besetting sin, and help to make a regulating principle of what is a theoretical belief, that a man who is doing honestly good work in any department, whether under the eyes of a multitude or of a few, will be happiest if he can learn to take pleasure in doing it thoroughly rather than in advertising it widely. and, finally, with that conviction we shall be less liable to the common error of an author who grumbles at his want of success, and becomes morbid and irritable and inclined to lower his standard, when in reality he ought to remember that he is as unreasonable as a marksman who should complain of the target for keeping out of the line of fire. "it is my own fault" is often a bitter reflection, but a bitter may be a very wholesome tonic. the vanity of philosophising. when the preacher exclaimed, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he did not exclude his own wisdom. "i communed with my own heart, saying, lo, i am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all that have gone before me in jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience of wisdom and knowledge. and i gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly: i perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. for in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." the preacher, whoever he may have been, has uttered thoughts upon which many eloquent followers have expatiated. more than two thousand years have passed since the words were written; philosophies have risen and spread and decayed; and yet, in this year , can we say that they have brought more than a multiplication of doubt? has the increase of knowledge as yet diminished sorrow, or established any firm standing ground from which we may look upon the universe and say that the eternal riddle is, i will not say solved, but brought a step nearer to solution? a great poet--i can't tell whether he lived in the twelfth or the nineteenth century, for the phrase is equally characteristic of either omar khayyam or edward fitzgerald--gives the same thought:-- myself, when young, did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in i went. what, indeed, are eight or twenty centuries in the life even of this planet? there are moments at which we all have suddenly felt by flashes the sensation of being suspended in vast abysses of space and time: when we see, for example, a chart of the heavens which has been recently revealed to us by astronomers, and find that spaces between the stars shown to us by ordinary eyesight are filled in every direction with world beyond world, vast systems of worlds, worlds in every stage of evolution, growing out of nebulous vapour or sinking into eternal coldness: while the imagination is staggered and bewildered by the inconceivable vastness of the spaces indicated, and its own infinitesimal pettiness. if we stroll into a museum and look at the petrified bones of some grotesque monster, and after rejoicing, perhaps, that there is an end of him, we are struck by the thought of the vast lapse of ages during which he was being slowly hammered out of some mere primitive form, and then slowly decayed, and was gradually elbowed out of existence by monsters a degree less preposterous than himself, and gain a new measure of the portentous lapse of time. the greatest of poets has summed up the impression in the phrase which carlyle was fond of quoting: "we are such stuff as dreams are made of": and our little speck of existence a vanishing quantity in comparison of the infinite above and below and around us, which we dimly infer though we cannot distinctly realise it. if in such a mood, common at times to all who can think or feel, we take up some philosophical work, and find the writer complacently setting forth a cosmogony or a theory of the universe; explaining how things came into being; what is the reason why they are not better or worse; what is the end of the whole drama: are we not justified in exclaiming with carlyle:-- the builder of this universe was wise, he planned all souls, all systems, planets, particles: the plan he shaped all worlds and æons by was--heavens!--was thy small nine-and-thirty articles! carlyle has been, to some of us, the most stimulating of writers, just because he succeeded in expressing, with unsurpassed power, the emotion which i must be content with indicating--the emotion which is roused by sudden revelations of the infinitudes, the silences and eternities that surround us. we cannot keep it permanently before us; the present absorbs us, and its little interests seem to be all that is important. it is only at moments when, for example, we reflect that our action of a minute ago is already a part of the mysterious past, sinking downwards, and rapidly becoming invisible in the depths of the infinite ocean, that we are startled by a momentary pang, and feel as though to live with a constant sense of our insignificance would be to risk the paralysis of all our powers of thought and action. that way, we are inclined to say, lies madness. we shall lose our heads if we gaze too long into such tremendous depths. possibly we may restore our equilibrium by meditating upon the infinitesimal, though possibly too we may rather feel that such meditations only reveal another infinite. i intended to make a few reflections suggested by such thoughts, when i found a guide, and, to a great extent, an ally, in a writer who has lately taken up the ancient parable. mr. balfour, in a book rather quaintly entitled _foundations of belief_ has dwelt upon the vanity of all known philosophy, and has shown, or appears to some of his readers to have endeavoured to show, that it is hopeless to lay any sound foundations on the little film of knowledge beneath which lie the great unknown abysses. he tries to indicate some other basis, though, so far as i can understand him, the foundations of his edifice are ingeniously supported by the superstructure; and that is a kind of architecture which, to my mind, lacks stability. through a large part of his argument, however, i find myself in the pleasanter position of an ally. he asserts, and i doubt whether any competent thinker would materially differ from him, that there does not, as a matter of fact, exist any established system of philosophic truth--any system upon which we can rely, as we do, in fact, rightly or wrongly rely, upon certain scientific doctrines. we no more doubt the truth of the newtonian system of astronomy than we doubt that fire burns or that bread nourishes. but the briefest glance at the old systems of philosophy shows us, as mr. balfour says, nothing but imperishable ruins--imperishable æsthetically--but, logically, mere crumbling fragments. we can still read plato with delight; but the delight is due to the beauty of style and exposition, not, certainly, to the conviction produced by his reasoning. aristotle's philosophy is a marvel--for his time: but his theory of the universe is no more tenable than his natural science. the luxuriant growths of later greek philosophy are interesting only to the curious investigators of the pathology of the human intellect. the vast development of scholastic philosophy in the middle ages showed only how far unlimited ingenuity and subtlety may lead in the wrong direction, if it starts with mistaken principles. it ended by upsetting the doctrines which it attempted to prove, and had finally to commit suicide, or fall before the insurrection of living thought. the great men who revolted against its tyranny in its later stages constructed new systems, which, to them, seemed demonstrable, but which, to us, are already untenable. we cannot accept descartes, or spinoza, or leibnitz, or bacon, or hobbes, or locke, as giving satisfactory or even coherent systems, or as having done more than lead to the thorough scepticism of hume. if kant presented one solution of the difficulties in which philosophy was landed, we have still to ask what precisely kant meant; whether his criticism was simply all-destructive, or really left anything standing, and, if so, what it left standing; and who represents the proper line of development. shall we, with schopenhauer, pronounce hegel to be a thorough impostor? and, if so, can we seriously accept schopenhauer's own system? if, here and there, some people accept his theories for literary purposes, nobody will maintain that they rest upon any permanently settled foundation. if, again, we believe in hegel, we have to make out what we mean by believing in hegel, and to which school of his followers we are to attach ourselves. i need not consider the polemic which mr. balfour has directed against the writers who have given a version of hegelian principles in england. personally, i agree with his criticisms in a general way; but i fancy that even the adherents of those principles would defend themselves mainly by declaring that they do not make such pretensions as he ascribes to them. they try, at most, to indicate a way of approaching, not of solving the problems. but, at least, they would claim to have done one thing: namely, to have proved the inadequacy of the rival system of empirical philosophy, accepted by the english followers of locke, and now mainly represented for us by mr. herbert spencer. i only add to this, that it is not a question of the convictions of any individual thinker, however eminent. philosophies of every different variety have been not merely accepted by those who first devised them, but have been taken up in good faith by whole schools of disciples; they have been tested, on a large scale, by systematic application to all relevant questions, and one after the other has become bankrupt; has lost its hold on the world, and confessed that it leaves the riddle as dark as it was before. all that can be claimed for the greatest philosophers is, that they have, at least, proved that certain paths which seemed to lead through the labyrinth, end in a deadlock; that they have exposed certain fallacies by the process of provisionally believing in them; and that they have buoyed certain shoals, and demonstrated that no channel leads in what seemed to be a promising direction. is there any channel open? once more, i might follow--i might even, if i had time, expand mr. balfour's argument in another direction. he has pointed out--not for the first time certainly--how men's beliefs are due not to reasoning, but to countless causes which prevent them from reasoning. the argument is too familiar, indeed, to require much emphasis. some one, arguing in the days of the old orthodoxy upon the necessity of the true faith to salvation, put the case of a couple of infants deserted by their parents. one of them is carried off by a mohammedan and the other by a christian. each will, of course, adopt the faith of the party into whose hands it has fallen; and the problem was, whether the infant seized by the mohammedan would be eternally damned, and the one taken by the christian go straight to heaven; and whether, on the whole, that would satisfy our sense of justice. the argument implies the inevitableness of error. men not only do, but ought to hold, contradictory opinions. take a scottish davie deans, brought up in the shadow of john knox's pulpit; a tyrolese peasant, educated in the catholic church; and a mohammedan, living at mecca; and, of course, it is plain, not only that each will accept the creed which pervades what is for him the whole world known to him, but that as a reasoning being each is probably in the right. that is to say, the accessible evidence is in each case overwhelmingly in favour of the doctrine, inasmuch as the supposed reasoner is entirely unaware of the evidence which might be produced on the other side. but what is true of the peasant is true of the philosopher. measured on a sufficient scale, the difference vanishes. this intellectual horizon is just as much limited, though not so narrowly limited. no one but a bigot would deny that a mediæval philosopher might accept on perfectly reasonable grounds the dogmas of the catholic church. the historical difficulties had not even been presented to his mind. he had no reason for doubting innumerable assumptions as to fact which have since turned out to be erroneous; and if the method of his reasoning was itself fundamentally vicious, the fact only came to light gradually in the process of working out the results. we--including in the "we" the philosophers--have to approach truth by the help of assumptions, and by trying how in point of fact they will work; it is so hard to remember that they are only assumptions that we generally call them self-evident truths. considering how many assumptions are involved even in the very structure of language itself; how we are led into all kinds of difficulties by the essential instrument of thought, which has been fashioned by the unconscious logic of our ancestors; it is not strange that the best that can be said of philosophies is, that they represent convenient working hypotheses. that, at least, seems to be a liberal view of their logical value. in another sense they are really to be considered as poetry, rather than as logic. they are modes of presenting certain conceptions of the world by apparently logical formulæ, instead of by concrete imagery; but, substantially, they represent the emotions with which men regard their dwelling place, and are radically imperfect if we insist upon considering them as providing us with correct plans and drawings of its various arrangements. let us look for a moment at another set of reflections upon which mr. balfour touches. what has been the influence of these systems upon men's lives? have these provisional constructions, these fluctuating, conflicting, unstable combinations of pretentious formulæ, really decided or directed the course of human history? it would seem so, if you read certain histories of philosophy. they seem to suggest that the hinge upon which all the course of human affairs ultimately turns is the growth of certain metaphysical conceptions. there is a preliminary difficulty in seeing how such pretensions can be established. the philosopher in his study or his lecture room discusses problems in which the enormously preponderating majority of the race has so little interest, that it is not even aware that there are any such problems to be discussed. he lays down dogmas so vague and unsatisfactory that half his hearers give up the attempt to understand, or understand them in a sense which the more intelligent half would utterly repudiate; and that intelligent half is itself divided into different schools, interpreting the dogmas in radically contradictory ways. is it not hard to believe that speculation leads to vast results, when for ninety-nine men out of a hundred it is practically non-existent, and with the small minority it amounts to providing new weapons for endless controversy? we must, of course, admit that men's conduct is in some sense determined by their thoughts. change the radical beliefs, and you will certainly change the whole constitution of society. and, again, it is obvious that in one sphere of thought the progress of inquiry is of vast importance. nobody can deny that scientific and mechanical discoveries have, for good or evil, materially affected our lives. the great inventions of modern times, from gunpowder and printing to the steam-engine and electricity, have changed things as much as if they had altered the physical constitution of the world. they have indeed altered it for us, for they have given us the means of applying forces previously dormant, and therefore for practical purposes non-existent. such beliefs have an immediate bearing upon the practices of ordinary human beings. but if we are to set down all philosophies as at once untenable and as absolutely unknown to the enormous majority of mankind, it becomes difficult to understand by what process they come to influence, or apparently to influence, the position of the race. a philosopher frames his scheme of the universe to his own satisfaction; but you and i hear nothing about it, and do not trouble ourselves to understand it, and go on working with our good old common-sense conceptions of things, leaving it to the philosopher to construct or destroy the fanciful system which he somehow supposes to lie beneath them. one answer is of course obvious. religious and ethical systems, it is said, presuppose a philosophy: no one denies that men are profoundly affected by the gods whom they worship and the rules of conduct which they adopt; and therefore the sceptic who is burrowing at the base may be ruining the whole superstructure, although his operations are no more obvious upon the surface than those of some minute parasite. accordingly, we are often told that revolutions are ultimately produced by speculation; and that old systems fall with a crash because some shrewd witness has been boring into the foundations upon which they really repose. the french revolution, according to one familiar statement, was due to the freethinkers who had set about prying into the ultimate grounds of the old faith, and had succeeded in shaking the convictions necessary to social welfare. that this argument expresses a truth is what i am so far from denying that i should be most anxious to give it emphasis. but what is precisely the truth expressed? destroy the belief in a church as a social system, and the organisation will crumble. but what is the real cause of the loss of belief? is it the logical argument that is effective? does the philosophical revolution underlie the political or religious revolution, or is that to invert cause and effect? let me take an example to illustrate my meaning. the doctrine of the "rights of man," proclaimed by the whole revolutionary school, was, it is said, the cause of the revolution. the destruction of the old order was caused by the sudden conviction which spread through europe of the truth of this theory, and the consequent decay of the old authority. now we may proceed, if we please, to trace the origin of this doctrine back through certain speculations to the days of the roman jurists, themselves influenced by the stoical philosophy. the view suggested is that the doctrine was a kind of germ, a something which preserved its vitality through centuries, like the bacteria of modern physiologists, and which, somehow, developed a baleful or a beneficial activity about a century ago, and changed all the conditions of social equilibrium. but, if this be true, we naturally remark that the potency of the doctrine must have been due, not to the doctrine itself, which lay dormant so long, but to the conditions which suddenly made it effective. the doctrine, indeed, is so obvious, in a sense, that it is not to be doubted that anybody who once began to philosophise about laws and political constitutions, after they had reached a certain stage, would hit upon it in one shape or another. it is not comparable to those scientific discoveries which require patient thought and a dexterous combination of arguments: but one of the primary axioms which present themselves on the very threshold of inquiry. the mediæval peasant who put the question:-- when adam delved, and eve span, who was then the gentleman? was, probably, no great philosopher; but he was giving the essential pith of the doctrine of liberty, fraternity, and equality. it may be regarded as an obvious logical canon, converted by an illegitimate process into a statement of fact. if i make any general statement whatever about men or beasts or stones, i, of course, assume that there is a corresponding class of things in respect of each of which the proposition is equally true. as soon as i say anything, therefore, about morality or politics, which is intended to be true of men in general, i assume, in this sense, that men are so far equal that something may be predicated, indifferently, of every member of the class man. it is very natural and easy to convert this into the proposition that the concrete men of whom i am speaking are, in some sense, actually equal. in doing so, however, i am either making a false statement, or begging the question. as a matter of fact, men are, in many respects, as far as possible from being equal. the real question, therefore, is whether the inequalities which undoubtedly exist are or are not relevant to the political inequalities which i have to consider. as a matter of fact, the inequalities which were challenged by the revolutionary writers were, as i think, and as most of us think, entirely unjustifiable. at any rate, they had, as a matter of fact, produced widespread discontent and bitter antipathies between classes. it was the existence of these antipathies to which the outbreak was due. the peasant, for example, felt that he was forced to give up the fruit of his labour to the noble, and that the noble was discharging no duty to justify his demands. the peasant, probably, could not read; he was unaware that rousseau or voltaire was laying down principles which would cover his case; he had never even heard of philosopher or philosophy; only, when the time was ripe, when the upper orders had become useless, and the lower classes had accumulated a sufficient quantity of passion, of indignant or vindictive feeling, an outraged sense of justice, the crash came, and any formula which would cover the particular case was acceptable. the doctrine then made its fortune; not because it was true, or because it was demonstrable, but because it gave the shortest and simplest expression to the prevailing sentiment. the philosophical dogma, which had been lying idle for generations, doing no particular harm or good, was, suddenly, converted into a war-cry, the more effective because the real vagueness and uncertainty of its application enabled those who used it to save themselves the trouble of thinking or arguing. instead of substituting particular grievances, and showing that this or that inequality in general was useless and objectionable, they could, in half a dozen words, denounce all inequality, and be perfectly satisfied with a formula which was imposing for its generality, though true only in its particular application. i take this familiar case, not only as familiar, but because it seems to me to be typical. similar general remarks might, i fancy, be made about any of the great religious movements which have, undoubtedly, most profoundly affected human society. they are not due to the philosophers; to the abstract meditations of refined thinkers upon ultimate principles; but to great underlying social changes. our christian apologists of the last century held the quaint belief that a new creed was caused by the occurrence of certain miraculous facts, susceptible of legal proof. it is sufficiently obvious to us that this is to invert the process. given the faith, and there is never any difficulty in supplying the miracles. no quantity of assertions as to miraculous events would have the slightest effect, unless there were a predisposition to accept them. the same answer applies to the theory that a new religion owes its success to the discovery of new moral truths. in the first place, there are, properly speaking, no sudden discoveries in morality; and in the next place, the mere statement of a moral doctrine, and even the presentation of a lofty moral type, can have little importance unless the soil is already prepared, and the doctrine is but the overt utterance of the sentiments which are seeking for expression. the only explanation that we can give of such events is the social explanation. there are periods, that is in history, when the old order is out of joint; when society has outgrown the institutions which were adequate at a previous stage, and when, therefore, the beliefs associated with them become oppressive, and can no longer pass without challenge; when different races and nations have been brought into collision or combination, and crushed together into new forms by conquest and commerce; when, therefore, the several creeds are no longer supported by the patriotism which has ceased to have a meaning; when a vast amalgam of different faiths and modes of life has been formed out of many heterogeneous elements; and thus a need is created for some wider and more comprehensive system of belief corresponding to the general needs of society. in that case the influence of the philosopher may be of some importance, because he can do something towards suggesting the most workable compromise, and of exposing superstitions which have lost their old support, and the instinctive loyalty of their adherents. even then his voice will not be predominant. the creed will survive which is most suited to the state of the average intellect; it will include a large element of the ancient modes of thought, which still insist upon finding some satisfaction, and which, indeed, have a strange vitality beneath the surface, even when explicitly disavowed by the official interpreters of the faith. now, if this be accepted as a rough sketch of the actual course of the development of belief, what is the conclusion as to the philosopher's function? does it go to suggest that philosophy is but a vanity and vexation of spirit, and does it reduce the philosopher to a humbler position than is sometimes claimed for him? my answer would be, in the first place, that the case against philosophy would have to be frankly admitted if the criterion sometimes tacitly suggested be the true one. nothing could be more hopeless than the claim of any philosophy whatever to have laid down a definitively satisfactory plan of things in general. when mr. balfour observes that an aristotle or aquinas or descartes has not laid down a tenable theory of the universe, i can only add that the very phrase--theory of the universe--conveys a sufficient refutation. it is idle, or worse than idle, to imagine that we can lay down, or even hope to lay down, anything of the kind. it needs only one of those glances into the surrounding infinities which i have suggested, or the briefest survey of the history of philosophy, to reveal the sheer impossibility of the attempt. no one, perhaps, ever quite imagined that his speculation could really lay bare the ultimate ground plan of things in general. but, certainly, philosophers have, at times, thought, or spoken as if they thought, that they could construct a body of first principles which should be to knowledge in general what a science is to some particular application,--the general theory of physics, for example, to astronomy. philosophy would then be a system of such ultimate principles. the day for such systems has, i think, passed. we have learnt that it is for ever impossible to spin real knowledge out of pure logic. what the universe, or the little bit of it that we know, actually is, can only be learnt by experience; and if experience presupposes categories or forms of intuition, still, without experience, they remain empty; as incapable of producing truth as a mill of grinding flour without corn. philosophers must admit that on such terms we get only "brain cobwebs"; ingenious feats of intellectual legerdemain, where the operator shows his skill by dexterously hiding away his assumptions, and bringing them out at the end as triumphantly demonstrated conclusions. the more modest ideal, which is now presented to us, is what is called the unification of knowledge. that means, no doubt, that we have to bring our theories into harmony and consistency; to get rid of the hypothetical and conjectural elements which have intruded themselves from earlier and cruder speculation; and so to analyse the primary factors of thought and the most general conceptions, that we may not have to assume in one relation what we dispute in another. even this process is, no doubt, exceedingly difficult; it is difficult partly because the human mind has, generally speaking, to begin at the wrong end; to proceed upon postulates which break down here and there and leave inconvenient fragments remaining elsewhere; partly because some philosophers are still open to the charge that they raise a dust and then complain that they cannot see; and, briefly, because, in one way or other, what with the dulness of the ordinary mind and what with the over-subtlety of the acute, our thoughts and beliefs have got into intricate tangles, which will require enormous patience and judgment to wind off and weave into a satisfactory tissue. genuine philosophers, doubtless, will learn in time how to set about the work. it will probably strike them that instead of evolving pretentious systems of theology, and ethics, and politics, and art, each purporting to give an exhaustive theory of the subject, and each destined to melt away, leaving some infinitesimal residuum of real suggestion, they will have to follow a slower method of gradual and tentative investigation. if so, we must undoubtedly assign to philosophy a more modest position than has sometimes been claimed for it. it must resign its claim to a vision of transcendental realities, to a knowledge of things in themselves, and of the ultimate groundwork of the universe. it has not, i hold, a subject-matter peculiar to itself; it reveals no principles belonging to a separate sphere of thought; it corresponds simply to the attempt to correct and harmonise the cruder thoughts of the average human being, and to state explicitly in their purity the principles which have been all along implicitly involved in his ordinary observations. it is, therefore, not a substantive, but an adjective; philosophy is not a distinct department of thought, and cannot be defined by itself. all we can say is, that we think philosophically in so far as we think rightly. when our mode of conceiving the world includes no heterogeneous or conflicting element, we shall be philosophers; but we shall not, in that capacity, have a separate dominion of our own. now, it will probably do no harm to philosophers more than to other men, to be impressed with a sense of modesty and a right appreciation of the necessary limitations of their enterprise. you have been trying to soar beyond the atmosphere, and you will make the better use of your wings when you learn that they won't support you in a vacuum. your failure is not due to the want of aquiline powers of flight, but to the melancholy truth that even an eagle can't do much in an air-pump. is not that a rather consoling reflection? but here the philosopher begins to be recalcitrant. you are not lowering my pretensions, he says, but attacking the power of man to attain truth upon any terms. all that is given to us in experience is the effect of underlying causes; if the causes vary the effects would vary; and, unless, therefore, you can get back to the cause, your knowledge must remain empirical and radically uncertain. destroy all transcendental truths, and the phenomenal world itself becomes a mere shifting phantasmagoria, on which we can trace only coincidences and sequences, but are entirely unable to say that they will ever recur again. the argument, of course, raises the recollection of library upon library of controversy. i can only touch one point. practically, we do not trouble ourselves about this difficulty. we are quite convinced that we know a great many things: we are sure that the sun will rise and set to-morrow; we have no doubt as to the properties of the ordinary objects, of trees and stones and steam-engines; every action of our lives implies a certain confidence in what is called the uniformity of nature; and it is plain enough that even if our knowledge be, in some sense, only a knowledge of probabilities, yet, from its effect upon conduct, it may be exactly the same as a knowledge of certainties. there may be an indefinite distance between the "necessary truth" that two and two make four and the empirical truth that a stone will fall; but if all the evidence attainable goes to prove that the stone will fall, i should be as foolish not to act upon that hypothesis as not to assume the truth of the arithmetical formula. now, it is, of course, the growth within recent generations of vast systems of such truths which has alarmed the philosopher. he contrasts his own fluctuating and conflicting dogmas with the steady growth and assured results and mutual confirmation of the established physical sciences. he fears that they will obtain a prestige which will enable them to crush him and sweep his pretended knowledge into the limbo of alchemy and astrology and scholastic logomachy. here comes in the argument which is really the keystone of mr. balfour's whole theory; and, as i cannot accept it, i must dwell upon its true nature. it looks, at first sight, like a retort upon the men of science. your knowledge, he seems to say, is as vain as your antagonist's. your physics, and astronomy, and chemistry, and physiology are mere empty shows, like the metaphysical theories that have gone to their long home in histories of philosophy. but to say this would be to accept complete scepticism, and a kind of scepticism which mr. balfour would, i am sure, disavow. he believes, of course, just as strongly as any one of us believes, in the astronomical theories of newton and laplace; or in the mathematical theories of the great physical sciences. that in which he disbelieves is a kind of bastard science called "naturalism," which, as he tells us, leads to contradictory or incoherent results. the naturalist, it appears, proposes to confine himself to the evidence of the senses, and ends by accepting a view of the world entirely inconsistent with the sensible perceptions. i see a green field: an object which has visual and other properties recognised by my organs of sense. no, says this misguided naturalist, you do not see what you suppose; what really happens is, that there is a vast whirlpool of atoms impinging upon each other and setting up vibrations, the last set of which is communicated to another set of atoms, called my optic nerve. these atoms, by their very nature imperceptible to the senses, are the only realities. we thus start from the senses and we get a world beyond the senses, a world which is a mere dance of infinite multitudes of bits of matter performing all manner of extraordinary gyrations and evolutions. the sensible impressions of colour, sound, and so forth, are mere illusions, somehow arising in a figment called the mind. this mind is a mere phantom--an unreal spectator of things and events, among which it has no place, and upon which it exercises no influence. now, let me say first that i agree with mr. balfour that the doctrine thus imputed to the "naturalist" is absurd. i do not believe, for i cannot believe, that i am only a dance of atoms. i "cannot" believe, i say, for the words are to me meaningless. my sensations and emotions are to me the typical realities. i cannot doubt the real existence of pain and pleasure, grief and joy, whatever else i may doubt. i believe, for example, that my toothache is a reality; and nobody will ever persuade me that it is merely a set of molecular changes in my tooth. that it, in some way, is dependent upon such changes i fully believe; but that is quite a different statement. and, secondly, i agree with mr. balfour (or with what i take to be mr. balfour's belief) that the scientific doctrines which are reached by help of these atoms are established truths. i believe those doctrines, not because i am convinced by the arguments, which i may not have examined or be capable of examining; nor simply because i trust, though i do trust, in the ability and the candour of the scientific reasoners; but because the doctrines can be and have been independently verified. i believe, that is, in modern astronomy because it has enabled modern astronomers to predict eclipses, and enabled adams and leverrier to discover neptune. that is the conclusive proof; for it is impossible to suppose that the power of prediction should be a result of erroneous belief, and such proofs are verifiable by anybody who can observe the phenomena. here, then, we have the difficulty, the difficulty upon which the whole of mr. balfour's argument depends. solve it, and the whole sceptical argument crumbles. the naturalistic theory, we both say, is incredible. the scientific doctrines based upon it are, as we both admit, unassailable. how is this? i reply, first, because the atoms represent nothing more than a logical scaffolding which enables us to infer one set of sensible phenomena from another. we start from phenomena and we end with phenomena. when we have discovered the so-called "law"--the connecting formula--we can remove the hypothesis as the engineer can remove the provisional supports when he has once got the keystone into his arch. that this is so appears, i think, from the whole scientific procedure. how is the atomic theory obtained? not by any direct observation of atoms themselves. they are, as mr. balfour says, not only not objects of observation, but incapable by their nature of ever being directly observed. the man of science begins by saying, _if_ the phenomena of light correspond in some way to a vibration of atoms, the atoms must vibrate in such and such ways. he finds, again, that the laws so discovered will give the law of other phenomena of light; and he argues quite correctly that his hypothesis is for his purpose verified. that is, it has enabled him to discover a verifiable and verified formula. in order to do this he has assumed from the very first the theory which of course appears in his conclusions. all physical science consists ultimately in giving definite formulæ in terms of space and time. it is therefore assumed that the atoms are to have no qualities except those which are definable in terms of space. we exclude any other quality because our whole purpose is to obtain purely geometrical measurements. we have asked how those atoms, infinitesimal bits, so to speak, of solid space, arranged in certain positions, must move in order to correspond to the law given by observation, and we have therefore, of course, predetermined that our answer must come out in terms of atoms. but, now, what is the error of the "naturalist"? simply that he has converted the scientific doctrine into an ontological doctrine. he really knows nothing, and cannot possibly know anything, about his atoms, except just this, that they give the law of the phenomena. he has nothing whatever to say to them in any other relation. if he proceeds, as mr. balfour says that he proceeds, to declare that nothing exists except atoms, that they are the ultimate realities, that they are "things in themselves," or objects independent of any subject, he is going beyond his tether, passing from science to transcendental metaphysics, and getting into hopeless confusion. in fact, after he has done his worst we may still follow berkeley and deny the existence of matter, or declare with clifford that atoms are only bits of mindstuff, or adopt any other metaphysical theory we please. the atoms at most are things which we judge from the analogy of the senses; and it is a pure illusion to suppose that they can ever take us into an extra-sensible world. they represent not only a convenient but an indispensable contrivance for enabling us to formulate scientific laws, such as those of light and heat; but they take us no further. in a remarkable passage, mr. balfour sketches an analogy, which gives the application of this to philosophical or theological questions; and i will venture to give my own interpretation of the argument because it seems to lead to the real point. we believe, he says, in a scientific theory of heat, although our view of the "realities" has changed. people once thought that heat was a substance. they now hold it to be a mode of motion. yet our "scientific faith" (our faith, i suppose, that things are hot, and that their heat varies according to certain assigned laws) remains unaffected. on the other hand, he says, if we cease to believe in the christian doctrine of the atonement, we cease also to have that "sense of reconciliation" between god and man which the doctrine was intended to explain. this he seems to regard as a kind of melancholy paradox. why is the scepticism harmless in science and fatal in theology? first, what are the admitted facts? a man of science propounds a theory of heat. if his theory does not give us the observed laws, we reject it and adopt a more successful theory. in any case, we, of course, continue to believe in heat. we may know facts without knowing their causes; as, for example, the fact of gravitation, which is not the less certain because it is at present an ultimate fact. otherwise our knowledge would be limited indeed; for even if the cause (in the scientific sense) were given, we should still have to ask, what is the cause of that cause? if heat is due to certain systems of atoms, we might still inquire how the atoms came to occupy their places, and possess the properties which they actually have. an effect "depends upon" a cause, as we naturally say; but it does not follow that the knowledge of the effect depends upon the knowledge of the cause. now, what are the facts which correspond to the facts of heat in the theory of the atonement? if we believe in a certain being, an anthropomorphic deity, who will punish us or reward us, it is, of course, obvious that if we cease to believe in him we shall cease to desire to be reconciled to him. so if i believed that the warmth of my house depended upon a fire next door, and then discovered that no such fire existed, i should of course cease to care about lighting it. in this there is nothing which wants explanation. i suppose, therefore, that what mr. balfour means is, that if men have certain emotions,--remorse, for example, or what is called a conviction of sin,--and then learn to reject the theory by which these emotions were explained, they cease also to feel the emotions. in fact, he emphatically accepts the view that, if we cease to accept theology, we shall cease to be moral. the perversity of a few wretched "naturalists" in continuing to be moral is explained as a case of survival; the moral naturalist is the parasite who draws his sustenance from the organism which he infests. let us consider the scientific analogy. i believe in heat, and i accept a scientific theory just as far as it gives me verified laws of heat. i believe, too, in the existence of conscience; that is, i believe that people have real emotions, such as remorse and shame, which correspond to the name. i hold that to be a fact of experience. it would have to be explained, again, so far as explanation is possible, by psychology in the first instance, as heat must be explained by scientific theories. remorse is a fact, as heat is a fact; and an explanation would consist in giving accurately its place in the moral organism and the laws of its operation. the explanation furnished by any given psychology, by "association," for example, must be accepted or rejected in so far as it explains or fails to explain the facts. if some theory about spiritual "monads" enabled us to show what the conscience is, and how it is, in fact, stimulated or suppressed, we should accept it in the same way as we accept the physical theory of heat. as yet, i need hardly say, no such result has been achieved; and psychology is still far too vague to offer any definite laws of the emotional nature. but in any case, how can a theory about facts make the facts themselves vanish? would not grief be real just as pain would be real if we could clearly explain how and why it occurred? why should the "sense of reconciliation" vanish because we show the conditions of its existence? the reason of mr. balfour's difficulty, i think, appears from what i have said. in the physical theory we can draw the line clearly between the scientific and the philosophical spheres. mr. balfour can accept the scientific truth, though he does not accept the doctrine which results from translating it into ontology. but the boundary between psychology and philosophy is far less distinct. we constantly confound questions about the constitution of man, as known to us by experience, with questions about supposed intuitions of ultimate truth. the fact that sin causes remorse is interpreted as meaning that remorse actually is a knowledge of an avenging deity; and when the emotion is thus identified with the belief, it becomes easy to suppose that to destroy the belief is also to destroy the emotion. i think, indeed, that fallacies of that kind are among the commonest in philosophical writings. now, of course, psychology has something to say in this matter. it may help, and i think that it has helped us to explain how men come to believe in anthropomorphic deities, and to invest them with the attributes of human rulers. but in that way it tends to show not that the conscience is caused by the belief, but to show how, under certain conditions, it has given rise to a belief by other than logical grounds. it suggests no probability that the conscience will disappear with the fallacy, but only that it will act differently when enlightened by a different logic. conscience disappears no more than heat disappears, when both are explained; though the conduct which the emotions or the sensations determine will, of course, be affected. and now, i can say what i take to be the difficulty, and the escape. mr. balfour draws a kind of parallel between the scientific creed, which is, as he would put it, "based upon" a metaphysical doctrine, and the theological creed, which has a similar foundation. if the metaphysical foundation is so uncertain in both cases, must not the scientific be as uncertain as the theological? if we know nothing about atoms, or, on the other hand, about souls, we must be either sceptical in both cases, or credulous in both. there are the same underlying difficulties, and if we manage to overlook them in the case of science, why not overlook them in the case of theology? conversely, if we elect to be sceptics in theology, how can we escape from scepticism in science? and, as a thorough-going scepticism is, doubtless, an impossible state of mind in practice, the conclusion of many people will be to accept belief in spite of certain gaps in our logical foundations. this, no doubt, is eminently convenient for the "constructive" process adumbrated by mr. balfour, which i certainly regard as extra-logical. but is any such dilemma really offered to us? the obvious answer is, that scientific truth, as mr. balfour admits, is not "based upon" metaphysical theory. the astronomical doctrine of a newton remains equally valid, whatever is the ultimate nature of space or laws or atoms; whether we are materialists or empiricists or idealists. the philosophical "basis" is not really a set of truths which we must know before we can know the astronomical theory; but simply a set of hypotheses which have to conform to the truths given by experience. the unassailable truths are just the facts which we observe, and which science enables us to describe accurately and state systematically. if a metaphysical doctrine has any bearing upon these facts, which seems to be doubtful, it must conform to the facts, and not the facts to it. so long as no such theory is proved, we can afford to remain metaphysically sceptical without losing our hold upon the scientific truth. now, i should say, what is true of the physical sciences is true of all our knowledge. we may study the moral sciences as we can study the physical sciences. we can observe and colligate the facts of emotion and volition, as we can observe the position of the stars and the laws of heat. therefore, in so far as theology is an attempt to give a theory of the universe in general, we must accept or deny the doctrines just in so far as they serve to explain or fail to explain the facts. but, in any case, the facts will remain unaltered, and will not vanish because we may be unable to understand them. but theology corresponds, also, not to the scientific method, but to the ontological inquiries which are represented by mr. balfour's "naturalism". both doctrines, as i should say, lead to incoherence, to contradictions covered by ambiguous language, and to hopeless difficulties, which, in theology, are described as inscrutable mysteries. i am, therefore, quite ready, with mr. balfour, to reject naturalism, but, on the same grounds, i also reject the transcendental theology. attainable truth is equally independent of all such theories; and were it otherwise, we should be doomed to hopeless scepticism. mr. balfour's analogy, therefore, apparently upsets his conclusion. i believe in heat, and i believe in the conscience. i reject the atoms, and i reject the doctrine of atonement. i reject it, if it be meant for science, because, so far from explaining the facts, the facts explain how the false doctrine was generated. i reject it, if it is meant for philosophy, because, like other transcendental theories, it leads to hopeless controversies, and appears to me to be incredible as soon as any such theology as is tenable by a philosopher is substituted for the crude theology of a savage. we are driven to scepticism, then, if we first declare that scientific knowledge depends upon metaphysical theory; and then that all metaphysical theory is moonshine. i do not accept the first principle; and i hold that the danger to morals from metaphysical difficulties is pretty much the same as the danger that the stars will leave their courses if we adopt a wrong theory of an astronomy. we fancy that when we are explaining facts, we are, somehow, creating them; as the meteorologist in _rasselas_ observed the clouds till he came to think that he caused the rain. the facts upon which morality depends are the facts that men have certain emotions; that mothers love their children; that there are such things as pity, and sympathy, and public spirit; and that there are social instincts upon the growth of which depends the vitality of the race. we may, of course, ask how more precisely these emotions act, and what functions they discharge. we may make historical and psychological and metaphysical inquiries; and we may end, if ever we reach such a consummation, by establishing what we may call a science of ethics. but the facts do not depend upon the explanation. the illusion of their dependence is easily produced. you make your theory of morality, and then you define morality as a belief in the object required by your theory. it follows, of course, that morality will disappear with the belief--or else that your theory is wrong. morality, said some people, is a belief in future rewards and punishments. if that belief disappears, morality--that is, their morality--must disappear too. but that morality--taken as the actual sentiment which they have erroneously defined--should disappear also, no more follows than it follows that heat will disappear when we discover that there is no such thing as the old imaginary substance of heat. the doctrine is now more generally urged in a different form. theology, it is said, is essential to morality. such bold assertions may be best met by a dogmatic assertion of the inverse case. theology, as i hold, is not the source of the moral instincts, but, under certain conditions, derives its real power from them. theology, in the first place, is a word including not only heterogeneous but contradictory meanings,--baal and jehovah, the mumbo-jumbo of the negro and spinoza's "ens absolute infinitum". to the enormous majority of the human race, the more metaphysical conception is hopelessly unintelligible. when a savage expresses his crude sense of duties to the tribe under the form of belief in an ancestral ghost, is the morality made by the belief, or the belief generated by the incipient moral emotion? does he believe in god or really in a man like himself, and respected precisely because he is like himself? is not the truth tacitly acknowledged by the more philosophical religions? their adherents admit that the god of philosophy is too abstract a being to excite any emotion; he fades into nature or the unknowable, and it is impossible to love one whom, by his very definition, you can neither benefit nor injure and whose omnipotence makes even justice a mockery. therefore, they make a god out of a man, and by boldly combining in words two contradictory sets of attributes, make what in theology is called a mystery, and in common sense called by a different name. does not that amount to confessing that the true source of morality is in the human affections of like for like, and not in that sentiment towards a transcendental object of which you have chosen to make your definition? and, finally, if we ask what is the relation of theology to morality, from a historical point of view, we see the same result. undoubtedly, theology has been a bulwark of morality in one way. it has expressed the veneration of mankind for the most deeply-seated customs of the race. it has been the form through which, though not the cause owing to which, men have expressed the importance of adhering to certain established institutions of the highest importance to mankind. briefly, therefore, it represents the conservative instincts. but, for that reason, it has naturally lagged behind an advancing morality. the newer religions have been precisely protests against the objectionable conduct of the old-fashioned deities who retained the manners and customs of a more barbarous period; and have, therefore, been regarded by the older faith, sometimes with justice, as atheistic. without referring to the familiar cases, i am content to appeal to the present day. what are the relative positions of the theologian and his opponent during the modern phase of evolution? the theologian has, in the main, maintained the sanctity of old institutions and customs; and i do not doubt that he has rendered a useful service. but the demand for justice, for the abolition of slavery, of the hardships of the poor and oppressed, the desire to construct society upon a wholesomer ideal, has been generated, not by theological speculation, but by the new relations into which men have been brought and the new sentiments developed. it has been accepted most fully by men hostile to all theology, by the free-thinker, the atheist, and the materialist, whom the orthodox denounces as criminal. doubtless the denouncer has excuses: the reformer may err in the direction of excessive demolition; but the very survival of the older creeds depends, as we all see, upon their capacity for assimilating and finding utterance for the moral convictions which have arisen outside of their limits, and, generally, in defiance of their authority. to say, therefore, that the morality depends upon the survival of the metaphysical theory, seems to me to be inverting the true relation. i end by suggesting what is to my mind the true moral of these speculations. the vanity of philosophising means the vanity of certain philosophical pretensions; of the chimerical belief that the philosopher lays down the first principles of belief in ethics or in other departments of life, in such a sense that the destinies of the race or of knowledge depend upon accepting and applying his principles. his function is a humbler one, though one of vast importance. the great philosophical systems have vanished, though they have cleared the air. they were primitive attempts at construction; results of the fact that we have to act before we can think; and to assume postulates which can only be verified or falsified by the slow experience of ages. but the process by which truth is advanced is not confined to the philosopher; or perhaps we should rather say that some sort of crude philosophy is embedded even in the feeblest and earliest speculations of mankind. our thoughts are guided by an implicit logic long before we have even a conception of logic in the abstract, or have the least thought of codifying and tabulating its formulæ. so every savage who begins to make a tool is exemplifying some mechanical principle which will not be put into accurate and abstract language till countless generations have passed. every one at the present day who is using his wits is philosophising after a fashion, and is contributing towards the advancement of philosophy. he is increasing the mass of still more or less chaotic knowledge, the whole of which is to that philosopher what the particular set of facts is to the student of physical science. the philosopher has not to evolve first principles out of himself, so much as to discover what are the principles which have been unconsciously applied; to eliminate the obsolete elements; to bring the new into harmony; to verify them, or describe how they may be verified; and so to work towards the unification and systematisation of knowledge in general. probably he will make a great many blunders in his task; but it may be some comfort to reflect that even blunders are often useful, and that he is not in the terribly responsible position of really framing laws for the universe or for man, but only of clearing up or codifying the laws which are already in operation. forgotten benefactors. i was reading not long ago some remarks[a] which impressed me at the time, and upon which, as it came to pass, i have had reason to reflect more seriously. the writer dwelt upon the vast services which have been rendered to the race by men of whom all memory has long since faded away. compare, he said, the england of alfred with the england of victoria; think of the enormous differences which have been brought about in thirty generations; and then try to estimate how large a share of all that has been done in the interval should be put to the credit of thousands who have long sunk into oblivion, and whose achievements, by the very necessity of the case, can never be properly estimated. a few great names mark every period; the great statesmen, the great churchmen and warriors, are commemorated in our official histories; they are placed upon exalted pedestals; and to them is attributed everything that was done in their time, though, but for the co-operation of innumerable nameless fellow-labourers, they would not have been provided even with the foundations upon which their work was necessarily based. this remark recalls the familiar discussion about the importance of the individual. is the hero whom we are invited to worship everything, or is he next to nothing? is it true, as some writers put it, that had cleopatra broken her nose, or had a cannon ball gone a hair's breadth further to the right or left when napoleon was directing the siege of toulon, "the whole course of history would have been changed"? or is it rather true that, as some philosophers would say, no man is indispensable, nor even any man very important: that, if any even of the greatest of men had died of the measles in his infancy, we should have carved a different set of letters upon the pedestals of our statues, but the course of affairs would have run in much the same channel? i will not seek to discuss that old theme, to which it is evident that no very precise answer can be given. it is clearly a question of degree. nobody can deny that a great man has an influence in the spheres of action and of thought; but to attempt to say how great an influence he has, how far he depends upon others or could be replaced by others, involves considerations lying in the unprofitable region of vague conjecture. this only i wish to note. it seems often to be suggested that there is something degrading or ungenerous in taking a side against the importance of the hero. it raises a suspicion that you are a valet, capable of supposing that men are distinguished by the quantity of lace on their coats, and not by the intensity of the fire in their souls. and, moreover, the view is fatalistic: it supposes that the destinies of the race are determined by what are denounced as blind "laws," and not by the passions and aspirations which guide their energies. to me it seems that it would be easy enough to retort these imputations. i cannot feel that a man of generous sympathies should be therefore inclined to a doctrine which would tend to make the future of the race a matter of chance. the more you believe in the importance of the great men, the more you have to admit that our progress depends upon the innumerable accidents which may stifle the greatest as easily as the smallest career. if some great social change was so absolutely dependent upon the leader who first put into words the demand upon which it is based, or who led the first forlorn hope which made victory possible, that his loss would have been the loss of his cause, it follows that the cause might have been lost if a crust of bread had gone the wrong way. it ought surely to be pleasanter if we are entitled to hold that we have a stronger ground of confidence; that the great victories of thought and action prove the diffusion of enthusiasm and courage through a wide circle; and that the fall of the chief is sure to make room for a worthy successor. the wider and deeper the causes of progress, the more confidently we can derive hope from the past, and accept with comparative equanimity even the most painful catastrophes. nor can i agree that such a view implies any want of susceptibility to the claims of the hero. i do not think that we can pay homage too cheerfully to the great men who form landmarks in history. i admit, most gladly, that the admiration which we feel for such men; the thrill which stirs us in reading of the great patriots and martyrs of the past; the reverence which we are now and then able to pay to a contemporary--to a lincoln, proving that political action may represent real faiths, not party formulæ; to a gordon, impersonating the sense of duty; or a father damien, sacrificing his life for the lepers--is one of the invaluable elements of moral cultivation. but i do not see the connection between this and the desire to exalt the glory of the great man by ignoring the unknown who followed in his steps, and often made them possible. i have not so far attained to the cosmopolitan point of view that my blood is not stirred by the very name of nelson. nay, however cosmopolitan i might become, i hope that my sympathies would never blind me to the greatness of the qualities implied in his patriotic devotion. my cosmopolitanism would rather, i hope, lead me to appreciate more generously the similar qualities in his antagonists, and, also, the similar qualities in the "band of brothers" whom he was proud to lead. i should be sorry so to admire nelson as to forget the sturdy old race of sea dogs who did their duty, and helped him to do his in a memorable way, some ninety years ago. i would rather believe than not that, had nelson been killed at the nile, there were many among his followers who, had the chance come to them, would have led the _victory_ at trafalgar, and have made england impregnable. "i trust we have within this realm five hundred good as he" is surely the more heroic tone. but, to drop the old-fashioned appeal to patriotic spirit, is it not true that, in every department of life, it is more congenial to our generous feelings to remember the existence and the importance of those who have never won a general reputation? this has come to be a commonplace in the sphere of scientific discovery. we find, over and over again, that the great discoverer has been all but anticipated by his rivals; that his fame, if not his real greatness, depends upon the circumstance that he has just anticipated by a year, or, perhaps, in extreme cases, by a generation, results to which a comparatively second-rate thinker would have been competent a few years later. the winner of the race is apt to monopolise the glory, though he wins only by a hair's breadth. the familiar instance of darwin and mr. wallace is remarkable, not because the relation of the two thinkers was unique, but because, unfortunately, the generosity with which each acknowledged the merit of the other was exceptional. a great discovery is made when the fertile thought is already going through the process of incubation in a whole circle of intelligent minds; and that in which it first comes to the birth, claims, or, at least, receives, the whole merit, by a right of intellectual primogeniture not much more justifiable than the legal right. admitting, again, in the fullest sense, the value and the difficulty of that last step which has to be made in order to reach the crowning triumph, it would surely be ungenerous to forget the long series of previous explorations by which alone it was made possible. there must have been countless forgotten newtons and descartes', who, in their day, had to exert equal powers in order to discover what are now the most familiar truths; to invent the simplest systems of arithmetical notation, or solve the earliest geometrical problems, without which neither a newton nor a descartes would have been possible. and what is true in science is, surely, equally true of activities which touch most of us more nearly. of all undeniable claims to greatness i suppose the most undeniable to be the claim of the founders of religions. their disciples are so much impressed by their greatness that they regard them as supernatural beings, or, in other words, as beings who are the sole and indispensable causes of all the consequences attributed to the prevalence of their doctrines. we are told, constantly, and often as though it were too obvious to need proof, that every moral improvement which has taken place in the world since the origin of christianity, is due to christianity, and that christianity itself is entirely due to its founder. human nature was utterly corrupt until the deity became incarnate in the form of a jewish peasant; and every social or moral step which has since been made in advance--and not one of the unfortunate backslidings by which the advance has since been trammelled--is a direct consequence of that stupendous event. this is the theory of the importance of the individual, raised, so to speak, to its very highest potence. we not only attribute the most important and far-reaching of all changes to a single agent, but declare that that agent cannot have been human, and indeed cannot have been less than the first cause of all changes. i shall not, of course, discuss the plausibility of a doctrine which, if accepted, breaks the whole chain of cause and effect, and makes the later history of the world not an evolution of previously operative process, but the result of an abrupt, mysterious interference from without, incommensurable with any other set of spiritual forces. i am content to say that to my mind the doctrine becomes daily more impossible to any one who thinks seriously and tries to picture to himself distinctly the true nature of the great world processes. what is to my purpose is, that it seems to me to be not only infinitely more credible, but also more satisfactory and more generous--if there be properly a question of generosity--to do justice to the disciples as well as to the master--to believe that the creed was fermenting in the hearts and minds of millions of human beings; and that, although the imperfect and superstitious elements by which it was alloyed were due to the medium in which it was propagated, yet, on the other hand, it succeeded so far as it corresponded to the better instincts of great masses of men, struggling blindly and through many errors to discover rules of conduct and modes of conceiving the universe more congenial than the old to their better nature, and prepared to form a society by crystallising round the nucleus which best corresponded to their aspirations. when so regarded, it seems to me, and only when so regarded, we can see in the phenomenon something which may give us solid ground for hopes of humanity, and enable us to do justice to countless obscure benefactors. the corruption of human nature, as theologians sometimes tell us, expresses a simple fact. undoubtedly, it expresses a fact which nobody, so far as i know, ever thought of denying--the fact that there are bad instincts in human nature; that many men are cruel, sensual, and false; and that every man is more or less liable to succumb to temptation. but the essential meaning of the old theological dogma was, i take it, something different. it meant that man was so corrupt that he could only be made good by a miracle; that even his apparent virtues are splendid sins unless they come from divine grace; and, in short, that men cannot be really elevated without supernatural interference. if all that is good in men comes from their religions, and if religions are only explicable as inspirations from without, that, no doubt, logically follows. i prefer, myself, to believe that, though all men are weak, and a good many utter scoundrels; yet human nature does contain good principles; that those principles tend, however slow and imperfect may be the process, gradually to obtain the mastery; and that the great religions of the races, while indicating the intellectual and moral shortcomings of mankind, indicate also the gradual advance of ethical ideals, worked out by the natural and essential tendencies of the race. and thus, as it seems to me, this conception of the mode of growth of religions and of morality, which gathers strength as we come to take a more reasonable view of the world's history, is closely connected with the doctrine that, instead of ascribing all good achievement to the hero who drops from heaven, or springs spontaneously from the earth, we should steadily remember that he is only possible, and his work can only be successfully secured, by the tacit co-operation of the innumerable unknown persons in whose hearts his words find an echo because they are already feeling after the same ideal which is in him more completely embodied. in our judgment of such cases there is, then, an injustice so far as we make a false estimate of the right distribution of praise and gratitude. it would be an injustice, in a stricter sense, to the persons ignored, if we regarded such gratitude as the appropriate and main reward of a noble life. i need not repeat the commonplaces of moralists as to the real value of posthumous fame, nor inquire whether it implies an illusion, nor how far the desire for such fame is, in point of fact, a strong motive with many people. this only i will note--that obscurity is a condition, and by no means an altogether unpleasant condition, of much of the very best work that is done. the general or the statesman is conspicuous in connection with successful enterprise in which his subordinates necessarily do a great part of the labour. it is impossible for the outside world to form a correct judgment in such cases; and, therefore, there is no hardship to the particular persons concerned, if they are simply ignored where they would, certainly, be misjudged; and if they, therefore, work in obscurity, content with the approval of the very few who can estimate their merits. there is a compensation, as we see, when we reflect upon the moral disadvantages of conspicuous station. literary people, for example, must be very unobservant if they do not notice how demoralising is the influence of public applause, and the constant inducement to court notoriety. it is unwholesome to live in an atmosphere which constantly stimulates and incites the weaknesses to which we are most liable. and many of our first writers must, i should fancy, feel pangs of self-humiliation when they contrast the credit which they have got for popular work with the very scanty recognition which comes to many who have applied equal talents to the discharge of duties often far more beneficial to mankind, but, from their nature, performed in the shade. "i," such a man, i fancy, must sometimes say to himself, "am quoted in every newspaper; i am puffed, and praised, and denounced; not to know me is to write yourself down a dunce; and, yet, have i done as much for the good of my kind as this or that humble friend, who would be astonished were his name ever to be uttered in public?" some such thought, for example, is inspired by johnson's most pathetic verses, when the great lexicographer, the acknowledged dictator of english literature, thought of the poor dependant, the little humble quack doctor, levett, who was content, literally, to be fed with the crumbs from his tables. but the obscure dependant, as the patron felt, had done all that he could to alleviate the sum of human misery. his virtues walked their narrow round, nor made a pause, nor left a void; and, sure, the eternal master found the single talent well employed. have i not, johnson seems to have felt, really done less to soothe misery by my _dictionary_ and my _ramblers_ than this obscure labourer in the back lanes of london, of whom, but for my verses, no one would have heard even the name? a full answer to questions suggested by these thoughts would, perhaps, require an estimate of the relative value of different aims and different functions in life; and, for such an estimate, there are no adequate grounds. in one of browning's noblest poems, rabbi ben ezra--of whom i must say that he strikes me as being a little too self-complacent--puts a relevant question. "who," he asks, "shall arbitrate?" ten men love what i hate; shun what i follow, slight what i receive; ten who, in ears and eyes, match me; we all surmise, they this thing and i that: whom shall my soul believe? and he answers or suggests one condition of a satisfactory answer, by saying that we are not to take the coarse judgment of the world, which goes by the work achieved. we must remember-- all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that, weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account; thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act; fancies that broke through language and escaped; all i would never be, all men ignored in me, that i was worth to god, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. if it were proper to treat a poetical utterance of this kind like a deliberate philosophical theory, i might wish to argue the point a little with the rabbi. but, at any rate, he points to considerations which show how little any one can judge of merit by any tangible and generally accessible test. i am content to say that this sentiment gives one--and a very impressive--answer to a problem which presses upon us the more as we grow older. it is natural for a man who feels that he has done most of his work, that the night is coming, and, as it seems, coming with accelerated speed; who feels, too, that whatever he has done or may do, he can no longer have the approval of those whose approval was dear to him as his breath;--it is natural for such a man to look back, to take stock more or less of his own performances perhaps, and at any rate to endeavour to estimate at their true worth the services which he has received from others. what, he may ask, has he done with his talents? what little fragment has he achieved of what might once have been in his power? the answer is pretty sure to have a very melancholy side to it; and it will lead to the question, what part of that fragment was really worth doing? what were the few really solid services which he may set off as some satisfaction to his self-esteem, against his countless errors and his wanderings in wrong directions, and his attempts to achieve the impossible, and the waste of energy upon the trifling and the worthless in which he is pretty sure to have spent a very large proportion of his time? when we try to return a verdict upon such issues, we feel painfully to how many illusions we are subject. when we are young we naturally accept the commonplaces, and do not question the ideals amid which we happen to have grown up; we are not conscious of the movement which we share. as long as we are floating with the current, we are not even aware that any current exists. we take our own little world to be the fixed base, quite unconscious that it is all the time whirling and spinning along a most complex course. and so it is difficult, even if the thought of making the attempt ever occurs to us, to try to occupy the position of a bystander looking on at life from outside, and endeavouring to pronounce some general opinion as to its merits or defects--its happiness or misery as a whole. "what a queer place this is!" i remember a man once saying to me abruptly; and i thought that he was referring to the steamboat on which we were fellow-passengers. i found that he had been suddenly struck by the oddity of the universe in general; and it seemed to me that there was a great deal to be said for a remark which seldom occurs to those people who take things for granted. we are roused sometimes by a philosopher who professes pessimism or optimism, to ask and to try to answer such questions. the answers, we know, are apt to be painfully discordant. is the world on the whole a scene of misery, of restless desires, proving that we are miserable now, and doomed never to obtain satisfaction? is it our only wisdom to give up the will to live; to hope that all this visible and tangible scenery is so much illusion, and to aspire to sink into nirvana? shall we try to conquer all earthly appetites by a thorough-going asceticism, and cultivate those spiritual emotions which can only find full satisfaction in another and a better world? or shall we agree that, after all, the love of the true and the beautiful, or, it may be, the physically pleasurable, gives a real solid comfort for the time, which it would be idle to drop for a shadow? is the world a scene of probation, in which we are to be fitted for higher spheres beyond human ken by the hearty and strenuous exertion of every faculty that we possess? or shall we say that such action is a good in itself, which requires to be supplemented by no vision of any ulterior end? shall we say that this is the best of all possible worlds because the fittest always tends to prevail, or that it is the worst because even the greatest wretchedness which is compatible with bare existence can still survive? philosophers, no doubt, contradict each other, because even philosophers are not exempt from the universal weakness. the explanation that pessimism means a disordered liver, and the counter remark that optimism means a cold heart and a good digestion, are too familiar to need exposition. each man's macrocosm is apt to be related to his microcosm, as the convex to the concave of a curve. to say the world is disagreeable, means that i find it disagreeable; and that may be either my own fault or the world's. nor is it easy to correct the personal error by observation, for the observer carries himself and his illusions with him. has such-and-such a life been a happy one? how are we to decide? we are often subject to what may be called the dramatic illusion. we judge by the catastrophe, by the success or failure of the assumed end. we see a noble young man struck down by some accident, and we think of his career sadly, because the promise has not been fulfilled. is it not equally reasonable to say that the promise was itself a blessing? that the man we regret had his twenty or thirty years of hopefulness, confidence, and happiness, and that that was a clear gain even if we lose the result which we might have anticipated? or we are impressed by the more exciting incidents of a life, the blows which crushed a man at intervals; and we forget all the monotonous years of tranquil happiness which, if we apply an arithmetical test, may have occupied by far the greater part of his existence. southey, for example, argues that although we remember cowper chiefly for his terrible mental suffering, we shall find, if we add up the moments of happiness and misery, that he probably had, on the balance, a life of much more enjoyment than torture. so, when we speak of the misery of a nation at the time of some great trouble--the french revolution, for example--it is difficult to remember how small was the proportion of actual sufferers; how many thousands or millions of children were enjoying their little sports, utterly ignorant of the distant storm; how many mothers were absorbed in watching their children; and how many quiet commonplace people were going about their daily peaceful labour, pretty much as usual, and with only a vague--and possibly pleasurable--excitement at the news, which occasionally drifted to them, of the catastrophes in a different sphere. carlyle, in one of his most vivid and famous passages, has incidentally drawn the contrast. or, if we try to form an estimate of the balance of happiness and misery through any portion of the race, and appeal to experience for an answer, we must certainly remember how limited is the field of observation, even of the best informed, and the most impartial; how rigidly they are confined for their direct knowledge to one little section of one part of the race; and how the vast majority--the thousand millions or so who are altogether beyond their ken--are known to them only by statistical tables or the casual reports of superficial observers. as there are so many difficulties in forming an estimate, as we are not agreed as to the true ends of human life, nor as to the degrees in which those ends are actually attained, nor as to the efficacy of the various causes which determine the success or failure of the means employed, it becomes any one to put forward his own opinion upon the topics to which such considerations apply, with all modesty. and, yet, i think that i may dwell upon some truths which may be admitted by those who differ upon these difficult problems, and, as i fancy, deserve more weight than they generally receive, even though they have become commonplaces. the main condition of human happiness, say some people, is physical health. a man whose organs are all working satisfactorily cannot fail to be happy under any but very abnormal conditions; as, conversely, a grain of sand in the wrong place will make any life a burden. no one will dispute the truth contained in such _dicta_; and, perhaps, as we realise more distinctly the importance of sound health to our neighbours and to our descendants, as well as to ourselves, we shall lay greater stress upon the conduct which is conducive to its preservation. we shall see that what is, apparently, a mere dictate of personal prudence, has, also, its ethical aspect. but, without dwelling upon this view, we may apply the analogy to society. whatever morality precisely means, and whatever happiness means, it clearly indicates what we call--and i think that it is no mere metaphor--a healthy state of society. this, again, implies, first of all, the health of those domestic relations which are as the ultimate molecular forces which bind together the social tissue. the society, we may say without hesitation, in which the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, are instinctively recognised and habitually observed, has, so far, secured the most deeply-seated and essential condition of happiness and virtue; the society in which the union of married people normally produces harmony, and the absolute identity of interests and affections, in which children are brought up in a pure home atmosphere, with an embodiment of the beauty of domestic love always before their eyes, imbibing unconsciously the tradition of a high moral standard, and so prepared to repay, in due time, to others the services lavishly and ungrudgingly bestowed upon them by their elders,--so far represents perfectly sound health. the degree in which any ethical theory recognises and reveals the essential importance of the family relation is, i think, the best test of its approximation to the truth. an unworthy view of domestic happiness may lead to the ascetic view which sets up a sham and quixotic ideal; or to the cynical view which regards it as a mere case of selfish indulgence. i do not deny that the relation, like all other human relations, may require modification as circumstances change. difficulties arise, as when we notice the great social changes which have broken up ancient ties, and have tended to weaken the family bond by facilitating desertion, and increasing the floating population. and many socialist schemes appear at first sight to be, and sometimes are, consciously designed to weaken the sense of responsibility of parents. i, of course, cannot now discuss a point which is, undoubtedly, of the highest importance; but i am certainly convinced that the merits of any change must be tested by its tendency to preserve, and, if possible, intensify the strength of this underlying bond upon which the welfare of society depends far more intimately than upon any other human relation. if this be true, it follows also that to those activities which knit families together, which help to enlarge the highest ideal of domestic life, we owe a greater debt than to any other kind of conduct. and to this i add that, as i believe, the highest services of this kind are rendered by persons condemned, or perhaps i should say privileged, to live in obscurity; whose very names will soon be forgotten, and who are entirely eclipsed by people whose services, though not equally valuable, are by their nature more public. to prove such an assertion is, of course, impossible. i give it only as my personal impression--for what it is worth, after any deductions you may please to make upon the score of the great fallibility of such impressions; and only because, correct or otherwise, it may serve to bring out aspects of the truth which we are apt to neglect. i have lived long enough to have had opportunities of seeing many eminent men and women. i have insensibly formed some kind of estimate of the services which they have rendered to me and my like; and i record, as far as i can, the result upon my own convictions. i will put aside for the moment the half-dozen men of really first-rate eminence,--the men whose names are written upon all the great intellectual and social movements of the century. i will think for the present only of those who may be placed in the second rank; of those who do not profess to have originated, but only to have diffused, important thoughts; who have acted as lieutenants to the great leaders, and become known to their contemporaries, with little prospect of filling any important place in the memory of their successors. yet even such men bulk far more largely in our eyes than multitudes of men and women whose names will never be known outside their own little parish, or even their family circles. and then i ask myself, how far the estimate thus formed corresponds to the real value of the services performed. i think that i can speak most easily by deserting the line of abstract argument, and endeavouring to draw a portrait or two, which you need not assume to correspond too closely to particular facts. i mean to suggest reflections which will really apply in many representative cases, and to refer to typical instances of general truths. i will first mention one such case which happened to strike me forcibly at the time, and which no one here, i am quite certain, will be able to identify. long years ago i knew a young man at college; he was so far from being intellectually eminent that he had great difficulty in passing his examinations; he died from the effects of an accident within a very short time after leaving the university, and hardly any one would now remember his name. he had not the smallest impression that there was anything remarkable about himself, and looked up to his teachers and his more brilliant companions with a loyal admiration which would have made him wonder that they should ever take notice of him. and yet i often thought then, and i believe, in looking back, that i thought rightly, that he was of more real use to his contemporaries than any one of the persons to whose influence they would most naturally refer as having affected their development. the secret was a very simple one. without any special intellectual capacity, he somehow represented with singular completeness a beautiful moral type. he possessed the "simple faith miscalled simplicity," and was so absolutely unselfish, so conspicuously pure in his whole life and conduct, so unsuspicious of evil in others, so sweet and loyal in his nature, that to know him was to have before one's eyes an embodiment of some of the most lovable and really admirable qualities that a human being can possess. he was a living exemplification of the truth which some great humorists have embodied in their writings, the truth that simplicity at which fools laugh may be venerable to wise observers. young men were not always immaculate in those days: i don't know that they are now; some of them probably were vicious in conduct, and might be cynical in the views which they openly expressed. but whatever might be their failings, they were at the age when all but the depraved--that is, i hope and fully believe, all but a very small minority--were capable of being deeply impressed by this concrete example. they might affect to ridicule, but it was impossible that even the ridicule should not be of the kindly sort; blended and tempered with something that was more like awe--profound respect, at least, for the beauty of soul that underlay the humble exterior. the direct moral addresses which took the form of eloquent sermons or of good advice naturally gained an incomparably higher reputation for those who uttered them. but, considering the facility with which the impressions so made evaporate from the minds of the hearers, i often thought that this obscure influence, the more impressive when one felt it because of its entire unconsciousness, probably did far more to stimulate good feelings and higher aspirations among his companions than all the official exhortations to which they ever listened. he would have been unfeignedly surprised to hear, what i most sincerely believe to be the truth, that his tutor owed incomparably more to his living exemplification of what is meant by a character of unblemished purity and simplicity, than he owed to the tutor whose respectable platitudes he received with unaffected humility. the case--for various reasons--impressed me deeply; and i have often thought of it and of the principle which it illustrates in later years. i once knew, for example, a woman whose whole life was devoted to domestic duties, and who confessed to me that she had sometimes felt a touch of humiliation when she thought how narrow was her own sphere of action, while her husband was daily deciding upon great questions of high political importance. some women would have drawn the conclusion, that the exclusion of women from political activity was a grievance to be abated; and such people might receive with scorn the suggestion that the discharge of the domestic duty might possibly be as important as the discharge of the more conspicuous function. the argument about the proper sphere of women is now generally treated with contempt; and i am perfectly ready to admit that it begs the question, and is often a mere utterance of blind prejudice. no one, i hope, could assert more willingly than i, that the faculties of women should be cultivated as fully as possible, and that every sphere in which their faculties can be effectively applied should be thrown open to them. but the doctrine sometimes tacitly confounded with this, that the sphere generally assigned to women is necessarily lower or less important than others, is not to be admitted, because the contradictory may be misapplied. the domestic influence is, no doubt, confined within narrower limits; but then, within those limits it is incomparably stronger and more certain of effect. the man or woman can really mould the character of a little circle, and determine the whole life of one little section of the next generation; when it may be very difficult to say whether the influence which they can bring to bear upon a class or a nation is really perceptible at all, or does not even operate in the direction opposite to that intended. and i could not help thinking that a woman who was bringing up sons and daughters ready to quit themselves like brave men and women in the great struggle of life, might be doing something more really important than her conspicuous husband, who was, after all, only part of a vast and complicated machinery, nominally directed by him, but, in reality, controlling all his energy, and, not impossibly, working out the very results which he most disapproved. it is, therefore, with no reference to any of the political theories of women's rights, and so forth, that i venture to insist upon this topic. i think that we habitually under-estimate the enormous value of the services, whether of man or woman, done in the shade, and confined within a very limited area. let me attempt, again, to draw a portrait, not all imaginary, which may explain, at least, what i often feel--the contrast between the real worth of such lives and the recognition which they can ever receive. wordsworth, in one of those poems which show best how true and tender were his moral instincts, has described one who was-- a perfect woman, nobly planned to warn, to comfort, and command; and yet a spirit too, and bright with something of an angel light. the words have often come to me of late, till i fancy that i could supply a commentary. the woman of whom wordsworth speaks was, when he first saw her, a "phantom of delight," an embodiment of feminine beauty, and, as such, possessing a characteristic perhaps superfluous from a moral point of view. i have known and know women, not exactly beautiful, before whom i would gladly bow as deeply as i would if they were beautiful as helen of troy. but a poet must be allowed to take pleasure in beauty, and we may grant to it a certain place that it deserves among higher qualities. for it does so when the possessor is absolutely--not unaware of the fact, for that is hardly possible, nor, perhaps, desirable--but absolutely untouched by any vanity or self-consciousness. the beauty, one may say, gives, at least, an opportunity for displaying a quality which otherwise would not have so good an occasion of manifestation. and, moreover, there is a beauty of the rarest and most exquisite, which, if not the product, is, or at least seems to be, the spontaneous accompaniment of nobility of mind and character. some persons, by a singular felicity, possess beauty as one of their essential attributes; it seems to be not an accident or an addition, but a part of their essence, which must mould every detail, which shines through body as well as soul, and is but the outward and visible sign of all that is sweet and elevated. wordsworth's ideal woman is-- not too bright or good for human nature's daily food, for transient sorrows, simple wiles, praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles: and yet displays equally-- the reason firm, the temperate will, endurance, foresight, strength, and skill. we cannot, even in our thoughts, separate the artistic homage which we pay to the external appearance, and that which we pay to the inner qualities, of which they are apparently the inevitable and predestined symbol. we have before us the ideal--the type which reconciles all the conditions of human life, physical and moral--the "perfect woman," who is also the fitting vehicle of the angel light. but it is, of course, upon the qualities symbolised and not upon the outward symbols that we must insist. i will, therefore, say, that the inward beauty, whether fully represented or not by the outward form, implies, in the first place, the absence of all those qualities which tend to lower and vulgarise life. what we call the worldly view, for example, of love and marriage, is simply unintelligible to such a nature. love means, to it, an absolute self-surrender, and the complete fusion of its own life with the life of the beloved object. it can only be granted in return for a reciprocal surrender; and becomes the mutual passion by which fear and distrust are utterly cast out; and the intensity proves not liability to weak illusions, but the sure insight of the lofty instincts which cannot fail to recognise corresponding instincts in others. to the lower mind, such a character appears to be too highly strung, too impassioned, romantic, and careless of the solid advantages which secure at least comfort. to those of more or less congenial sentiment, it will rather appear to imply a spirit which, because it breathes a higher element than that at which men habitually live, perceives also more distinctly what are the truest and deepest sources of all that deserves to be called real happiness. to live in an atmosphere of the strongest and most unqualified affection, to have the very substance of life woven out of the unreserved love of a worthy object, is its ideal; and that ideal represents, i am convinced, the highest and purest happiness that can be enjoyed in this world. suppose, now, that one so endowed is struck by one of those terrible blows which shiver the very foundations of life; which make the outside world a mere discordant nightmare, and seem to leave for the only reality a perpetual and gnawing pain, which lulls for an instant only to be revived by every contact with facts. sorrow becomes the element in which one lives and moves. consolation, according to the familiar phrase, is idle; for the vulgar notion of consoling is that which sir walter scott attributes to one of his characters: it is to try to prove that the very thing for which we offer consolation has not happened--in other words, to undertake an enterprise which is obviously hopeless and illusory. yet the greatest test of true nobility of character is its power of turning even the bitterest grief to account. the lofty and simple nature sorrows; it does not attempt to shut its eyes to the full extent of the calamity, nor seek to distract itself by a forgetfulness which might obscure its most sacred visions of the past; nor, on the other hand, to make a parade of its sensibility, or try to foster or stimulate enervating emotions. it knows instinctively that grief, terrible as it is, is yet, in another sense, an invaluable possession. the sufferer who has eaten his bread with herbs learns, as the poet puts it, to know the heavenly powers. for he or she acquires a deeper and keener sympathy with all who are desolate and afflicted; and the natural affections become blended, if with a certain melancholy, yet with that quick and delicate perception of the suffering of others which gives the only consolation worthy of the name--the sense of something soothing and softening and inspiring in the midst of the bitterest agony. grief, so taken, may be stunning and deadening for the time; it may make life a heavy burden, from which hope and eager interest have disappeared: "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable"; but by slow degrees it undergoes a transmutation into more steady and profound love of whatsoever may still be left. the broken and mangled fibres imperceptibly find new attachments; and the only solution of the terrible dilemma is reached when time, which heals the actual laceration, enables the sufferer to feel that the new ties do not imply infidelity to the objects still beloved, but are a continuous development of the indelible emotions, and that the later activities are but a carrying on of the old duties, made more sacred and solemn by the old grief and its associations. a lofty nature which has profited by passing through the furnace acquires claims not only upon our love but upon our reverence. it becomes perhaps within the little circle with which it is familiar the obvious and immediate resort whenever some blow of sorrow or sickness has fallen upon one of its fellows. the figure which i attempt truly to describe is happily not unfamiliar. we have all, i hope, known some one who is instinctively called to mind whenever there is need of the loving kindness which seems so obvious and spontaneous that it does not even occur to the bestower to connect the conduct with self-sacrifice. such persons appear to be formed by nature for ministering angels, and move among us unconscious of their claims to our devotion, and bringing light into darkness by their simple presence with as little thought that they deserve our gratitude as that they ought to emerge from obscurity. happiness, peaceful and contented at least, if not the old bright and confident happiness, may come in time; and new spheres be bound together by the attractive force of a character which, if it is not more intrinsically lovable, has gained a more pathetic charm from its experience. the desire to relieve suffering has become a settled instinct; and, even when there is no special appeal to it, is incessantly overflowing in those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which, according to wordsworth again, are the "best portion of a good man's life". whether that be quite true i know not; but in so far as such acts seem to testify most unequivocally to the constant flow of a current of sympathetic tenderness, always ready to seize upon every occasion of giving happiness, on a child's birthday as on the parent's deathbed, they perhaps speak to us most convincingly of an all-pervading sweetness of character. an assiduous and watchful desire to show kindness, which makes a perpetual succession of such little attentions a part of the practical religion of the doer, may generate a corresponding love even more forcibly than the sacrifices made in obedience to a more conspicuous appeal for help. the value of such a life as i have tried imperfectly to indicate is not to be estimated by the number of good actions performed, or by any definite list of the particular consequences achieved. it may be hard to say how many pangs have been soothed, how much happiness has been added in special cases, by one who goes through life absorbed in such activities. but above and beyond all the separate instances, such a person,--the object only to a few, perhaps, of love and reverence, but to those few the object of those feelings in the most unreserved and unequivocal form,--is something far more than a source of any number of particular benefits. to reckon up and estimate the value of such benefits is a conceivable undertaking; but we cannot attempt to calculate the value of a spiritual force which has moulded our lives, which has helped by a simple consciousness of its existence to make us gentler, nobler, and purer in our thoughts of the world; which has constantly set before us a loftier ideal than we could frame for ourselves; which has bestowed upon us an ever-present criterion of the goodness or badness of our own motives by our perception of the light in which they appear to a simple and elevated character; which has made every cowardly and worldly thought shrink away abashed in the presence of noble instincts; which has given us a sympathy so close and constant that, as with the light of the sun, we are apt to be unconscious of its essential importance to us until some accident makes us realise the effect of its eclipse; and which, therefore, has in some sense become a part of ourselves, a restraining and elevating and softening impulse, to which we cling as to the worthiest and most indispensable of our possessions. i am not speaking from imagination. i am trying to utter convictions springing from my personal experience, and which i feel--most painfully--that i cannot adequately express. i could not say more, even if by saying more i could express myself adequately, without a sense of a kind of profanity for uttering what should be kept for a few. but though i speak for myself, i hope and i entirely believe that i am therefore speaking for many others also. there are few who have the eyes to see who have not recognised some such light shining upon their lives, and as one main source of what they have done or said if least unworthy. i fancy that the thought which naturally occurs to us when we reflect upon such an influence will be: was i, could i, be worthy of it? what am i that such goodness should have come to me? or, what, if anything, have i done to transmit to others the blessings conferred upon me? such questions have various aspects, and i do not quite see how they could be reduced to a form admitting of a bare logical answer. it now seems to me almost unbecoming to dwell upon the comparison which i contemplated at starting. i imagined a man who has made some such impression upon the world as is recognised by public reputation, to compare his own achievement with such achievements as these, which are absolutely private, and neither seek nor desire any public reward. in truth, the two things are, perhaps, strictly incommensurable. they must be measured by different standards, and are of importance in different spheres. and yet i must try to say this much. the achievements to which i have referred as in their nature public and recognisable, should certainly be considered with gratitude. yet, when we attempt to estimate their worth we are sensible of terrible drawbacks. i have passed, let us say, a measure admirably useful, or written a book which has made a mark. certainly i have done a good action. but what if i had not done it? were there not hundreds of people who would have been only too glad to take my place? i have been successful because i happen to have been in the front rank, which was impelled by thousands of eager supporters. i have said just a little better than my rivals what they were all striving to say; and my highest reward will be that my name will be attached in my own generation, and possibly even in the next, to some particular opinion which yet would have come to the birth without me. i have made a certain commotion on the surface for a moment or two, but the ripple will die away in a few years; and, important as i may seem to myself, i have only to look back for a generation to recognise the plain fact that there have not been at any period more than one or two conspicuous workers the products of whose activity can be distinctly recognised at the present day. even in regard to them, it is often doubtful whether they did more harm or good; whether they did not direct human energy along the wrong paths, and do as much in giving currency to fallacies as in extending permanent truths. now, after making such deductions, which to me, at least, seem to be essentially necessary, we can, i think, do justice to the truth which is contained in browning's poem. you are not, he seems to say, to measure the worth of life by the amount of work done in it, by the tangible and obvious results which can be tested by the world's coarse finger and thumb. rather, he suggests, the value depends upon the excellence of the soul which is fashioned into "heaven's consummate cup" by the stress of the potter's wheel; by the joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, which have affected it in its passage through life. i should prefer to say that the kind of dilemma so suggested is not really to the purpose. the rabbi may seem to speak, as i said, with a little too much complacency, if he be interpreted as sharing the feeling which is often, however unjustly, attributed to goethe--that his supreme end was the cultivation of his own nature, and that he regarded himself as a work of art, to be elaborated for its own sake, and enriched by experience even at the cost of others. but in a better interpretation this does not apply: for the very process by which the noble nature is developed and cultivated, implies the closest and most active sympathy with suffering, and an invariable reference to the highest aims of life. it becomes perfect, that is, by constantly rendering invaluable services to others; and there is, therefore, no meaning in drawing a distinction between the services and the influence upon the soul itself. they are parts of the same indivisible process. what is true and noble, as i think, in the rabbi's doctrine, is that which i have already tried to indicate: namely, that the worth of such a life is not exhausted by a catalogue of the good deeds done, but that, beyond and above all them, remains the inestimable value within its own circle of the very existence of a natural symbol of the good and holy--by the "holy" i understand that which is not only moral, but beautiful by reason of its morality--and the incalculable benefits to it of the pure fountain of all good influences which descend upon all within its reach. the stimulus which is given to the beholders of such a life--by the clear perception that morality does not mean a string of judicious commonplaces, but can be embodied as the spring of a harmonious life, and reveal itself as a concrete flesh-and-blood human being--is something which transcends in value all the particular results which we can tabulate and reckon up. we must think of it, not as the cause of so many external benefits, but as the manifestation of a spiritual force which modifies and raises the characters of all its surroundings. if the sphere within which it distinctly operates is far narrower than that of political or literary achievement, it is also incomparably purer, and works without a single drawback. every religion has its saints, and honours them in various ways, not always altogether edifying. but that man is unfortunate who has not a saint of his own--some one in whose presence, or in the very thought of whom, he does not recognise a superior, before whom it becomes him to bow with reverence and gratitude, and who has purified the atmosphere and strengthened the affections in a little circle from which the influence may be transmitted to others. the saint will be forgotten all too soon--long before less valuable, but accidentally more conspicuous, services have passed out of mind--but the moral elevation, even of a small circle, is a benefit which may be propagated indefinitely. if we cannot hope to preserve the name, we can try to carry on the good work; to maintain the ties which have been formed and propagate the goodwill through widening circles. that, i think, is what every one feels under the stress of the most terrible trials of life. we are shocked by the sense of the inevitable oblivion that will hide all that we loved so well. there is, according to my experience, only one thought which is inspiring, and--if not in the vulgar sense consoling, for it admits the existence of an unspeakable calamity--points, at least, to the direction in which we may gradually achieve something like peace and hopefulness without the slightest disloyalty to the objects of our love. it is the thought which i can only express by saying that we may learn to feel as if those who had left us had yet become part of ourselves; that we have become so permeated by their influence, that we can still think of their approval and sympathy as a stimulating and elevating power, and be conscious that we are more or less carrying on their work, in their spirit. we find, as lowell says in his noble ode-- we find in our dull road their shining track; in every nobler mood we feel the orient of their spirit glow, part of our life's unalterable good, of all our saintlier aspiration; they come transfigured back, secure from change in their high-hearted ways, beautiful evermore, and with the rays of morn on their white shields of expectation. alas, he adds, even the best deeds will be hidden before long by "the thoughtless drift of the deciduous years". yes; they will be forgotten before long, as we too shall be forgotten--the incalculable majority within a generation or two. the thought may be painful, but the reasonable conclusion is, i think, not that we should fret over the inevitable; rather that we should purify our minds from this as from other illusions, and feel ashamed of the selfish desire that our own names should be preserved when we know that so many who were far better and nobler than ourselves will inevitably be forgotten, and were better and nobler without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. gratitude to the obscure is, in this sense, i take it, a duty, which we cannot practise without a proportional moral benefit. it enables us to rise above the constant temptation to seek for notoriety at any price, and to make our ultimate aim the achievement of good work, not the chorus of popular applause which may be aroused. thoroughly to conquer that temptation is, i take it, one of the objects which every man should set before himself. and nothing, i think, helps one more than a vivid and enduring consciousness of the enormous debt which we owe to men and women who lived in obscurity, who never had a thought of emerging out of obscurity, and whose ennobling influence has yet become a part of every higher principle of action in ourselves. i may or i may not have formed too low an estimate of the services of the few heroes who stand conspicuously above the ordinary level; but i am certain that nothing that i can say would exaggerate the importance of many who have no claims to such a position. to cherish and preserve that influence by every faculty we possess seems to me to be our plainest duty; and we may comfort ourselves, if comfort be needed, by the reflection that, though the memory may be transitory, the good done by a noble life and character may last far beyond any horizon which can be realised by our imaginations. the end. footnote: [a] see the "wealth of nature," in _essays by a barrister_ [sir james fitzjames stephen]. aberdeen university press. generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) +-------------------------------------------------+ |transcriber's note: | | | |errors listed in the errata have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ on mr. spencer's data of ethics. by malcolm guthrie, author of "on mr. spencer's formula of evolution," & "on mr. spencer's unification of knowledge." london: the modern press, and , paternoster row, e.c. . (_all rights reserved._) contents. page chapter i.--ethics and the unification of knowledge. the philosophical view chapter ii.--the scientific view of the evolution of ethics chapter iii.--the biological view of ethics chapter iv.--the sociological view chapter v.--the ethical imperative chapter vi.--systems of ethics chapter vii.--the evolution of free will chapter viii.--evolution and religion chapter ix.--summary preface. this volume completes the critical examination of mr. spencer's system of philosophy already pursued through two previous volumes entitled respectively "on mr. spencer's formula of evolution," and "on mr. spencer's unification of knowledge." the entire task has been undertaken by a student for the use of students. it cannot be of much use to the general reader, as it presumes and indeed requires a very intimate knowledge of mr. spencer's works. for those who do not wish to enter into detailed examination perhaps chapter i. of the "unification of knowledge" will afford a good epitome of the line of criticism; and this may be followed, if desired, by a perusal of the "formula of evolution." it is believed that the most serious piece of criticism against mr. spencer's system will be found in the examination of his re-constructive biology in chapter v. of the "unification," and in the examination of the origin of organic molecules commencing at page of the "formula of evolution." evidently of the highest importance in a system of philosophy conceived in the manner in which mr. spencer presents it, this point of transition between the inorganic and the organic with its dependent histories is of the very deepest fundamental interest, and upon the question whether it is well or badly treated depends the practical value of his philosophy as applied to human concerns. in our opinion, whatever of worth there is in mr. spencer's works (and there is very much), derives its value from _a posteriori_ grounds and not from its _a priori_ reliance upon first principles, nor from its place in a deductive system of cosmic philosophy. it has not fallen to our lot, nor has it been our object, to appraise the separate or incidental value of mr. spencer's works. our view has been limited to the single object of examining them in the mode in which he presents them, as forming a connected system of philosophy. we have done so because he sets forth his works to us in this light, and evidently if they can be so accepted, it would be a gift to humanity of the highest value, for it would lend cogency to every past and confer a guidance to all future ages, forming a crowning glory to the intellectual achievements of the human race. it is therefore to this point that we address our examination, and in no unfriendly spirit; for the object mr. spencer had in view was one which appealed to every sentiment and every intellectual aspiration within us. but we feel bound to say how sadly we have been disappointed. we have found the object of our admiration to be like nebuchadnezzar's dream god, a thing apparently perfect and complete in configuration but like the image compounded of iron and clay and precious stones inevitably falling to pieces under the strain of sustained criticisms. mr. spencer's philosophic conception was indeed imposing, and before its magnificent proportions many have bowed down in sincere respect. but his cosmical scheme when carefully examined proved to be constructed of terms which had no fixed and definite meaning, which were in fact merely symbols of symbolic conceptions, conceptions themselves symbolic because they were not understood--and the moment we began to put them to use as having definite values they landed us forthwith in alternative contradictions! then to effect cosmical evolution, which is a process of imperceptible objective change, what was necessary, but to adopt a system of imperceptible word changes, so that the imperceptible word changes accompanying the imperceptible objective changes should lead us in the end to the completed results, and the process of evolution should thus be made comprehensible! in this manner over the spaces of an enormous work have we been skilfully led by a master of language till we find ourselves in imagination following out mentally the actual processes of the universe. but after all it has only been a process, in our own minds, of the skilful substitution of words! errors to be successful must be big and bold. fallacies of reasoning are detected on a medium scale, but when they are "writ large" it is difficult to detect them. trains of syllogisms are sometimes more effective because they are vast than because they are true. let them be imposing in their language and grand in their proportions, we naturally bow down to power, even if it is only power of largeness. when dealing with mr. spencer's reasonings we feel a certain awe as if we were contradicting the forces of the universe--seemingly allied to him. we feel conscious of an impertinence in treating of such great matters, dealt with in such a mighty sweep--disdainful of precision and consistency. the transformations and evolutions of reasoning in mr. spencer's works are no less wonderful than his treatment of words. the mind is swept along by an indiscernable but mighty flow, and sometimes after mysterious disappearances of consecutiveness between volumes or chapters, we find ourselves landed in a satisfied but bewildered manner at a conclusion about which we cannot but wonder however we arrived there. by such terms as equilibration, including the theory of the moving equilibrium; by such terms as polarity plastic and coercive; and by plausible similarities between modes of process, we are deluded into supposing we understand the constructive progress of nature and are made to feel happy and proud of our knowledge. a great self satisfaction attends the student who believes himself rightly to understand the universe. we are pleased with our teacher, and are still more pleased with ourselves. but the real difficulty appears when the necessity for exposition arises. if one undertakes to explain, if one has to condense and solidify for the purpose of teaching, if one wishes to make others understand, and share the knowledge one has attained, then indeed our difficulties commence. what seemed so grand and alluring to look at will not stand the ordinary handling of scientific language and logical statement as between man and man. the illusion vanishes, the system has gone. in these remarks we speak only of mr. spencer's cosmical system. of the general value of this work as a philosopher we express no opinion. in the estimation of competent thinkers it is very great. fiske, youmans, carveth read, ribot, maudsley, clifford, sully, grant allen, gopinay, and others are all working on spencerian lines, but we do not understand that they accept the cosmical explanation of mr. spencer. he marks not the age of complete accomplishment but the age of transition. he has not grasped the solution of problems, but he has shewn the direction of future studies. he has failed in his grand endeavour, but he has shown what to aim at and has pointed the way. much of his detailed work has been good and effective, and therefore one feels some compunction in writing of him so severely. nevertheless a man of such eminence must not be held sacred from criticism, but on the contrary, just by reason of his eminence and consequent influence, must his work be well examined before it is accepted and approved. this is the task we have set ourselves and which may now be considered as complete. we have approached the study without any prepossessions, and we have endeavoured, while being very strict, to be perfectly fair and honest in our presentations of mr. spencer's theories. naturally the work has been long and tedious, and where so many contradictory and indistinct expressions of opinion are given it has been necessary to deal largely in quotations. this has been done in justice both to ourselves and to our author. if we have succeeded in bringing out the main lines of thought for the future use of students we shall have accomplished our end. it is only by very strict thinking and discussion that truth is finally evolved. a few words must be added as to the teleological implications which a _westminster_ reviewer has discovered in our previous works, and has regarded as vitiating the whole of their reasoning. the subject of teleology is a very interesting and puzzling one, and is bound to receive careful attention from the student of nature. it requires much consideration as to what is meant by the term. there may be a natural teleology apart from a supernatural teleology. we have no very clear conceptions upon this point ourselves as yet, but are at present engaged upon the study of the question. intention and design are exemplified in human actions, means to an end are adopted by many animals; the "moving equilibrium" theory, and the "happy accident" theory alike seem inadequate to account for the origin of natural teleology or even for all variations of species; and the study of biological developments suggests to us the presence and activity of a subjective factor related to physical factors by some law to which may be due the origin of some of the biological variations. mr. spencer's theory of biological variations as internal forces generated by external forces, and thus acting as a counterbalance in opposition to an inimical force, or in harmony with a favourable force, having for its object the protection or sustentation of the organism, is an altogether different theory from the agnostic "happy accident" hypothesis of the naturalist school. it implies the origin of biological variations as means adapted to ends in the preservation of the organism or species, and if this is not found workable on the physical equilibration hypothesis, some extension of theory is required to account for the origin of biological variations in which teleological implications are involved, although this theory may be truly naturalistic and in perfect harmony with an orderly development in the manner of evolution. if we cannot predicate an anthropomorphic teleological mind at the beginning of things, nevertheless a teleology appears to be involved in biological developments and requires a naturalistic explanation. m. lionel dauriac[ ] enquires how it comes about that, while accepting the theory of evolution, we write a book of pages against its most illustrious exponent, and asks us to explain our acceptance of the doctrine as a whole. it is quite true, as he states, that we repudiate a materialistic explanation, and it is on this ground that we join issue with mr. spencer, inasmuch as, notwithstanding mr. spencer's own formal repudiation, all the formulas of explanation upon which he attempts the reconstruction of the universe are materialistic. the factors of chemistry, and the laws of physics, together with the laws of equilibration and polarity, are all purely materialistic in character. by the aid of these factors and these laws alone we do not think it possible to understand and explain the history of cosmical evolution. do we then accept a spiritual evolution to which the materialistic has been altogether subordinate? no. we do not understand the operations of the subjective apart from the material organism. it seems to us that there are material factors, and factors which are subjective, and what is wanted is the law of their correlation. when we say that we accept evolution, we mean that we accept the theory of an orderly progress from a state of indefinite, incoherent simplicity to a state of definite coherent complexity. we discern two sets or kinds of factors, the materialistic and the subjective, but we are unable sufficiently to understand them and their laws of correlation to lay down a formula of interaction of such a nature as to explain the orderly development which we recognise. this is a difficulty which has not been overlooked by mr. spencer. he would escape it in two ways. firstly by a mysticism, through which after the definite meaning he has given to his terms has been found to fail in actual work he changes all his fundamental terms into "symbolic conceptions." why? because they have no meaning; and if you give them a meaning the conclusions from them land the student in irreconcilable contradictions. out of this mysticism no progress is possible. secondly by means of the "double aspect" theory. according to this theory everything is both material and subjective, as you choose to regard it, and may be explained and accounted for in laws of the relations of either set of factors. it is true that phenomena may be so described, but it is not true that they can be so explained. there is an undoubted concomitance between the bodily act and the conscious feeling, but the real question is this,--does the conscious feeling wholly depend upon the physical series of events and has itself no effects on the physical series? is it produced without producing? is it something occurring in connexion with certain motions in the nerves of the organism and therefore dependent upon and wholly produced by the physical factors in their interrelation, according to the known chemical and physical laws of the factors? if it is so determined, and does not determine as part in a chain of causation it cannot be said to interfere with the materialistic explanation. that is complete in itself. the only question left is this:--how comes it about that some portions of the physical series of phenomena have this strange accompaniment of consciousness? a very interesting but comparatively unimportant question. the theory that phenomena have two sides is of no use whatever in the endeavour towards the statement of a cosmical formula of explanation. the result of our studies is to the effect that there are physical factors and subjective factors alike produced and producing. we aim at the statement of their law of correlation, and in this we would seek the cosmical formula. we however seek it in vain, and we do not think it possible to attain it. in the meantime we look to the development of the subjective factor in life, and more especially in human life, as a fact of the greatest interest, the more so that we discern in that development an orderly progress in a well marked manner; and it is our task to understand the laws of that orderly development. this study has to be undertaken along with the study of material evolution; and although we may not fully understand our problem, there is much that we can understand and much to make our views large and sympathetic and our minds expansive in working out the great questions that are set before us. the study of ethics from the evolutionist's point of view assumes an altogether different phase from the old methods of inquiry and rests upon an altogether different basis. its ground of authority is seen to rest in the very nature of humanity and does not come to him as an imposed law. confidence is first shaken and then fully restored. from the new point of view the merit of all preceding systems is seen, and how they all fall into harmony in a wonderful manner in the consensus of mutual support and enforce ethical law by an united authority. the chief merit of mr. spencer's "data of ethics" is that it puts the study upon an entirely new basis in grafting it upon the study of the larger science of biology. heretofore the study has been isolated, and supposed to be complete within its own borders. henceforth no professor or student will be considered competent to express opinions without being well grounded in the study of biological and psychological evolution. ethics, along with sociology, must be studied as part of the greater movement. footnote: [ ] "revue philosophique," dec. . on mr. spencer's data of ethics. chapter i. ethics and the unification of knowledge. the philosophical view. always a very complex problem, the study of ethics, in mr. spencer's works, becomes in some respects still more complex from the necessity he is under of affiliating it in some way upon the cosmical process. conceiving all knowledge to be capable of unification as a system of causation, so that when the relations of the original factors are understood, all histories are merely corollaries from these ultimate truths, mr. spencer feels bound, in the first place, to show that each particular science falls into its due place in the logical scheme. consequently, one of the main ideas permeating the "data of ethics" is this view of ethics as interpretable only by an adequate knowledge of the cosmical process in which it forms a feature. indeed, the proposition is laid down at the outset that parts can only be properly understood through a knowledge of the wholes of which they form part.[ ] upon this mr. spencer reasons that since ethics deals with purposed conduct, that kind of conduct can only be understood through a scientific knowledge of conduct in general, which again forms part of the study of action in general, bringing us at once to the cosmical process upon the understanding of which, therefore, depends the understanding of our special subject. this philosophic relation of ethics to the cosmical process is referred to in the preface as being, in fact, the main object mr. spencer had in view in his elaborate series of volumes, and is more explicitly stated in chapter iv. of the work under review, in which mr. spencer considering "the ways of judging conduct," justifies the course he thus pursues. here it is pointed out that in the systems of all preceding authors the idea of causation has been insufficiently recognised or has even been altogether ignored--an assertion which is thereupon justified by a review of the theological, political, intuitional, and utilitarian schools of moral philosophers. mr. spencer thereupon proceeds (¶ ) "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 connexions. of course, i do not mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but i mean that they recognise 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 generalises these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage at which its empirical generalisations are included in a rational generalisation 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 recognising 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 organisation, scattered through the masses of worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognised by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalisations, are now beginning to assume the character of generalisations 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 pre-supposed. 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. "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 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."[ ] in this passage mr. spencer propounds morality or ethics as a matter for scientific study, only to be understood or explained as part of general conduct when it is capable of explanation deductively from antecedent causes. the distinction recognised between conduct called moral and conduct regarded as immoral is only to be understood when, after a historical survey of human actions and of the actions of organisms in general, we not only perceive its immediately antecedent causes, but, going behind them, recognise the ultimate necessity of their occurrence in the very nature of the universe. this reveals the special features of mr. spencer's method in the treatment of his subject as distinguished from that followed by mr. leslie stephen in his "science of ethics," a distinction which we may conveniently mark by terming them respectively the philosophic and the scientific methods. the former term we use in the sense assigned to it in the definition given by mr. spencer in "first principles."[ ] a philosophy is complete when the mind has been able to form for itself such an appraisement of the relations and conditions of factors at a period sufficiently remote to ante-date any great amount of complexity as will enable us deductively to frame a history of developments which may correspond with the actual history of sequences in the concrete universe. if this appraisement of a remote cosmos characterised by comparative simplicity nevertheless admits the existence of many factors whose differences are not accounted for, philosophy is so far formally incomplete: but as the determination of these points lies beyond the powers of human reason, philosophy may justly be regarded as practically complete if it unifies from this point of view all the knowledge with which the human mind is conversant. if we are able to include all the sciences in one coherent whole nothing more can be expected of philosophy--beyond that lies the realm of speculation and the unknowable. the scope of the sciences is not so ambitious. their aim is limited within a much narrower purview. they seek merely to ascertain the laws which subsume special classes of phenomena. they recognise causation and their inductions are valid to the extent of the classes of facts expressed in any particular law. but each science or class of facts is severally and separately worked upon even though the progress of study is ever disclosing the mutual dependence of the various sciences. it is very evident that there must be great imperfections in our scheme of knowledge so long as there remain great blanks between the sciences. but this is a natural condition of the progress of thought. on the other hand a complete philosophic system such as that referred to above, and at which mr. spencer aims, would throw a flood of light upon each particular department if the mutual relation of all problems could be deduced from ascertained relations of the original factors. but it is also clear that if we think we have framed such a philosophy without having really succeeded in so doing, or at any rate without having succeeded in making others understand or accept it, then the supposed philosophy becomes a confusing element in the exposition of a scientific problem. in the work under review the philosophical attempt is very regrettable for it spoils the exposition of a scientific treatment, surpassing all former expositions, since it dims the clearness of the argument, and hinders the force of its practical application. such is our judgment of mr. spencer's "data of ethics." it contains at once an excellent scientific treatment of the subject and a weak attempt to affiliate it upon an impotent philosophy. to the philosophical or cosmical aspect of the work we will confine ourselves in the present chapter, so that we shall hereafter be free to devote our attention to the more solid scientific treatment of the questions at issue which it presents. the students of mr. spencer's previous volumes will have observed that although he states the problem of evolution as a deductive one, he has yet regarded evolution in a different aspect in the working out of each specific problem. thus it is very noteworthy that throughout the biological, psychological, and sociological expositions, mr. spencer has regarded the establishment of the fact of evolution by the accretion of insensible changes as equivalent to an actual affiliation of the sciences upon the theory of evolution, utterly regardless of his own rigid requirement that these changes should be explained and accounted for by the general deductions of cosmical evolution. the histories of organisms, for instance, exhibit gradual development, and therefore are supposed to conform to the definition of evolution at large. but if these changes are not intellectually discerned as the result of antecedent conditions and traceable to the relations of the ultimate factors recognised by the philosophy, then the affiliation of the science upon evolution in general is not made good. while the form and outside show are present, the organic connexion is not exhibited. but it is a characteristic of mr. spencer's mode of exposition, that when the latter fails, the former takes its place. hence the gradual development of conduct is evolution of conduct, but it is an evolution of which we want an explanation. we seek it in biology, but find that biology also is a gradual increment of insensible changes of which again we seek in vain for an explanation. the effect of this mode of presenting evolution or the unification of knowledge is heightened by the seemingly systematic manner of its exposition. development is shown to be universally characterised by progress in three forms--namely, from a simple, indefinite, incoherent state to a complex, definite, and coherent state: and the wonderful scope which the universe affords, both in time and space, for historically exhibiting these traits, overwhelms the mind with a sense of the universality of evolution, in spite of the fact that all the time the very point of the question is missed in the absence of any explanation. we recognise the gradual development, but where is the deductive connexion? where is the promised system of corollaries from original factors which shall account for the historical development? thus, when in the "data of ethics" we find a reference to the biology, the psychology, and the sociology as parts of an established philosophical system we are apt to suppose that the views as to ethics which mr. spencer expresses derive their authority from an antecedent apprehension of the cosmical process; whereas this is not really the case: and although it is essential to the study that ethics should be viewed as dependent upon the sciences named, yet such a connexion is not shown as one of logical order; we are only told that ethics exhibits similar traits in its order of development. but in addition to this foisting of the sciences upon philosophy by means of general similarities of history, the student will find that whatever inner deductive warrant is set forth is badly conceived in the appraisement of the original factors--matter, motion, and force--terms to which no definite conceptions can be attached. and should any one be so rash as to attach to them such definite meanings as would render their logical use possible, then the deductive process which would have to be undertaken to render them into corollaries corresponding to concrete histories would very shortly bring him to confusion. should he, again, confine himself to the definite chemical factors existent in the primordial nebulæ, then his deductive attempt would bring him to the impassable gulf at the commencement of life. and, moreover, should he import the factor of sentiency into some simple chemical aggregates, and should he be able to set forth some gradual development of mind in correlation with gradual changes of physical organism, then again in the absence of any knowledge as to the relations of the two he would find himself unable to work out the deductive process and fail in the system of _à priori_ explanations which philosophy requires. for philosophy, according to mr. spencer, demands a deductive process commencing with the apprehension of the relations subsisting between the factors of the universe at some particular stage, which deductive process shall be a counterpart of the actual histories of the universe. such deductive explanations mr. spencer does attempt--mainly in the biology--the most important as to results, and the most badly reasoned of all his works. it is attempted firstly in a very concrete manner, by a consideration of the properties of the chemical substances which form the bases of organisms, and of the properties of the surrounding agencies--light, heat, air, water, etc. to the inter-relation of these are applied the laws of mechanics, such as movement in the direction of least resistance, etc., and by their instrumentality at last are organisms supposed to be evolved which have, somehow, a concomitant of consciousness which is nevertheless not a factor in any action of an organism. in such a history however, it is found necessary to admit genesis, reproduction, and heredity, and these, since they cannot be explained, are accepted without explanation. it is true that polarity is called in to assist the endeavour, but it is a polarity which is the obedient servant of the author, and does as it is bid, firstly in being so amenable to changed conditions as to alter conformably with them, and again in being so rigid in its acquired form as to coerce molecules into definite construction. it is alternately so pliable and so fixed as, hand over hand, to enable the author to scale the highest summits of biology. it is also true that equilibration is called in: but then every change in the organic and the inorganic world turns out to be an equilibration, so that the word becomes devoid of meaning. a more special study has to be given to mr. spencer's theory of the moving equilibrium with which he identifies the existence of an organism, and by means of which he is supposed to bridge over the chasm between it and the inorganic. the idea is derived from a consideration of the spinning top, the solar system, and the steam engine, more particularly if the latter is self-feeding! these are moving equilibria, and if their motions are disturbed by some external object they will generate forces in opposition to the environment. this purely mechanical conception is then rendered into an abstract form by the substitution of the idea of related _forces_, as constituting a moving equilibrium, and is found to fit the abstract conception of an organism, so that the solar system and the organism can both be identified as moving equilibria. next, by loosely characterising the behaviour of the solar system in its relation to its environment, real or hypothetical, as consisting of changes due to the laws of a moving equilibrium, mr. spencer seeks to show that the adaptations of an organism in response to changed external conditions are likewise due to the same laws, so that organisms and their histories are supposed to be explainable or accounted for both in their origin and in their development in the same manner as the moving equilibria of the physical world. thereupon we are supposed to understand both why organisms generate forces to counterbalance inimical external forces, and why they generate forces (adaptations) for securing and absorbing forces of the environment (food) favourable to their continued existence. it is only what all moving equilibria do. this biological theory we have discussed at great length elsewhere,[ ] and we then came to the conclusion that it was only a mockery of a rational explanation. we also found that the facts of genesis and the law of heredity were wholly inexplicable by means of a study of physics or by means of a study of the nature and laws of the moving equilibrium. so that altogether we found the main requirements of a philosophical explanation of biological facts very far from being complied with. as part of the deductive system which our philosophy requires, we have now to consider the origin and development of purposed actions--the subject-matter, namely, of our present study which is to lead us up to the ultimate study of ethics proper. resuming the consideration of the problem at the point where we left off in our reference to the explanations of biology, we have first to review the arguments which would explain the origin of purposed actions in the nature and laws of the moving equilibrium. for if the actions of organisms are thus explainable, so must be the purposed actions or purposed conduct of organisms, and mr. spencer himself expressly includes them in the biological definition. and indeed it is doubtful whether "purpose" is not covertly introduced in the very definition of life as "the continuous adaptation of inner relations to outer relations." the question is a very nice one, and brings us at once to the obscure confines of the organic and the inorganic worlds. how, for instance, from the laws of the moving equilibrium, as derived from the study of the solar system, are we to regard the movements of an infusorium? "an infusorium swims randomly 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 neighbourhood of some creature by which it is swallowed and digested.... the conduct is constituted of actions so little adjusted to ends, that life continues only as long as the accidents of the environment are favourable."[ ] this is one of mr. spencer's transitional passages. the infusorium is a moving equilibrium. consequently it rearranges its forces for self-preservation in opposition to inimical forces of the environment, and in harmony with favoring forces of the environment. the special adjustment it displays is motion. but this is not communicated motion of a mechanical description, such as the kick given to a foot-ball. nor, apparently, are we to regard its motions as due to a series of mechanical motions of the molecules of the environment. the action of the environment is expressed as being a stimulus. does this mean a chemical action? or does it refer to the action of heat and light? if so it means that the attractions and repulsions of atoms and the motions of ether and of molecules, account for the movements of the infusorium. there is certainly no "purpose" in such a theory. but then the question arises, how do we apply the theory of the moving equilibrium to such an assemblage of atoms thus acted upon to account for the fact that the assemblage of atoms endeavours to prolong its existence by defence and absorption or by absorption only? if it be said that it does not do so, and that its movements have no food object, but are simply the effect of chemical and mechanical action, then it is not an animal displaying life, inasmuch as it does not adapt means to an end--motions to the end of sustenance. if it be regarded as a moving equilibrium in this sense, it is one of the same sort as the solar system, and not one of the sort known as animals. nevertheless, mr. spencer regards it as displaying life, yet very little adjusted to ends; but again he regards its actions as determined by external stimuli, without, however, explaining his meaning. if we are to regard the motions of the infusorium as displaying life, it must be by regarding them as adaptations of inner relations to outer relations--the outer relations being food; but if its actions are merely chemically and mechanically determined, then its conduct is not adapted to or balanced against the action of any external relations, but is the submissive consequent thereof. but if its conduct is altogether determined by external relations we seem to be landed in a paradox. the only escape is by the obvious inference that the definition of life advanced by mr. spencer always implies an adaptation or adjustment or action having the definite twofold object in view of sustenance and self-protection employed _against_ the inimical forces of the environment. life adaptations are always for the accomplishment of the end of self-preservation, either by the procuring of food, or by defence against enemies--self-preservation primarily and afterwards the continuation of the race. therefore, if we regard the movements of the infusoria as included in the definition of life we must regard them as having in view the sustenance of the creatures. they are acts adapted to ends. are they then to be regarded as purposed actions? life adaptations seem to be distinguished from the changes wrought by external forces upon a physical moving equilibrium in the fact, namely, that they act towards a definite end, and therefore come into the class of purposed actions. we cannot do more than indicate the difficulty. if we say these actions are not purposed we allow that there may be purposed adaptation of means to ends by chemistry and mechanics. if we say that chemistry and mechanics do this, then we have to revise our meaning of chemistry and mechanics, and that in a much more thorough manner than mr. spencer has done in his treatment of the moving equilibrium. that there are biological adjustments which do not manifest purpose we experience every day in the thickening of the skin and the changes wrought by climate or daily avocation, although it is true these adjustments may receive a scientific explanation independently of their being adaptations of means to ends. we also find that there are reflex actions of organisms which take place in response to external stimuli without any conscious purpose, such as breathing, digesting, &c. we are also acquainted with the fact that purposed actions become by long habit automatic. indeed we have more experience of purposed actions becoming automatic than of automatic or reflex actions becoming purposed. can there then be purpose without consciousness? there are adaptations in the vegetable world as well as in the animal, and of these we do not predicate conscious design. nor can we, on the theory of life as the adaptation of a moving equilibrium to its environment, admit that these changes are due to mere happy accidents of origin and survival, for we are required to account for them as necessary results of their existence as moving equilibria. yet if so the adjustments are so complex, so marvellous in their relations to the insect world and the animal world generally in view of their preservation and the propagation of their species, that purpose or means adapted to ends is the apparent characteristic. means adapted to ends is denied in the "happy accident" theory, and is sought to be explained by the "moving equilibrium" theory. yet when we come to consider the abstract conception of a moving equilibrium derived from our solar system we can discern no endeavour towards self-sustenance and self defence. no adaptations are there made to secure either of these objects. there is no purpose manifested, and no adjustment made in view of ends to be secured. on the other hand, there are many adaptations in the animal and vegetable worlds which are not consciously purposed. since, however, ours is a critical task and not a reconstructive work we need do no more than point out that purposed actions in particular, and biological adaptations as a whole, are not explainable by regarding organisms as aggregates of the chemical elements acted upon by physical forces and constituting merely physical moving equilibria, of which the laws are similar to those derived from a consideration of moving equilibria like the solar system. such a theory does not admit of purposed action. stated in the abstract, the problem is how to explain the origin of purpose in a moving equilibrium--commencing from the solar system and proceeding to a self-feeding engine and pursuing our investigation to the abstract moving equilibrium of forces in which external inimical or favourable forces generate internal forces as a counterbalance, either of opposition or harmony of adjustment. thus stated, the problem is purely of a dynamic nature, and would give an understanding of purpose as a dynamic relation of aggregates of forces. this is the true spencerian view to take of the problem and its mode of settlement, but it is one to which mr. spencer does not apply himself. in the absence of such a study mr. spencer forsakes the true line of explanation required by his philosophy. but we think if we proceed more deeply into this study we shall find purpose connected with consciousness. the question arises, must all purpose be conscious purpose? purpose implies the direction of action, it implies an interval of time, it implies the accomplishment of a result. in these respects it differs from chemical and mechanical action. we have to ask what place consciousness finds in the constitution and action of a moving equilibrium. evidently it has no place in the solar system, for physicists can make their calculations without taking it into consideration as a factor. yet the ideal or abstract moving equilibrium, by whose aid we are endeavouring to understand the actions of organisms, is derived from the consideration of the solar system as a moving equilibrium. but reducing the problem from the abstract to the concrete study of an organism, we have to ask what place consciousness holds in a moving equilibrium of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, etc., in relation with an environment of heat, light, etc. we find that it is in the main a factor in all those classes of actions which we term purposed--that in so far as actions depart from the chemical and mechanical, that in so far as aggregates manifest the characteristics of life--namely, the adaptation of inner relations to outer relations--the nearer do they approach the most complete adaptation of means to the ends of complete living, and the more do they manifest conscious purpose. the theory has been propounded that consciousness is the result of complexity in the combination of the chemical elements, a complexity which can be explained on purely physical grounds. mr. spencer's biology is partly worked so as to prove this theory. but it is evident that no more can be got out of a deductive theory than is contained in the original factors. it is useless to say that we do not sufficiently know all the properties of the original factors, because that is to abandon this particular theory, and to acknowledge its inadequacy. the admission necessitates an attempt to re-state the original forces of the factors. if this can be done it is equivalent to propounding a new theory, which again must be judged by its deductive efficacy. the theory that complexity of nervous structure--a structure produced by chemical and mechanical combination--suffices to explain memory, reflection, judgment, choice, and purpose, has been treated by dr. bain and professor clifford at considerable length, and has been criticised in our former works in great detail.[ ] the theory that organisms are the result of chemical and mechanical combinations, and that consciousness is a concomitant of some processes in the continuous existence of such physical combinations, throws all the burthen of explanation just as fully upon the line of physical causation as if there were no such concomitant of consciousness whatsoever. the determining causes are wholly physical, and the chain of sequence is complete within the lines of chemical and mechanical relations. the fact that independent and concomitant consciousness accompanies some of the actions in question is an interesting circumstance, but although consciousness is produced as an effect, it never on this theory produces any effects itself. the attempt to amend the conceptions of the original chemical factors (the sixty or seventy so-called elements,) and of the physical factors (heat, light, etc.,) by the association with them of mind, feeling, etc., has at various times produced vague theories. more particularly of later years professor clifford's theory of mind-stuff has attracted a great deal of attention. but, singular to say, professor clifford only endeavoured to work out his theory in some vague semi-mechanical, semi-subjective kind of way. it was not of such a sort that, given a nebula such as we supposed to be the predecessor of the solar system, we should be able to deduce from it the existing universe. the proper statement of such a problem would be a statement of the relations not merely of mind-stuff, but of mind-oxygen, mind-nitrogen, etc. the conception would have to be of such a nature as to express the mind-factor, mental side, or subjective aspect of oxygen, as related to the mind-factor of nitrogen, etc., and how they variously affected the conduct of the doubly-constituted atoms or of the more complex molecules into which they formed themselves. but this is a mere indication of the larger task of estimating the whole of the elementary substances, and estimating the value and the action of their relative mind-factors. from this would have to be determined the law of growth by which increasing complexity evolved the continually increasing power of the mind-factor in determining actions. upon this might rest a rational basis for a definition of life of such sort that the organic could be recognised as arising out of the inorganic. and since the organic, in its latest and highest development, is mainly distinguished by purposed actions, purposed actions might be deemed to have evolved in a natural way out of actions which were not purposed. but such a theory is not capable of definite statement, and our philosophic object in endeavouring to account for the origin of purposed action out of non-purposed action is as far off as ever. it might be as well here for the full satisfaction of the student, to consider how far the origin of purposed action is taken account of by mr. darwin, or is to be accounted for by his methods. there is a wide distinction between mr. spencer's treatment of biology and that of mr. darwin. mr. spencer aims at a complete logical deductive system, and endeavours to show how in the very nature of things, everything that is, must have been what it is. mr. darwin's endeavour is not so ambitious. he confines his studies to the field of biology, and to past histories of living creatures, as preserved for us in the geological record. his is a purely scientific work, not trespassing beyond the generalisation of the facts with which he deals. these are large and immensely important; so much so, that they cover the whole history of living things: but his explanations only go a certain way. they are not fundamental, and we are only led backwards in time to the original twilight and ultimate darkness. his theory is strictly causational. the explanation of existing organisms is to be found in the relations of antecedent factors. part of these we understand, and part of them we do not understand. we do not understand the wherefore of genesis and heredity, but we know them to be facts, and they form the basis for large explanations. for if organisms are modifiable, ever-increasing changes of structure and function can be produced and reproduced. the increment of induced changes in various directions may in succeeding generations be such as to obliterate all semblance of relationship to the original ancestor. what are the laws of these changes it is mr. darwin's great achievement to have explained. the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, the adaptation to new environments by the use and disuse of parts, the changes induced by change of climate and food, or by the action of new organisms in the environment, all these considerations open out to the astonished and admiring gaze of man vast and interesting histories of changes such as a discerning mind like mr. grant allen revels in in his rambles through the english fields. the question arises how far mr. darwin's theories can be extended philosophically, so as to explain what he accepts unexplained, viz.: genesis, heredity, the origin of organisms out of the inorganic, the gradual development of consciousness, the increase of feeling and intelligence, and the advent of purposed conduct directed to the achievement of definite and deferred ends? for all these points he leaves undealt with as not coming within his scientific province. evidently his theories are not fitted to explain what they take for granted. they cannot explain what they are founded upon. the origin of organisms is unexplained: propagation of the species is accepted as an unexplained fact, so are heredity and the presence of consciousness. purposed actions are not accounted for in mr. darwin's works. but there is one point to which we wish to call attention as regards the different method in which the changes of species are treated by mr. spencer and mr. darwin. the former regards all changes as necessitated by the laws of the moving equilibrium, so that a change of climate of such a nature as to deprive an organism of the requisite moisture for continued existence through a long period of time, would absolutely necessitate some device on its part to counterbalance the external force of drought. it would be a consequent in the very nature of things that the plant should become thick and succulent like the cactus, or that the animal should form for itself a reservoir for the storage of water. mr. darwin's theory is very different. he advances the fact that organisms, and more particularly those of the lower and simpler forms constantly produce "sports." these are not chance accidents in the false metaphysical sense of being uncaused, but are termed accidents as being produced by some external or internal incident in the growth of the embryo, which causes it to deviate in some point from the structure of the parent. this "sport" may be to the advantage or to the detriment of the new organism. if it should be the latter, it soon perishes: but if it should assist the organism to a fuller life, then it will live longer and better, and its progeny will in like manner survive to the detriment of its fellows of the unimproved type. the accretion of changes produced in this way, now in one direction, and now in another, together with the influences elsewhere indicated, might do and no doubt has done much in the development of species. to this cause of change we give in no disrespectful spirit, the name of the "happy accident theory" as opposed to mr. spencer's "moving equilibrium theory," and would ask what it may and may not account for. it may account for much within the limits of mr. darwin's enquiry, but does it at all account for those fundamental facts which he takes for granted--genesis, heredity and consciousness, or the origin of the organic out of the inorganic. could some inorganic aggregate, produced by the relations of certain chemical compounds under the action of light, heat, &c, accidentally take to generation by fission or otherwise, and then by a succession of sports eventuate in sexual generation? could such a chemical combination accidentally become conscious, and by a succession of sports organise its consciousness into purpose? into these regions we think we cannot carry the happy accident theory--the theory of sports. this is a valid and justifiable theory within the limits of biology, though even here the estimate of its results may be exaggerated; but beyond it and behind those limits it is of no use. the very admission of it is a confession of ignorance and incapacity to apprehend the exact line of causation; but so long as we are satisfied that the accident or the sport which gives rise to a variety, occurs within the scope of factors which we are able to recognise, the incapacity to account for the special cause of a special sport does not affect the general theory. but if any one should rashly extend the application of the theory so as to explain the otherwise unaccountable presence of a new factor, or advance it as an explanation of a line of sequences not logically deducible from all that is included in the mental appraisement of the original factors by which the system of sequences is to be unified, then he makes a very great mistake indeed. it is to guard against such a mistake that we take notice of the proper limits to the applicability of mr. darwin's theory. indeed we think it is too commonly supposed that mr. darwin's theory is of the universalistic scope of mr. spencer's theories; his work however is purely of a scientific character relating to the province of biology. it will have been noticed that in the preceding argument we have not dealt with the philosophical problem of the theory of knowledge. we have simply taken the study of the cosmos in the historical order, finding the inorganic as antecedent to the organic, the unconscious to the conscious, a historical order which cannot be disputed whatever theory of knowledge may be held. we conclude therefore that in so far as the data of ethics is an attempt to explain purposed actions and their ethical quality upon a philosophical method of the kind propounded by mr. spencer, namely, as included in a proper understanding of the cosmical process, and of the histories of the universe consequent upon a knowledge of the relations of its original factors--so far mr. spencer's work must be considered a failure. that there is much of real scientific value in the work under review, and much original insight and true apprehension of process, we hold to be true; but this scientific value is much obscured by the vague cosmical references which pervade an otherwise admirable study. as stated at the outset of the chapter, we consider the attempt to affiliate purposed actions upon the general lines of the cosmical process to mar the effect of the work in its scientific aspect. the fault is all the greater since mr. spencer rests the full stress of his theories, not so much upon their limited scientific value, as upon the soundness of the philosophic basis. for twenty years or more he has been working from this basis, and in the course of his marvellous work has had ever in view as his crowning achievement the establishment of ethics upon a cosmical basis through a cosmical process of which it should be the glorious outcome. ethics should be shown to be dominant and imperative through the voice of the expanding universe. yet, except as showing ethics to be a part of the study of biology, the general laws of the development of which are known, but which in its factors and their relations and origin is utterly unknown, he has not succeeded. he might, with the exception indicated, just as well have written his "data of ethics" first as last. footnotes: [ ] data of ethics, pp. and . [ ] data of ethics, p. . [ ] see "on mr. spencer's unification of knowledge," chap. i., ¶ , and chap. iii, ¶ . [ ] on mr. spencer's "unification of knowledge," chap. v. [ ] data of ethics, p. . [ ] on mr. spencer's "unification of knowledge," p. , _et seq._; and see dr. bain's reply in "mind," no. xxxi. chapter ii. the scientific view of the evolution of ethics. modern thought since the publication of the "origin of species," has been more and more forced into the recognition of ethics, (together with all other forms of human conduct) as the result of a process of natural growth. the factors out of which this growth arose are lost in the obscurities of our ignorance, and many of the processes upon which it has depended also surpass existing human powers of explanation. science has to take for granted the unexplained existence of organisms. for her purposes she is obliged to begin by assuming certain primitive organisms of some simple structure and functions. she is also obliged to admit, although she does not understand, the facts of reproduction and of heredity. nor can she refuse to acknowledge a place in the history of development, along with the factors of chemistry and of physics, to a subjective factor called feeling, consciousness, mind, or however else it may be best expressed. all these unexplainable but fundamental verities of existence she has to assume. it is because these are unexplained that science falls short of becoming a philosophy. but within the range of their operation science can tell us much, and the darwinian doctrines have displayed before our eyes the wonderful histories of change and growth through the preceding cycles of the world's existence. little doubt now remains in the minds of thoughtful men as to the truth of biological development. the theory rests upon such a wide induction of facts extending over so many branches of science and over such remote periods of time, and withal as by a stroke of magic it has so arranged all sorts of odd incomprehensible facts into definite places in a well ordered organic history, that the mind can no longer withhold its subjection to so imperial and cogent a scientific conception. although the philosophical laws of biological development are as we have seen beyond our reach, and although our theory of the accidental origin of variations is rather lame, still there is much that can be expressed in the formal statements called the laws of biological development, which throws light upon those processes of change and growth that have led up from simple organic forms to the highest manifestation of life in the human race. mr. spencer defines life as "the continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations." this mr. spencer regards not merely as a definition but as a law. its philosophical justification is sought in vain, but it may be accepted as a correct scientific statement--not only of the non-conscious adaptations of organisms to changes of the environment, (such as the thickening of the fur to resist arctic cold, or protective change of colour to imitate physical surroundings,) but also of the conscious adaptations by which higher animals perform particular actions or undergo changes of habit. as mr. spencer points out, the acceptance of this law implies not merely an entire harmony between the existence of an organism and its environment, but it also implies various degrees of life. the greater the number and variety of correspondences established between an organism and the immensities of the external world--immensities displayed not only in the multiplicities of individual objects, but also in the grandeur of their collective interrelations--the greater the degree of life. much stress is laid by mr. spencer upon this quantitative character of life. much more, indeed, than upon mere continuity, although the latter is to a certain extent essential to the former. subordinate to this notion, advance in degree of life is found to proceed from a simple, incoherent, and indefinite life to a more and more definite, coherent and complex set of relations with the environment. but side by side with this development, and indeed in a manner to be likened to that of a geometrical progression, the subjective factor has advanced in relative importance. in its more rudimentary development, mr. spencer finds pain to be the concomitant of those states of the physical organism which tend to its destruction, and pleasure to be the concomitant of those states which tend to its promotion. thus hunger is a pain indicative of the absence of those supplies of energy to be obtained from the environment, which are requisite for the continuance of the organism's activity, while the pleasure of feeding is concomitant with the due supply of the energy necessary for the continuance of organic function. pleasure and pain, therefore, become motives, and the attainment of the one and the avoidance of the other work together for the continuance of life. pleasures and pains are relative to the organism--according to the physiological constitution and structure of the organism so are its pleasures and its pains. the concomitant of some of the structures and functions of the organism has been not merely sentiency but perception. mind has developed from the distinguishment, identification, and recognition of modes of sentiency. these functions and structures have been accompanied by pleasure and pain, and have formed the basis of the pleasures of intellectual activity in their multiform variety. from their very nature in relation to the environment they have increased wonderfully the quantitative development of life. with the increase of mind has proceeded the recognition of the part played in the organic universe by feeling. this recognition of the existence of feeling--of the susceptibilities of external organisms to pleasure and pain--has formed the basis of a large part of the adaptations of organisms in relation to their organic environment. adaptations revealing this recognition are to be seen not only more manifestly in the actions of man and the animals, but also in the functions of plants, strange as this may seem. with this increase of general intelligence has proceeded an increase of rational knowledge of the causal relationships of phenomena: and with the increase of the knowledge of human motives has proceeded an increased knowledge of the sequences of actions. thus larger rational judgments of the consequences of actions have been attained. following upon the increased recognition of pleasure and pain as motives, and upon the increased amount of rational judgment as to the sequences of actions, has come the adaptation of conduct to the pains and pleasures of others. those adaptations have, however, been relative to the particular constitution of the ego, and relative also to the constitution of the environing egos. the knowledge of the existence of sentiency in external organisms may be turned to the account of the ego by inflicting pain, so as to coerce other sentient organisms to its own selfish objects; or, again, by conferring pleasure, so as to subserve the same end. thus cruelty may be a natural pleasure in certain early stages of development, as a concomitant of necessities of existence, and may remain by inheritance long after the necessities have passed away. but with the increase of life has occurred the increase of sympathy. it is a law of nature that after the pleasures of the ego are satisfied they are augmented by the contemplation of similar enjoyments of others. but this again is relative. the gourmand likes the society of gourmands, and cares not for the company of the æsthetic or the ascetic. the man of taste revels in the society of kindred natures and despises the pleasures of the base. but the family relation has been the main source of all sweet and manly sympathies: and it has been the gradually widening scope of social organisations which has spread more and more the feeling of human sympathy. the course of history exhibits to us a constant growth, not merely in passively refraining from the infliction of pain, but also in the active endeavour to promote the happiness of our fellow creatures. this is a general statement of the scientific view of purposed conduct. its laws are derived from a study of its growth. the growth is one exhibiting several distinguishable features. there has been the ordinary biological "struggle for existence," and "survival of the fittest." there have been adaptations necessitated by the action of the environment, and there have been chance variations within the lines of causation which, benefitting the individual or some particular race, have given them such an advantage in the battle of life as to secure for their descendants a preponderating possession of the good things of the world. there has been the increase of intelligence, the increase in the organisation of society, the increase of rational judgments of phenomena and human actions. there has been increased knowledge of the determination of actions by motives. there has been increase of sympathy. but what is the ethical virtue of this historical study is not very clear. the history of human developments is a matter of natural history and no more. and even if we proceed as we might do, to study more in detail the history of the development of notions of right and wrong and of the various changeful applications of those terms, we are still within the limits of a natural history--we are still holding the merely scientific or observant attitude. it is true such study may be essential to our future history: but the mere study of what has been, and the consequent pre-vision of what will be, establishes no rule of right. to prophecy the determining courses of future human conduct does not furnish an ethical imperative to the individual. "if so it will be," he may say, "so let it be, it is no affair of mine. the obligation rests with nature and not with me." whence then the new "regulative system," the want of which fills mr. spencer with alarm? where shall we look for the new gospel which shall restrain and vivify the moral conduct of future generations in place of the supernatural systems which are supposed to be tottering to their fall? and if we go beyond this and find that this natural history of man is governed by general laws of adaptation and development we shall still have to question the ethical discernment and ethical authority in special junctures, when what is--is judged not to be what it ought to be; when, in fact, adaptations or biological facts, or equilibrations produced by evolution, are judged not to be ethically good equilibrations. however, mr. spencer holds that rules of right conduct can be established on a scientific basis, and it is our task to examine his treatment of the problem. "though this first division of the work terminating the synthetic philosophy, cannot, of course, contain the specific conclusions to be set forth in the entire work; yet it implies them in such wise that, definitely to formulate them requires nothing beyond logical deduction. "i am the more anxious to indicate in outline if i cannot complete this final work, because the establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing need. now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative. few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system, no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it. most of those who reject the current creeds, appear to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may be safely thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling agency. meanwhile, those who defend the current creeds allege that in the absence of the guidance it yields, no guidance can exist; divine commandments they think the only possible guides. thus between these extreme opponents there is a certain community. the one holds that the gap left by disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics, need not be filled by a code of natural ethics; and the other holds that it cannot be so filled. both contemplate a vacuum which the one wishes and the other fears. as the change which promises or threatens to bring about this state, desired or dreaded, is rapidly progressing, those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief."[ ] it is clear, from the above passage, that mr. spencer seeks not merely a knowledge of the laws of past developments, which have landed us in our present position with regard to moral obligation in general and the varied social regulations extant in different societies, but he seeks in addition to strengthen and establish on a new basis the authority of all such obligations. what mr. spencer hopes for is a practical end. he seeks the art of good living. as there are sciences of chemistry, metallurgy, electricity, etc., and arts consequent upon them, so he looks for rules of life which shall benefit humanity, consequent upon the science of humanity. but it is a question whether the moral imperative can be regarded as the result of science. however, if not the result, yet science may be able to discern that the moral imperative is so firmly established in human nature, that it may be able to proclaim loudly its empire in the heart and over the actions of man; while at the same time science may be able to guide it to wiser and better judgments. the task we have before us is to pursue mr. spencer's course of thought, undertaken in this spirit, through the succeeding chapters of his work. neglecting minor criticisms and passing over much valuable teaching, our business is to follow the main course of his reasoning and examine the chief grounds for such authority and guidance which he finally presents to us as the outcome of his study. footnote: [ ] introduction to "data of ethics," p. . chapter iii. the biological view of ethics. we shall best arrive at an adequate estimate of mr. spencer's ethical system by studying first what he terms the biological view of ethics. but to do this properly requires a survey not only of chapter vi., which bears this title, but also of the following chapter, which deals with the psychological view. we hold that mr. spencer, in this division of his subject into separate stages, makes a false arrangement of his studies. for as on the one hand he endeavours to include the study of biology as a branch of physics, on the other hand he treats it as incapable of comprehensive developmental study apart from the factors of feeling and mind. these divisions are marked features of the form into which mr. spencer has thrown his study of human conduct, but they do not correspond with his actual treatment of the subject. the course of thought cannot be fitted into the formal outline. it is found that the understanding of biology is as dependent upon a knowledge of psychology as it is upon a knowledge of physics. the sequence of dependent stages as set forth does not hold good. the conduct of animal and perhaps vegetable organisms is not explicable as the action of mere physical aggregates, and is little understood without the admission of a subjective factor of feeling or mind. it is all very well for mr. spencer to argue, as he does in chapter v., on the "physical view," that since all conduct is objectively physical action it may be separately studied from the physical point of view; but since the actions of organisms are not to be explained within the limits of physical laws this is a very useless reminder, and mr. spencer himself makes nothing of the study since he cannot work out the line of causation in terms of the physical factors only. on the other hand we find that our author has not proceeded three pages into the biological view before he introduces the subjective factors of pleasure and pain, which he eventually establishes not merely as the accompaniments of life-sustaining and life-diminishing acts, but even as the causes of further actions which shall at the same time tend to secure pleasure and avoid pain, and thus sustain the organism in a continuance of existence. only for three pages can the purely biological view of animal organisms as physical moving equilibria be maintained; and then with section comes the introduction of subjective factors--factors which are treated not merely as the concomitants of physical processes conducted wholly within and according to the laws of physical sequence, but as actual factors interfering with and affecting the line of causation. it is true mr. spencer recognises and deals with the difficulty which obviously arises as to the separability of the psychological view from a biological view which admits the factors of pleasure and pain. but the distinction he makes, while justifiable, does not deal with the fundamental difficulty. psychology treats, roughly speaking, of mentality; it comprises a study of the establishment of sets of inner relations, (_i.e._, associations of thought, relations of ideas, relations of sequences, the powers of remembrance, of discrimination and identification,) with sets of external relations, namely, the actual existences of which the inner relations are the representatives. the establishment of such inner relations corresponding to outer relations and their widening growth, must have a marked influence upon human conduct so that it may very well be separated for convenience of study from the earlier forms of organic conduct, in which such action is little recognisable. but how to form the connective law is the difficulty. moreover, it is one thing to establish the fact of evolution, and another thing to explain it. we ourselves admit the fact, indeed, but search in vain for the explanation. are we to look for the origin of pleasure and pain in those laws of the moving equilibrium which necessitate the generation of internal forces equal and in opposition to external inimical forces? if so, pleasure and pain must be regarded as forces--as factors--in the organism, and we must regard the subjective as generated by external physical factors operating upon internal physical factors, and we must regard these subjective factors not merely as concomitant, but as producing physical effects by way of reaction. so far as it goes there may be a physical view of purposed conduct, and so far as it goes there may be a psychological view, but between the two the biological view is a mere disorderly mixture, borrowing its terms first on one hand and then on the other, and assigning its determining causes first to the physical moving equilibrium theory, and then again to the anticipation of pleasure and pain. but the biological law which should co-ordinate these two sets of laws is not formulated, and hence we find more or less gliding, or more or less sudden transition from one set of terms or laws to the other, a defect which is concealed in some measure by the formal divisions of the chapters. but if the course of thought is carefully followed it is found that the actual treatment does not properly fit in. there is an unmistakeable transition from the purely physical set of factors to the purely subjective, and there is no co-ordinated biological law at all. the chapter is a transitional one, it is true, but only in the sense of gradually leaving off the employment of one set of terms, and the gradual employment of another set of terms in the treatment of the same phenomena. mr. spencer argues well in chapter v. as to the concomitance of pleasure-giving acts with life-sustaining acts, and of pain-giving acts with decrease of life; but which is prior in the chain of causation? or, to repeat the old difficulty, is the subjective factor present in the line of causation at all? is it merely a concomitant of the physical line of events? mr. spencer proposes to deal with feelings and functions in their mutual dependence,[ ] and so admits the subjective as a factor. thus there are feelings which are sensations and serve partly as guides and partly as stimuli towards actions for the sustenance and preservation of life. and there are feelings which are classed as emotions which also act in a very potent way as guides and stimuli, such as fear and joy. hence, in treating of conduct under its biological aspect we are compelled to consider that inter-action of feelings and functions which is essential to animal life in all its more developed forms.[ ] following upon this we are taught that pleasure is a feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness, and pain a feeling which we seek to keep out of consciousness. this certainly accords to the subjective factor a commanding position in the physical action of organisms; it also implies a foresight of the results of actions, and a certain degree of advance in psychology but throws no light upon the lower stages of biological action. mr. spencer says, however, that "fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in living things even before consciousness arises." this is followed by an interesting study of the proposition that "after the rise of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than to become better established," and that "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." "it is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions" than that "pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare." all this may be admitted, granted the existence of the subjective factor; but at what stage does it commence to have such a potent influence upon the development of organisms, and whence came it at all? mr. spencer says, "fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in living things even before consciousness arises." "at the very outset life is maintained by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts which impede it." it would seem that if life can be maintained by means of unconscious persistence in beneficial acts and unconscious desistance from injurious acts, such a process might continue in more complex organisms without the assistance of consciousness, and that the continuance and development of life could be explained in terms of the same factors and processes which originated life, and regulated and propagated the existence of races in the lowest forms of organisms. mr. spencer clearly holds that such races of organisms were originated and maintained by the action of physical laws before sentiency became a factor in their sustaining or generative actions. what need then for sentiency in the subsequent development? mr. spencer's argument is good, that, granted the concomitance of pleasure and pain with life-sustaining and life-diminishing acts respectively, the attainment of the one and the avoidance of the other acts on the increase of life; but he says that, previous to the advent of sentiency, life was sustained in much the same way. there is this difference in it, however, that only where the requisite acts were performed or avoided in pre-sentient organisms did such organisms continue to exist, and that these acts were not consciously performed, but only happened in the course of physical sequence; whereas in the case of sentient creatures pleasure is consciously sought, and pain is intentionally avoided. but it seems to us that when acts are determined by the anticipation of pleasure or pain, we enter upon the domain of psychology, and when they are determined by physical factors without consciousness we remain in the province of physics, so that there is no intermediate science of biology at all. and by this we mean, not that for convenience we may not so arrange our classes of study, but that there are no laws of physics which will account for the development of organisms, and there are no biological processes which do not imply the action of a subjective factor; and that there is no true biological law which properly expresses the correllation of the two. mr. spencer starts with a biology from which the subjective is completely absent, and ends with a psychology of the highest description: but he fails to express the biological law which accounts for the growth of the one out of the other, or expresses the law of their correlation in a concomitant growth. how then can we arrive at any ethical rule by the study of biology? in this way. an organism is a moving equilibrium: it is a law of moving equilibria that they counterbalance by means of new adjustments antagonistic forces in the environment, and absorb forces from the environment favourable to their continuance. their continued existence depends upon such continuous absorption and adjustment. but as environment varies, so do adjustments; and thus there is a wonderful variety of different moving equilibria, which form important parts of one another's environment. the suitable structures and functions which have thus been evolved are therefore relative to the environment, and the inherited structure and functions forming a moving equilibrium are fitted for particular environments and no other. there is no absolute moving equilibrium; all are relative. "that which was 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." but completeness of life means primarily the completeness of life in each individual organism as regards its continued existence, and the full satisfaction of all its functions during the period of its existence. the biologically good is all that conduces to this end, and the biologically bad is all that detracts from it. the biologically good and bad are therefore relative to the consensus of functions which constitute an animal or other organism. the biologically good and bad are therefore individual. that which is good for the individual is the right conduct, and that which is bad for it is wrong conduct. it is therefore right for the big fishes to eat the little ones, for the bird to prey upon the insect; it is a fit satisfaction for the functions of the lion to devour the antelope, for one tribe to slay or drive out another tribe in order to possess itself of more fertile plains and more delightful countries. and so, as long as the functions delight in egoism, and there is no counterforce of sympathy included among them, it is right to tyrannise, to subject others to the service or passions of the dominant organisms. they subserve the biological law--they are conducive to complete relative life. the biological law does not recognise the lives of others until sympathy has become part of the functions of the organism. the question here arises, how far the ethical law is to be determined by the biological law, for if the biological law is dominant, and the ethical dependant, the latter can only be explained and justified by the former. but we at once see that the two things are not identical and co-extensive. we recognise the difference between the biologically efficient and the ethically good and bad. the law of biology refers to the actions of each individual in regard to itself alone, whatever the functions, etc., which constitute that self. it relates to its good alone, irrespective of the good of others, unless, and until, sympathy with others has become part of the functions of the individual. but mr. spencer seeks to make the biological view of conduct identical with the ethical by introducing the conception of quantitative life. in this case an organism has more life the greater the number of correspondences it has with the environment. and since the environment is constituted of two classes of objects, the objective and the subjective--the purely physical and the organisms possessing feeling--so the correspondences established in the individual are of two kinds, the psychological and the emotional. in the former class are comprised all the objects and relations of the inorganic world, the great laws and intricacies of nature and her past history, including the history of organisms and of man. in the latter are included all the feeling, living creatures around us, with their pleasures, hopes, and pains, and all the characters, noble and beautiful, delicate or brutal, passionate or aspiring, who have ever trod the stage of history, or wrought or thought for us in antecedent ages. in fact all the patient work and mighty achievements of science, and all the emotional relations of men have afforded scope for the quantitative increase of life; and in proportion to the increase so it is suggested that life became ethical. the biological law is the continuous adjustment of organisms to environment, and the increase of adjustment is the increase of life. this may be so; but it is a denial of ethics as being coeval with biology; it makes the one simply a late outcome of the other. according to this view, ethics is something which has supervened upon the process, and which requires a separate analysis. but we have seen that increase of correspondence is of two kinds--it takes place in the direction of intellect, and it takes place in the direction of emotion, whether of sympathy or antipathy. but it is with the latter class of phenomena alone that ethics is concerned. the increased quantitative life which is identical with the increase of knowledge has no ethical aspect. it is increased relations of an emotional nature only which admit that term. in fact it is to societarian relations alone that it is applicable. increase of life may proceed in the direction of intellect or recognition of the facts and relations of the external world, and yet the life may never be termed ethical; while on the other hand there may be but little increase of intellect, yet a great increase of ethical relations. therefore, increased quantitative life, considered as a mode of identifying the biological law with the ethical law, except by way of comprehension in a larger classification, fails in the end because it is not true that the increase of correspondences need be in the special direction of increase of emotional correspondences: and thus we find that ethics is not to be affiliated upon the main line of biological progress, but with one distinguishable result of it--namely the relation of the individual with its subjective environment--that is to say, society. and here it is fit that we should take notice of mr. spencer's account of good and bad conduct, given in chapter of the "data of ethics." a good knife, gun, or house are such in virtue of their capacity for fulfilling the purposes for which they were designed. a good day or a good season are such as satisfy certain of our desires. a good pointer or a good ox are so in reference to certain of our requirements. a good jump, or good stroke at billiards, are those which accomplish the desired ends. and bad things are those which do not subserve desired ends. mr. spencer then proceeds to study the ethically good and bad, and to discuss the application of these terms to actions as regards the welfare of self, of offspring, and of fellow citizens. acts are said to be good and bad according as they affect the welfare of self. here it is indicated that acts are judged according to their degree of biological efficiency. in the next class--namely, acts relating to offspring--a father and mother are again judged according to their efficiency in those capacities, although the egoistic element is present in a subordinate degree. "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" (biological laws) "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 life-subserving actions are so great, that the interdicts have to be peremptory." the general meaning of "good" and "bad" as applied to actions, then, has reference to their efficiency. the differences of their meaning are due to the end regarded. the meanings are harmonised, however, when we consider that they are applicable to different degrees in the evolution of conduct; the conduct to which we apply the name good is the relatively more evolved conduct, and "bad is the name we apply to conduct which is relatively less evolved. this involves a reference to the three stages of biological evolution, the individual, the offspring, and society." "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 that this is the form of conduct most emphatically termed good."[ ] from this mr. spencer infers the contemporaneous achievement of the greatest totality of life in self, and this is supposed to vindicate the affiliation of ethics upon biology. we have, however, already shown that the enlargement of the relations between the individual and the subjective environment is the special ethical relation, and that the enlargement of the relations between the individual and the objective environment is non-ethical, thus specialising the ethical interpretation of the enlargement of biological relations. we must also notice that mr. spencer's affiliation of biology with ethics relates to a remote ideal future and not to an actual present or a historic past. the biological law is the adaptation of the individual to its own special surroundings, and not the adaptation of its remote and changed descendant to its remote and changed environment. according to the fitness of the individual for supplying itself with food, whether of a vegetable or animal nature, and according to its capacities for, self preservation or defence, so will it be deemed biologically perfect. this is a relative, an individual standard, without reference to the subjective environment except in so far as this subjective environment subserves some internal function of sympathy. but even in this case the ethical relation is subordinate to the biological and is relative to the actual individual and not to a future ideal descendant. moreover, the biological standard is always individual and singular and is not societarian. we therefore come to the conclusion that the biological point of view does not furnish us with any ethical theory. the biological law is not individual completeness; it is individual suitability to environment. it is true, individual greatness may be the most complete life; but when that is not possible from the nature of the inherited organism, or from the nature of the surroundings, then the actually best thing, because relatively best, is conformity to the surroundings. the man who cannot adapt the environment to himself will prudently adapt himself to the environment. that is the biological law; whether it be the ethical law is another question. abstract quantitative life may not be attainable either intellectually or in relation to the emotional surroundings. therefore the more skilful adaptation having in view the particular functions of the organisms, (whether they include sympathies with the subjective surroundings, or not), is the biological law--although it may not be regarded as the ethical law. quantitative life, viewed biologically, _i.e._, individually, does not mean an ideal quantitative life, but the most that an individual organism can get. this depends upon the organism's own nature and capacities, and upon the nature of the environment. that some descendents some day may have other natures and other surroundings, is not to the point. the presence of subjective surroundings in the environment affects the individual according to the nature of his own feelings: it affects him in the first place according to his possession or non-possession of sympathy, and in the second place according to his position of command or subserviency. if biology takes cognisance of ethics, it is from a prudential point of view alone. it means a recognition of the penalties of legal enactments or social laws. as a matter of calculation it takes account of the consequences of actions, and the conduct varies accordingly. and if we are unable to accept the biological view as identical with the fundamentals of ethics, so we are unable to accept the correlative that the preponderance of pleasurable feelings is indicative of the ethically correct life. for this criterion again is relative to the individual, and prescribes that course of conduct which to him is most largely pleasurable. it is only ethical when the surrounding conditions are such as to make the personally pleasurable harmonise with what is also pleasurable to the subjective environment--again showing the external or social origin and authority of the ethical imperative. before quitting this subject, it would-be as well to notice the narrow limitation assigned to the relation of feeling and function in the chapter on the biological view. pleasure is there described as the correlative of life-sustaining acts, and pain as the correlative of life-destructive acts; and we are told that under these conditions alone sentient creatures could evolve. this would apparently limit the range of the evolution of feeling to those classes of actions which are essential to the mere continuance of existence. if the growth of feeling is co-extensive with the growth of actions essential to existence, then pleasure and pain should be limited to the feelings involved in the supply of food, the escape from enemies, the pursuit of prey, &c. if to these should be added the larger, but as yet unexplained, view of biology, which makes the individual a part only of a greater moving equilibrium--namely the species to which he belongs--then there will be an extension of feeling (that is, of pleasure and pain) to the acts requisite for the propagation of the race and the care of off-spring. but to these two classes of functions, human pleasures and pains are not limited. beyond what may be termed the essential growth of feeling, there has been a super-growth of feeling concomitant with every extension of the correspondences between the inner relations and the outer relations. in the converse of the organism with its environment there has grown up a vast extension of knowledge as to external facts; and in the classification and reasoning upon these there has supervened a vast interest, which has been pleasurable quite apart from any life-sustaining necessity. so in the arts of life there has arisen a pleasure in the exercise of ingenuity and skill of manufacture, far above the requisites for bodily preservation. in the spread of æstheticism and the appreciation of the beautiful in painting, statuary, architecture and decoration generally, there has been manifested an amount of taste or feeling, utterly beyond any value it may have as "life-sustaining." poetry, music, literature, along with all the other highest manifestations of civilization, are not the outcome of the necessities of existence, but a work super-imposed upon the poor and bare adaptations which are sufficient for simple existence. the same may be said of all those fine sympathies of man for man, of man for noble ideals of humanity, and even of the more homely love and good feeling of simple natures. our friendships, our admirations, all that makes man something over and above the mere brute animals, is due to this larger growth of feeling beyond what is essential to the mere continuance of life--and if we should identify pleasure and pain merely with the conditions of life-sustaining and life-destructive acts, we should form a very inadequate conception of their place in human life. this of course is on the understanding that the biological law implies only self continuance or race continuance. that this is mr. spencer's original view is manifest from the fact that he theoretically derives life from the consideration of the laws of the moving equilibrium. but if we take the larger view, (which, however, is not derivable from the former), that life is correspondence between inner relations and outer relations, and is to be measured quantitatively by the increase of the number of correspondences, then of course the whole estimation of pleasures and pains is changed. under the latter view the organism enters into correspondence with all the individual objects of the environment, and not only has a present regard, but a past and a future interest. the scope of interest in the larger minds embraces long lines of history leading up and down the eras of development. in narrow measures of family or local interest, the social feeling has first risen, but as the framework of tribes or nations becomes knit together, so the social feelings acquire a wider interest. the merely biological interests have become enlarged by means of an internal growth, so as to have regard for other sentient existences. altruism becomes a part of egoism. we care for others, not by compulsion, but from natural growth of interest. into the causes and incidents of this growth it is not necessary to enter. it is a simple fact of human nature that the pains and pleasures of others affect us much, and sometimes very keenly indeed. thus we find that the purely biological law, regarded as the adjustment of a moving equilibrium to its environment, derived from and exemplified in the physical moving equilibrium of the solar system, the spinning top, the steam engine, &c, does not afford us much insight into ethical theory, even if the equilibrations have a concomitant of feeling. in any approach from the purely biological towards the ethical, we are thrown for our explanations upon efficient subjective factors--upon the interaction of feeling organisms and sympathetic organisms. if we attempt to apply the biological law as an explanation of the super-growth of correspondences over and above the actual necessities of continued existence, and as an explanation of the growth of sympathy or altruism, we have to suppose that the external forces have generated in the organism internal forces in opposition or balance therewith. but this theory of the moving equilibrium, difficult to understand and accept in its simplest applications, transcends all powers of human comprehension when it attempts to deal with the subjective relations of organisms, and, it appears to us, entirely fails to account for the growth of sympathy or altruistic feeling. altruism in egoism. the fact of the existence of altruistic feelings in the texture of the ego has led to the theory that all altruistic actions, since they arise out of the constitution of the ego, are really egoistic. this argument is irresistible. a kind, sympathetic man or woman is so by virtue of innate qualities, just as the selfish or the brutal man is. and if the justification of actions were to depend upon the authority of natural egoism the one is as much capable of justification as the other. if ethics depends for its explanation and justification upon biology, then, since the view of biology is limited to the individual and means the suitable adjustment of every moving equilibrium to its special environment, each is capable of equal justification and similar explanation. egoism may include altruism or it may not, but in either case the action is equally valid from the point of view of biology. if, however, an extension of this view be argued for on the theory that a rationalistic view of all the requirements of the subjective surroundings involves a certain line of conduct in order to secure a suitable adaptation between the organism and the environment, which shall be the equation of that organism, the best adaptation for the time being--this will be a superior, because a more extended, biological aspect of conduct, and it is not disputed that such a view of life may be more or less acted upon. but neither the ego-altruistic view, nor the prudential rationalistic view attains to the true ethical point of view of human conduct; for the altruistic growth in the ego is not universal, nor of equal development; and the prudential rationalistic motive is purely egoistic and biological, and therefore adverse to the altruistic, even if it exists in the ego. the main object of the present argument is to shew that the purely biological explanation of ethical injunctions is insufficient as a means of understanding their imperative character. and yet it is difficult to say this if biology is to be considered as the law of actions of organisms. it all depends upon the factors which are included in the generalisation. if the factors are simply physical, then the generalisation is insufficient; if the forces included in the moving equilibrium include subjective forces capable of growth into sympathy or altruism, then the biological laws receive, perhaps, an extension which renders them capable of determining the whole of the phenomena. but if pleasure and pain are limited to life-sustaining acts or life-destructive acts, then the influence of the subjective factors is limited to the physical, and the super-growth of correspondences of inner with outer (which is necessary to explain the larger growth of feeling) transgresses the narrow limits of the biological law--the law of simple equilibration between the organism and its environment. it is well now to raise the question what is the object of ethical enquiry. is it merely scientific determination of the origin, growth, and variations of ethical opinion? is it a natural history of human conduct, more particularly of that part of it called ethical? is it an investigation into the natural authority of ethical injunction? is the object to establish ethical authority, or to show that ethics has no authority, or to enable us to conform to it and administer it intelligently? generally speaking, is it a scientific enquiry for the information of our minds, or is it investigated for the enforcement of ethical injunctions? it is to be presumed that we have both ends in view. knowledge must precede power. light must go before footsteps. at least, so it must be if intellect is to rule. as a matter of fact, ethics has not been so much a reasoned out system of conduct as a worked out system to be afterwards reasoned about. morality has been the interbalance, growth, and counterbalance of subjective and sympathetic individuals. then it became something to reason about, to modify by reason in the the application to remoter ends and larger bodies of the principles out of which it arose. but the province of reason is not to supersede those principles, nor to weaken their authority, which indeed it could not do, for the forces which produced morality are ever present to sustain it, and, indeed, acquire age after age an increasing force. footnotes: [ ] data of ethics, p. . [ ] ibid, p. . [ ] ibid, p. . chapter iv. the sociological view. we now enter upon the study of ethics proper. notwithstanding mr. spencer's attempt at the outset of the chapter to identify "right living" with the universal biological principle that "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 fact still remains that the ethical imperative is drawn from the social surroundings, and is not derivable from the adaptation to environment, unless the environment be of a subjective character requiring an adaptation to it as such. mr. spencer considers that "there is a supposable formula for the activity of each species, which, could it be drawn out, would constitute a system of morality for that species," although "such a system of morality would have little or no reference to the welfare of others than self and offspring." we cannot concede that the formula of activities for a worm by which it maintains its existence, is a formula of morality; nor can we admit that the longest-lived oyster is the most moral of oysters. systems of morality which relate to the welfare of self and offspring alone are in the latter instance confessedly of a very limited character, and when entirely confined to self it would seem that we lose all ethical quality whatsoever. we continually find in mr. spencer's exposition that, notwithstanding his attempt to affiliate ethics upon the biological law, it is only in the increased correlation of subjective individuals that ethics arises, and it is only the modification of the individual by society, and the mental or emotional growths in the individual consequent on the action of the social environment, that constitute the groundwork of ethics. it is true that, since society is composed of individuals, the nature and constitution of the units has to be considered in their mutual interaction, and therefore the study must have a biological basis: but when we have to consider the special action of the compound social environment upon the individual, the study is not one which can be properly considered from the purely biological side, nor is it to be comprised within the formula of individual life. with respect to the social environment mr. spencer says, "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 conflict with the activities of others, and because the sentiments responding to other's claims are relatively weak, moral codes emphasise 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. 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 harmonisation of them, they are still partially conflicting."[ ] the difficulty alluded to arises from the fact that human society is not one well-ordered whole, but has been from the first, and still is, split up into numerous nations having conflicting interests: from which it follows that there is not a complete homogeneity of duty between man and man when, for instance, a state of warfare exists. if now we recognise ethics as the rule of life imposed by society upon the individual, we shall have to recognise great varieties of rule, according to the nature and objects of the particular society imposing the rule, according to the state of development at which that society has arrived, and according to the nature of the environment. the rule of a club over the individuals composing it, the rule of a church over its members, the rule of any body of men over its constituent units is founded upon the ethical principle, however trifling or however serious the objects of the particular association may be. those slight or those important social penalties or commendations which fill up the course of everyday life in business, in the workshop, in social intercourse--the familiar judgments of companions or contemporaries--are all of them ethical valuations of conduct. slight though some of them may be, they are still enforcements of social opinions. man is hedged in on all sides by forces limiting his action to certain lines of conduct, and this social pressure is as much the basis of the most forceful ethical commands or prohibitions as of the most ephemeral influences. the only difference consists in the importance of the mode in which the various actions affect the general welfare. but this we shall have occasion to treat of hereafter in greater detail. it is, however, all a matter of the greater or lesser degree in which it affects the welfare of the temporary organisation, the welfare of the family, or the welfare of the permanent community, of which the individual forms a part. but it is evident that as the stage of development differs, and as nations differ in their environments, so there will be different standards of conduct at different times and places. and therefore, again, there will be different standards of morality for different sets of purposes. this must be acknowledged at once. hence arise the questions, what can be the obligation of a relative morality? and--is there no absolute morality with its imperatives universal in space and in time? the question as to absolute morality we reserve: meanwhile we confine our considerations to a study of the influence of society upon individuals. this is disclosed in a study of sociology. living together in a social state necessitates certain negative and, eventually, positive duties. "whether the members of a social group do or do not co-operate, certain limitations to their individual activities are necessitated by their association; and after recognising these as arising in the absence of co-operation, we shall be the better prepared to understand how conformity to them is effected when co-operation begins.[ ] "what shape, then, must the mutual restraints take when co-operation begins? or rather, what, in addition to the primary mutual restraints already specified, are those secondary mutual restraints required to make co-operation possible? * * * * the reply will be made clearer if we take the successive forms of co-operation in the order of ascending complexity. we may distinguish as homogeneous co-operation ( ) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are simultaneously enjoyed. as co-operation that is not completely homogeneous we may distinguish ( ) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are not simultaneously enjoyed. a co-operation of which the heterogeneity is more distinct is ( ) that in which unlike efforts are joined for like ends. and lastly comes the decidedly heterogeneous co-operation, ( ) that in which unlike efforts are joined for unlike ends."[ ] the social attainment reaches a full development in the last mentioned case. "only under voluntary agreement then, no longer tacit and vague, but overt and definite, can co-operation be harmoniously carried on when division of labour becomes established. and, as in the simplest co-operation, where like efforts are joined to secure a common good, the dissatisfaction caused in those who, having expended their labours, do not get their share of the good, prompts them to cease co-operating; as in the more advanced co-operation, achieved by exchanging equal labours of like kind expended at different times, aversion to co-operate is generated if the expected equivalent of labour is not rendered; so in this developed co-operation, the failure of either to surrender to the other that which was avowedly recognized as of like value with the labour or product given, tends to prevent co-operation 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." "but now we have to recognise the fact that complete fulfilment of these conditions, original and derived, is not enough. * * * * 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." the point brought out here is the social pressure of the society upon the individual, so as to ensure that the actions of the individual primarily are not inimical to its welfare, and secondarily are subservient to its welfare. but, of course, since society is composed of individuals, this pressure must not be of such a character as to be destructive of the welfare of the individuals of which the society is composed, for that would militate against its own objects. it is easy to reason out from this principle what actions would be condemned and what actions would be praised in the various stages of human development. the strongest injunctions would correspond with the fundamental requirements of existence, and would enjoin the sacredness of life within the community. the family relationships would come next in order of authority. the safeguards of property of every description would early receive ethical recognition. commendation would be accorded to men whose actions were properly limited in these respects. in early stages of development the coward would be condemned, while the warrior who did his share well in the protection of the community would be praised. and so in a variety of ways men's actions would receive praise or blame, according as they conduced to the welfare or to the suffering of the existing community. footnotes: [ ] data of ethics, p. . [ ] data of ethics, p. . [ ] ibid., p. . chapter v. the ethical imperative. we have thus seen that the origin and authority of ethics are to be found in sociology; but to allow the enquiry to rest here is only half to understand the nature and imperativeness of ethical obligations as to conduct. we consider that mr. spencer's ethical theory suffers from his mode of exposition. we should be disposed to approach the question in an inverse order, and instead of seeking for an ethical authority on individual or biological grounds, culminating in an ethical sociology, to acknowledge at once the sociological origin and authority of the ethical obligation, and to endeavour to understand it in detail by a subordinate study of biological requirements and psychological growths. the main fact underlying all ethics is the existence of a society composed of subjective factors, factors possessing feelings and reasoning powers. the fundamental notion in ethics is the regulation of the mutual conduct of these factors. it is the voice of the million against the voice of the unit which decides the duty of the unit. it is the voice of the individual against the voice of society claiming a modification of opinion. it is the voice of individuals to other individuals specifying general duty. broadly speaking it is the claim of duties towards other individuals upon the ego. but it follows from the universality of the claim, that there is mutuality of claim, and the duties which are demanded have at the same time to be acknowledged. the principle can be easily accepted as theoretically correct, and many general rights and duties can be readily deduced as corollaries, but beyond these general rules ethical problems have rather to be worked out than thought out--in the more important matters by societies during their upward growth, in smaller matters by individuals through multitudinous adjustments and re-adjustments. i do this or that in contravention of some accepted social law. i am condemned, and am made so generally uncomfortable by the social penalties that i am coerced into conformity, or, otherwise, society modifies its opinion in acknowledgment of my right to do as i have done. but then the question arises, upon what principle should ethical judgments be formed? since society demands the performance of certain actions, while it prohibits the performance of others, and since its aim is the biological completeness of each of the individuals, what are the principles upon which it determines the restraints and imposes the injunctions so as not to interfere too much with individual liberties? this principle finds very good expression in mr. spencer's formula. the whole problem comes before us when we have to consider the relative claims of egoism and altruism, a problem splendidly worked out by mr. spencer, in the chapters entitled "egoism _versus_ altruism," "altruism _versus_ egoism," "trial and compromise," and "conciliation." as this is a purely critical work, to be read only in conjunction with the work criticised, we do not feel called upon to give an account of these chapters. we simply state our acceptance of them bodily, the reservations we would make being merely in regard to certain details of the exposition. we ought to reprint them here in order to make this work complete in its argument, but it is simpler to ask the student to interrupt his reading of this criticism by a reperusal of the chapters referred to. * * * * * * having read mr. spencer's treatment of the problem, the question remains, is the ethical imperative merely an external one, dictated by a prudential consideration of the requirements of the social environment? the answer must be a negative one; there is an internal moral authority which gives to actions their ethical glory, their poetic delicacy, their qualitative appreciation, insomuch that there are names in past history that stand ever in the forefront of the memories of men, hallowed and ennobled in their imaginations for all time, on account of the ethical glory of their lives and the manner in which their example appeals to the wide sympathies within us. from the same internal fount springs the detestation of foul and cruel actions, the hatred of unjust and tyrannical deeds, and the abhorrence of the men and women who commit them. the same internal sentiment covers the individual himself with shame and remorse for unworthy actions committed, from which an ever-present memory suffers no release. the natural history of the growth of this internal authority is the history of the action of the subjective environment upon the subjective individual. the understanding of this growth is the province of psychology in the two forms of emotional evolution and intellectual evolution as presented by mr. spencer in chapter vii of the "data of ethics,"--the enlargement of the number of sympathies with the subjective environment--past, present, and future--and the enlargement of the number of correspondences with the objective environment in space, and time, and generality. we are more particularly concerned with that branch of it which deals with the growth of the emotions. the purely biological view relates to the individual, and its own personal existence. but the care of offspring, arising from some incomprehensible necessity for the continuance of the species, and accompanied by a recognition of their subjective character, produces actions, having regard to their effects upon the subjectivity of the offspring, of a regulative, coercive, or deterrent character. moreover, by some not understood law, the sympathies which undoubtedly exist between organisms, have led to the recognition of the pains of others as egoistic pains, and of the pleasures of others as egoistic pleasures. thus altruism from the very first became _to a certain extent_ a form of egoism, and the action of the ego in its subjective environment was of a regulative character amongst its offspring. an extension and modification of this action ensued upon a social environment composed of more distant, or only tribal relationships. nevertheless psychological evolution made the sympathies gradually include tribal and national, and eventually humanitarian recognitions. the growth of ethics, and the growth of ethical feeling, are thus seen to be a natural growth, and not merely the solution of an intellectual problem. the justification for the ethical feeling is that it exists. the justification for any code of morality is that is exists. but the amendment of the code of morality derives its justification from changing conditions. the changefulness of the latter does not detract from but attests the essential nature of the former. it is the court of appeal for the retention of existing codes, and for the judgment of imminent changes. we cannot, therefore turn round and say--as we may be tempted to do when we find the relativity of morals and its origin in external obligation--"ethics is only an intellectual puzzle, only a social contract, into which i may enter or not as i please." if a man assumes a hostile attitude to society, he wrongs his nature as a man; and if a philosopher or selfish man of the world cuts off human sympathy for the purpose of living a merely prudential life he becomes something less than a man, he misses the full function and joy of life. nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that there are men who have so maimed their emotional nature as to lead tolerably satisfactory lives within the narrow limits of selfish desires. to them ethical obligation is external only, and the internal obligation is a minimum. such may be the case. there are men who do actions in contradiction of the voice of society, and who do not repent. society has to deal with these men as best it can. the ethical problem is only of interest to those who feel the obligation, or to the philosopher who studies the human nature of which it is a characteristic. viewed as a practical question, no philosophical theory will carry the force of conviction to a bestial, brutal, sordid, selfish man. these require the material punishments of the administrators of the law, personal force, and social coercion. and even then there remain large criminal classes in every community. the study of the ethical problem is for those who recognise ethical obligation and seek guidance or to guide. the internal ethical obligation is not to be reasoned into a man. it must be grown into the child. this is to be done by love-enkindling actions and demeanour, a just and considerate course of conduct, well judged according to ethical principles. and herein lies the utility of the study. example and injunctions in daily exigencies form the groundwork of such influence as can be exerted by education. a discriminating judgment of contemporary actions and of past histories tends to develop a proper discrimination of the qualities of actions. but below and accompanying all this must be recognised--as mr. spencer so fully recognises--the registration, as he terms it, of emotions and mental capacities in the inherited constitutions of organisms. that which is the lesson of one age has become the inborn faculty of a succeeding one. there are natural tendencies inherited by individuals from their ancestors, and the perpetual social improvement tends to the gradual production of individuals more and more suitable to the social state by the possession of sympathies for others, and the internal feeling of moral obligation. furthermore, these individuals are born and reared under the influence of a social state ever more and more permeated by the recognition of the good of society as rightly overruling the destinies of the individual. the ethical imperative then must be regarded as an internal growth in a subjective individual brought about in psychological evolution in the continuous advance both of the increase of the sympathetic correspondences and of the intellectual correspondences with the subjective environment, and in the hereditary transmission of the same, and their perpetuation and modification by means of education and training induced by the current social pressure, special and general; which social pressure is itself undergoing constant but gradual change in its incidence and tendency. the ethical imperative therefore is partly internal in so far as each individual is actuated by societarian sympathies and emotional regards for humanitarian ideals, or in so far as he possesses numerous special and personal kindly relations with his environment. but in-so-far as a man is destitute of these sympathetic possessions, so far is he free from the obligations of the internal ethical imperative, and so much does he approach to the lower evolutionary states of the inanimate object, or of the beast of the forest, the insensate fish which stares into vacuity in the tanks of an aquarium, or a self-feeding engine which is only a little less developed form of a moving equilibrium. for such as these there only remains the external prudential obligation of conformity to social pressure in its several forms of law, custom, or public opinion, or the variously expressed displeasure or commendations of neighbours whereto it would be wise to conform. this to them is the only ethical imperative. to neither class does any reasoned-out theory of absolute morality yield any force of obligation or insight into the details of duty. and here it will be convenient to enquire whether mr. spencer himself attaches to absolute morality, any power as an ethical imperative. absolute morality in mr. spencer's treatment is merely a conception of ideal conduct in an ideal state of society. we must conceive a state of society in the highest degree complex, composed of individuals following all the various occupations necessitated by the sub-division of labour from the lowest to the highest, in which each individual may yet perform his or her functions in such a manner as to insure the highest degree of personal happiness, and at the same time promote the highest happiness of the society as a whole. such an ideal state would comprise individuals of all ages, from infancy to extreme old age, and could not possibly exclude invalids and the maimed, for we cannot suppose that moving equilibria will be able to develop internal forces so as to preserve them intact from the effects of storms, explosions, and other natural occurrences, and as it is part of the moving equilibrium theory to suppose that organisms are only temporary equilibrations on the way towards a final equilibration in a state of rest, it is necessary to suppose that they will always be subject to disease and death. it is therefore probable that the society would comprise many sufferers from organic diseases, and it is difficult to imagine any state of society which would be entirely free from mental disorders in various degrees of defect, or excess, or aberration. nevertheless we are asked to conceive a state of perfect balance amongst a society composed of heterogeneous individuals in various stages of equilibration, and we are told that a proper and complete conception of this character would furnish us with a code of absolute morality. but it is quite clear that mr. spencer's utopian hypothesis is the outcome of hope springing from large human sympathies rather than a realisable future, affording an ethical imperative. thus it is supposed that actual standards of morality are extremely imperfect, and form but faint foreshadowings of a future ideal, or in any case, that there is an absolute morality which rules throughout all ages, and is the authority for the approximations of each age. but if we sufficiently realise the fundamental notion of biology as that of the most complete adjustment of the organism to its environment, including incidentally the adjustment of the environment to the organism we must acknowledge that the most perfect morality is the best adjustment of the individual to his environment in the society to which he belongs. thus the most perfect morality is the best relative adjustment, and not the nearest conformity to an ideal standard suited to a perfect state of society. the biological rule is more fundamental than any other, the societarian view following; and its ideal of morality is perfection of actual adjustment amongst the individuals of existing societies so as to insure the greatest happiness of each and all. thus as there are higher lives and lower lives, there are higher moralities and lower moralities, but they are justified by their quantitative relative perfection, and not according to their approach to absolute morality, and they do not derive their ethical obligation from the latter source. it is due to the growth of psychological views that man is troubled with the burthen of so many ideals. far be it from us to detract from noble aims, but it is necessary to note the origin and nature of moral ideals and to assign them their proper place. they arise from the growing sympathies of the race, and its ever-widening intelligence; more especially do they arise in the minds of thinkers and students of humanity in regard to the continuous aggregations of tribes and nations of men in entering on the practical problem, how they shall live together without unduly trespassing upon one another's rights of life and enjoyment. these necessarily had to form for themselves practical ideals, but ideals of some sort--ideals of greater or less degree of imperativeness in proportion as they affected the essentials of a pleasurable existence, or as they affected interactions of lesser consequence. the growth of individual sympathies continually afforded wider scope in the judgment of personal actions, and the spread of intelligence insured the acceptance of more general laws of regulative requirements on the part of the society. the authoritativeness of some of the laws so recognised seemed eventually to be in the nature of things, and to be independent and absolute in its imperativeness. those laws which were seen to be essential to the very existence of society were regarded as eternal and true independently of society. but this is at once seen to be a false notion, and only a peculiar manner of representing the most essential laws of relative morality. no men, no morals! immorality is a sin, not against eternal principles of right, but against the practical working principles co-eval with human society. to set up a perfect morality, an ideal code, which may possibly exist in an ideal state of society, but which is scarcely likely ever to be realised as a rule of present conduct, is to set up not only an impracticable, but a false standard, since the only true standard is the relative sociological one founded upon the historical principle of adjustment. perhaps, however, even from this principle we work round to the same point, for in working out the problem how to secure to each his fair share of happy life, we are obliged to set down certain fundamental laws protecting the individual from injury in the full exercise of his faculties, and we are obliged to impose upon society as a whole, and upon each individual, certain positive duties of assistance towards individuals, being members of the community. nevertheless, the ideal set before each generation is that of which it is actually capable, and not a fanciful one which is beyond its powers. and we imagine that some harm is done by the sweeping condemnation of religious and moral idealists in inculcating the sense of sin, and imperfection, and incapability of attainment, which the preaching of such high absolute standards necessitates. no doubt the inculcation of high ideals kindles youthful enthusiasm, and sustains manly effort. but sometimes the non-attainment of impossible ideals detracts from the effort towards attainable relative perfections, and causes us to under-value and to neglect the good qualities actually extant in ourselves, and in our fellow-creatures. the "unco guid" may repress as much as they may develop, for the idealists have made more sin, and therefore sinners, than is justified by the adaptations of society. nevertheless, the psychological conception of an ideal man in an ideal state is a most fascinating one, alike to the philanthropist whose heart broadens out to all humanity, and to the philosopher who aims at absolute perfection of moral or political theory. there are men and women of noble and sweet sympathies who aim at making each his little ideal world around him, and so leaven the general mass and aid the movement towards the great ideal. poets have sung, and will sing through all ages, of that golden age, and philosophers, consciously or unconsciously, have it for their ruling motive in all their writings. statesmen in lesser circles of practical scope only work towards it, and the whole heart of humanity teems with hope for a time when troubles shall cease, and a bearable, if not a happy lot, shall be the meed of all. the ethical imperative we therefore find to possess a two-fold origin. it has external authority in the imposition of coercive rules of conduct, carrying with them social penalties or rewards, varying in degree according to the essential or trivial manner in which actions affect the lives of other individuals, and again an external one in the sympathetic action of surrounding subjective organisms upon subjective organisms in eliciting and enkindling sympathetic response. it has also an internal authority in the sympathies which, by a law of nature, grow up in the ego towards surrounding egos in the manifestation of its several subjective characteristics. thus the ethical imperative is a growth within a man. it is also an education imposed upon him, and it is again an external social pressure accompanied by rewards and punishments. the internal ethical imperative does not exist to all men, and to them must be applied the social pressure in more or less manifest forms of scorn, denunciation, and even scant diet, and the cold frowning walls of jails, and unrewarding labour. towards this end the legislator works, also in the removal of hindrances to life, and the promotion of education. the philanthropist gently encourages the feeble efflorescences of humanitarian sympathies. sunday schools and pulpits more or less earnestly impress the moral obligations. parents call forth the love and sympathy of children, and amongst brothers and sisters and companions the child first learns the lesson of mutual duty and mutual help. occasionally in the world's history arises a prophet in whom has become concentrated in a ten-fold degree the humanitarian sentiment, and he speaks in a voice which reverberates down the outspreading avenues of time, calling forth an answering note from the attuned heart chords of the nations. chapter vi. systems of ethics. mr. spencer very justly claims for his system that it gives a new meaning and authority to all previous systems of ethics and theories of human action. in his system they all harmonise. their contradictions disappear on the discovery that they are all parts of one consensus of truth. we will proceed to examine in order some of these earlier theories in their relation to the one now propounded. the idea that society is a pact or contract, though essentially untrue, since society has been a growth and not a partnership resulting from negociations, is nevertheless true in the sense that men have had to give up individual biological liberties or egoisms in entering upon the social stage. there never was any conscious bargaining, but there have been an infinite number of tacit understandings of societarian and individual adjustments which eventually brought about the well-ordered societies of modern times. the intuitional school of moralists finds the intuitions as to what is right and wrong, and more especially the feeling of right and the feeling of wrong, justified and established in the fact of the growth of feeling in general as the essential of the biological history, and in the historical establishment of the internal growth of moral feelings transmitted from generation to generation. validity and authority are given, to moral principles by the very fact of their existing strength and their recognised fitness to the social circumstances. the indignation or the admiration naturally felt by man at certain actions is justified _a priori_, and apart from any reasoned opinion of their bearings. praise and blame are not much, as a matter of fact, affected by reason. spontaneously and independently passion and enthusiasm are expressed. without staying to think, comes the unbidden frown and sharp reproof, or even the hasty blow. without thought come the expression of sorrow and sympathy, the glow of praise, the approving smile, the commendatory word, straight from the heart and sympathies of the like-minded spectator. reason may argue about details--it may rejudge the spontaneous expressions of the sympathies, it may guide and direct, but it never lends to praise its warmth, or to condemnation its severity. these are purely instinctive, and reason justifies them in the ascertainment of their origin and growth. there is an intuitive conscience which has been developed by evolution. the adjustment of organisms, the growth of feeling, the acquisition of altruistic or sympathetic feeling in an environment of subjective individuals has developed not only social adjustments, but also feelings in individuals, relative to those social adjustments, which compose a conscience or intuition. never yet could such a conscience or intuition wholly and of itself teach a man moral action. the conscience presupposes for its actualization the presence of its environment. it needs education, encouragement, and instruction. society is a continuous existence. the child born into a society not only inherits its dispositions, but from the very first receives its prepossessions, is subject to its injunctions, and is trained in its habits. intuition is only a part of the truth. yet although it may be developed by education, and guided by reason, there is no question as to its existence, and as to its affording the zest to praise, the keenness to condemnation, and the poignancy to remorse. the view which regards ethics as explicable by egoism is a very imperfect and ambiguous one. for what is the ego spoken of, and of what does it consist? the view which makes egoism the rule of life, and which some suppose may afford the ultimate rationale of ethics, is identical with the biological view which we have already discussed. no doubt egoism is the rule of life taken in its widest sense. no doubt the adjustment of the ego to society, and of society to the ego, is the rule of life. but egoism only becomes ethical when it, in order of growth, includes love of offspring, love of family, love of fellow-man, regard for the tribe, the nation, or humanity at large. as egoism loses its narrowness, as it loses its exclusive regard for personal continuance, and finds itself possessed of affections for others and altruistic considerations, so does it become continually less and less egoistic. it is a matter of chopping logic to say that its action is still essentially selfish, if it does good to others, because it is part of its own nature to do good to others, and it does so to satisfy its own egoistic desires. this only proves that egoism is the rule of life, but does not establish it as the rule of ethics, which is a very different thing. the ethical rule has been found in the course of the enquiry to be, firstly, the body of injunctions which society lays upon the individual; and, secondly, the conscience which a society of subjective individuals cultivates in each separate ego, both arising from the growth of altruistic sympathy in the subjective organism of which society is composed. to say that when men act ethically they act from egoism is only to include ethical action in a statement of a more general biological law, and takes the mind off from the special ethical study altogether. ethical egoism pre-supposes ethical feeling in the ego, otherwise egoistic morality is obliged to frame for itself a hypothetical society of individuals without feelings, which, of course, puts it out of relation with humanity. egoism, as a basis of morals, is bound to include altruism, or else it is merely a form of expressing the most general law of biology. egoism however gives, in its highest form, a wide and wise consistency to actions. it pre-supposes a well-ordered mind capable of self-regulation and control. it takes a look all round, and it judges of the eventualities of actions. it sums up its own forces and motives, it takes account of its present and future surroundings and forms a judgment as to the most prudent course of action for securing the fittest life possible for itself and the greatest continuance of such life in the future. a wise and well-judged egoism is very valuable to the community, as well as profitable to the individual. it is not however essentially ethical, and is so only in so far as the individual is properly altruistic. if the egoist is not altruistic, he may become a curse to the society in which he lives, or if on a larger scale--a terrible scourge to humanity at large. utilitarianism does not explain ethics, unless the word be accepted as co-extensive with the biological and sociological adjustments which have gone on during the upward growth. no doubt these were all utilities; and, therefore, utilitarianism is so far true. but since the process has been one of accompanying modified feeling, it is only half an explanation, only one feature of the general explanation. it was no common intellectual appreciation of the axiom "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," which caused the evolution of morals. the axiom was itself an after-thought. it may have great use in these days, as the expression of the outcome in feeling and in philosophic thought of processes of evolution, but it was not the ruling principle which produced the evolution. accepted thus as the outcome, it may be the criterion and guide for future action in detailed adjustments and modifications of ethical judgments or political action, and may have an authority in modern times which it could not have had primordially. but its scope is limited to the formation of deliberate judgments, and it does not impel spontaneous praise or give any force to spontaneous blame. its judgments are those of the calm reasoner which may very properly modify the opinions of society at large, and thus tend to form an improved conscience, but it will never make a moral impulse or form the base for an ethical ideal. in an ethical system founded upon an acceptance of biological and sociological evolution, all these systems of previous philosophers find a due place. egoism cannot be denied as the rule of life, but it is shown that egoism cannot always remain purely egoistic, but at last includes inevitably an altruistic growth. the progress of society involves altruistic conditions. the intrinsic growth of sympathy and the extrinsic imposition of conditions form in a continuous society, by change in the internal constitution of organisms, and by hereditary transmission of such changes, not only an intuitional feeling of right and wrong, but also an intuitional conscience of greater or less development. thus, we admit and explain the law of right and wrong written upon each civilized human heart. utilitarianism is recognised as the ultimate outcome of philosophical thought; and, while it is but an inadequate expression in the hands of some writers, it may, perhaps, in its wider expansion by later philosophers, become an adequate and suitable expression of the ethical principle, and a guide for re-adjustments in the recognition of the wider ends and larger views of human organisation. but any one of these views is inadequate by itself to explain and express the largeness of ethical movement. only when we seize upon the history of the development of subjectivity, only when we understand the gradual progress from gross beginnings, and recognise the grand movement which carries us forward to we know not what hopeful future, can we properly appreciate the ethical position and the ethical authority. but to one who understands the evolution of organisms and of society, all these varying views fall at once into their natural places in a beautiful harmony. the touch of genius in a darwin or a spencer, produces out of the apparent chaos a well-ordered and progressive system. this is the proper place to notice mr. leslie stephen's very valuable and elaborate work upon "the science of ethics." that work is wise in conception, sound as to its basis and construction, beautifully proportioned in its mode of treatment, carefully, and, perhaps, too elaborately worked out in detail. the original conception is wise in that it excludes metaphysical questions and discussions as to first principles, and limits the range of its considerations to properly-ascertained scientific facts or laws, and to such extensions of scientific surmise as are warranted by the acceptance of the modern doctrine of evolution, expounded by darwin. the acceptance of this doctrine not only involves the acceptance of historic developments, but justifies, and even necessitates, the acceptance of a supposititious prehistoric development. this hypothetical history, founded on observations of historical order, and of the habits and customs of uncivilised races, is perfectly justifiable. however, the problem, conducted within scientific limits is to consider the groundwork of actual morality (ch. i.). properly to effect this object, it is necessary to study the influence of the emotions as determining conduct. next, the influence of the reason as determining conduct, and finally, the interaction of the race and the individual (ch. ii. and iii.). these preliminaries are succeeded by a study of the moral law as derived from social interests, following upon social necessities, establishing the moral law as natural, and as authoritative (ch. iv.). the contents of the moral law are next discussed, in which the virtues of courage, temperance, truth, and the social virtues are considered (ch. v.). altruism, as a growth within the ego, is necessarily an object of study, and is explained as a natural development of sympathy out of intrinsic subjectivity. its place in a system of ethics is also set forth. (ch. vi.). upon this follows an exposition of special views upon merit, free-will, effort, and knowledge, as modified by the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution. of essential importance to an ethical work is a consideration of the nature of conscience and the variations of its judgments (ch. viii.). a discussion of happiness as a criterion succeeds, including a study of utilitarianism, and a consideration of the relations of morality and happiness (ch. ix. and x.). a concluding chapter sums up a work of nearly closely printed pages. it is very evident that we cannot undertake the criticism of so large and important a work without having to enter minutely upon points of agreement and difference which would greatly augment the size of our present volume. we need only say that, although there are naturally many minor criticisms to be made, we accept it as an excellent exposition of modern ethical views modified and co-ordinated as necessitated by the recognition of the darwinian theories. it should be read, we think, in succession to professor sidgwick's excellent broad and dispassionate work on "the methods of ethics." mr. leslie stephen's study is based upon the same scientific fundamentals as mr. spencer's "data of ethics," without the confusing cosmical views which are necessitated by mr. spencer's position, but which do not by any means tend to strengthen it. chapter vii. the evolution of free will. two distinct theories may be held by the evolutionist with respect to volition, both of them being strictly causational, and, therefore, of a scientific, as opposed to a mystical character. he may hold, in the first place, the double aspect theory pure and simple, according to which all developments of mind are merely dependent concomitants of the development of nerve ramifications, with consequent growths of nerve-cells, ganglions, and the more considerable nerve plexuses, culminating in the growth of a brain. this evolution of a nervous and cerebral system he may hold to be wholly due to the action of molecular and other motions upon a mass of colloid substances of such a constitution as to be fittest, under the action of these external stimuli, to form lines for the transmission of motions and for the discharge of these motions into certain otherwise formed contractile structures called muscles. he will consider that they eventually acquire a power of retaining these motions, so that the effect of all the motions thus caused is not immediate but deferred. and since all motions received are not immediately concerned with the welfare of the organism, he may suppose that separate masses of nervous matter are produced, in which these motions are stored in an organised form, related indirectly rather than directly to the motor apparatus. according to this theory the whole system of determining causes is purely physical. in the simple organisms the response of muscular action to incident motions is quick, direct, and unhesitating. such action is called reflex or automatic, and is as unconscious as chemical activity. but when the system becomes more complex, when nerves cross each other, when cells and junctions are formed, and more particularly when the storages of motions are formed, as just referred to; then compoundings and recompoundings of nervous motions take place, and, according to the strength of the various currents, to the facility of discharge, and to various physical local or general conditions, the action becomes slower and more hesitating. under these circumstances, it is held that the nervous system becomes conscious. a double aspect then arises, and the actions which thereafter take place may be described either in terms of the relations of the various molecular motions in the nervous and cerebral systems, or in terms of feeling; but all the same the latter is merely the secondary aspect of series of changes altogether determined by the motions and structure of the former. on this theory memory is the revived motion of a nerve structure; feeling is a consciousness of interaction between different nerve motions; trains of thought are the reverberations of great varieties of motions throughout the system and brain; consciousness resulting from the mingling of the nerve currents and the consequent conflict and retardation of effects. the element of mystery here lies in the secondary or subjective aspect, but it is placed strictly without the line of deduction and is a merely unexplained accompaniment of a series of changes otherwise fully accounted for. a second theory--as strictly causational as the former--recognises the presence of a subjective factor. in some of the quotations from mr. spencer's "psychology," given above, it will have been seen that, at the point of development of nerve junctions when different currents meet in the developed ganglion and in proportion as the system becomes more complex, mr. spencer asserts not only the rise of a secondary aspect, but of an additional factor. the element of mystery here is the entrance of this additional factor, capable of taking part as an active agent in the affairs of the organism. but since it is itself the result of experience and the organization of experiences of the physical nervous system, it is strictly of a causational or deductive order, and after its unexplained inception, it has to be studied strictly in the scientific order of development and action. notwithstanding that it plays a part in the conduct of life, and notwithstanding that its dependence upon physical organization and development is so intimate, and that this development again cannot be understood without it--notwithstanding all this incomprehensibleness of relation and our ignorance of its origin, the evolutionist maintains the orderly development of organism and actions, including the subjective as resultants of the relations of original factors, although he may be for the time being ignorant of the nature of the processes. it will therefore be seen that in either case he holds the deterministic theory of volition, and believes all purposed actions to be actions determined by pre-existing causes, whether he regards these causes as the structure and condition of nerve centres, or as feelings and thoughts, or whether he regards them as ascribable to some law of correlation between the two. nevertheless, it seems to be incumbent upon all writers dealing with the subject of ethics to define their position as to the free will controversy. it is needless to say that we accept unreservedly the deterministic theory, though it may be necessary to attempt its reconciliation with the consciousness in persons of free will. we here make a distinction between theories of will and theories of free will. what we have just been considering have been theories of will or volition. they are of the deterministic order because in either case the actions are wholly determined by preceding facts. human and all actions of organisms are held to be merely resultants of pre-existing factors and their relations. this is the theory held by all scientific philosophers, and the one most analogous to what we know of physical science as well as most in conformity with actual experience of human conduct. another theory--arising no doubt in the mystery of the secondary aspect or in the mystery of the origin of the subjective factor, denies the rigidity of the scientific order, and asserts the presence and activity of a _self-determining factor_, thus placing volitional action beyond the scientific order of the dependent and related successions of cause and effect. perhaps, however, we would be more correct in attributing the confidence with which this theory of a self-determining power is sometimes held to another cause. there is in all human beings the consciousness of a power more or less developed to regulate their own actions; and this process of self-regulation is held to be inconsistent with the deterministic theory. there can be no doubt that there is such a consciousness and we think there can be no doubt also that there is such a power. the superficial evolutionist, indeed, may admit the consciousness, which he may explain as a secondary aspect of conflicting nerve-currents, and laugh in his sleeve at the egotistic vanity of a trustful man proud of his power of will. but we think a deeper explanation, and one more commensurate with the phenomena, is to be found: and this brings us back to the distinction, as indicated at the outset of this section, between theories of will or volition, and theories of free will or the power of regulating one's own conduct. will, in its scientific sense, is merely volition, _i.e._ the mental state accompanying or immediately preceding action. the nature of the action, good, bad, or indifferent, is immaterial. technically speaking, all volitions are equal, viewed as such. the volition for the time being is the will for the time being. the will of a man is the totality of his volitions during the whole of his lifetime. it is a general or collective term relating to conscious actions, or states of consciousness immediately preceding actions, and is not the name of an entity. but if will is the volition for the time being, irrespective of any qualitative characteristic, then we have to inquire as to the applicability to it of the term "free." now this term is antithetical to the two terms "restrained" and "constrained." thus if a man's actions are hindered or forcefully prevented by the will of others, that man's actions are not free. but if some of a man's motives are restrained or his actions constrained by the predominance of some other of his motives--as, for instance, when he performs actions which his conscience tells him are wrong--in his will not free? the actions are his volitions. if some motives are restrained, and therefore not to be considered free, still the others which have gained the predominance have thereby become his will; their operation proves their non-restraint or freedom, and the volition or will is still free. the action is an evidence of freedom. volition is always free. it is of different kinds, but this does not affect the conclusion that volition proves its own freedom. the will is always and under all circumstances free. but although this disposes of the question theoretically, the ordinary man remains unconvinced, and clings to his belief in a free will, which is not merely this technical and universal free will, but must be interpreted as a power he feels himself to possess of choosing and determining his own actions; and if we say to him, "undoubtedly you have this power; but your choice, and therefore your volition and consequent action, is still determined in the same manner as if you had not recognized the power," he will demur, and, logically or illogically, he will deny your position, and hold to his consciousness of what he calls his self-determining power over his own actions, which he places out of the line of determinism, however unmeaning or paradoxical his assertions may be proved to be. it is this state of consciousness, this clinging to the belief held by many men in their own _power of self-rule_ over their own general conduct, and by most men in their own control over some of their activities, that evolution is bound to account for and explain. evolutionists do not sufficiently mark off this _practical_ part of the question from the _theoretical_ part, and thus leave imperfectly explained the consciousness of the so-called "free will." they deem that the explanation of free will is included in an explanation of will, and therefore they only deal incidentally and imperfectly with self-rule. the confusion arises from the term free will having two meanings--the theoretic or scientific one, as opposed to determinism, and the practical one, as implying the power of self-rule, choice, effort, and determination. that there exists such a power of self-regulation is a fact recognized in every department of social intercourse--in the attribution of praise or blame, in the teachings of the moralist, in the eye of the law, and in the process of education. every individual is supposed to have a command over his own actions, except such as are purely automatic. it is not supposed that men are responsible for their congenital tastes or abilities; but all members of the community are held responsible for their actions towards other members of the community, and to a certain extent they are judged to be wise or foolish with regard to themselves, on the supposition that they are able to carry out a purposed conduct. and even if in various particulars it is seen that they do not possess such a power, they, or the persons responsible for their earlier education are blamed for their want of this power since it is held to be one of the most characteristic and valuable possessions of humanity. thus we find the judicious parent, from the very first, endeavours to inculcate in the child habits of command over his temper and his appetites. the youth who has received the lessons of wise counsellers, who has been imbued with the lessons of christianity, who has drunk in the teachings of the ancient moralists, and framed his ambitions upon the severe examples of early greece and rome, or who has found his sympathies excited by the dreams of modern philanthropy, knows that the foundation of all his personal greatness is in his power of self-command. it is no idle verbiage that of the rhetorician, the preacher, the philosophical novelist, the poet, when they exhort to the cultivation of the powers of the will in their varied representations of the aspirations and struggles of noble humanity. there is something that calls forth the moralist's sympathies in the poet's appeals to the power of will, and there is no grander spectacle in all this universe than to witness the battle of the will-power of a man against difficulties and oppositions of all sorts; none the less if the scene of the conflict be in the region of his own heart and mind, rather than in the wider field of the battle of life. the evolutionist is bound to account for this amongst the other phenomena of human existence. the principles of such an evolution are contained in mr. spencer's "psychology," but the development is not elaborated in detail, and is well worthy of a special study. we have previously roughly indicated the outlines of such a study; and as the special psychological question has been treated in an interesting and suggestive manner by the rev. t. w. fowle in the number of the "nineteenth century" for march , we will find it convenient to take this article as the text or basis of our own remarks. the writer's argument appears in brief to be this. in the course of evolution, man became self-conscious (see p. ). this consciousness of self led, first of all, to self-preservation, then to self-assertion, and finally to self-pleasing. "when man first uttered the words or rather felt the impression to which language subsequently gave definite shape and force, '_i will_ live in spite of all the forces encompassing my destruction,' then was free will created upon the earth." note here, that will is changed to free will in the course of a single sentence, and that this "free will" is simply human action predominant over external difficulties, which should therefore rather be called will, and is certainly not the free will or self-rule which we have now under consideration. hence arises a certain amount of confusion, as witness p. :--"we ascribe, then, man's consciousness of _free will_ to the concentration of all his pre-human experiences into one imperative determination to preserve, to assert, and to please himself." thus, "free will," in the mind of the writer, is simply the human will as opposed to the forces of nature. nothing is said about the exterior opposing wills of others, though surely he must intend them also to be included in the environment. at the same time we do not know that it makes the particular point under consideration more difficult of study, although these external wills form a considerable part of the objects determining the activities of the self. yet, as our particular point of study is _self_-rule, this extension of the reference to external forces does not directly affect the argument. but it will be seen that the will or free will mentioned here, and defined as self-assertion and determination to please one's self, is self-assertion as opposed to environment--a self-assertion which, irrespective of the qualities or nature of the motives comprised in that self, determines to work out its own pleasure there and then in spite of all opposition. such a state is well illustrated in the first self-assertions of childhood--its so-called _wilfulness_; for as embryology illustrates the stages of biological evolution, so does childhood illustrate the stages of mental and moral evolution. this self-assertion is also illustrated in the conduct of the insane and of the rude, rough, uneducated minds of the masses. still it is not what is meant by free will, but the very reverse; for such persons are said to be slaves to their passions or motives. this is undoubtedly egoistic _will_; and therefore theoretically, as before distinguished, it is _free_: but it is not the free will, the self-rule we are now in search of. this sort of self-assertion is the determination to please oneself, _irrespective of consequences_. but when it is known that consequences recoil upon self--when the _element of time_ is taken into account, and the self is found to be continuous, then there is reflection, and by-and-by succeeds caution, restraint, and the co-ordination of actions to a given end. this is the germ of self-rule which is mistakenly regarded as identical with the self-determination of volition. the term "self-preservation" has a wide and also a restricted sense. it may simply mean the continuance in existence of the body; or if the self is equivalent to the preservation of the activities comprised in that self, _whatever those activities may be_--lust, hate, benevolence, æsthetic feeling, &c.--then it implies the continuous gratification of those activities. this understanding of self-preservation is dependent on the length of time for which the self is expected to continue. the religious man, believing in a god and a future life, preserves what he esteems his self--_i.e._, his moral and religious being--even in martyrdom. but if there is no future life, then the self that has to be preserved is the self as it is, whatever that may happen to be--gross or refined. there are no better recognised traits of free will--_i.e._, self-rule--than the power of self-denial, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice. these cannot be explained by any definition of free will founded on self-assertion and self-preservation merely. then, again, self-education, the designed alteration of the character, and the intentional acquirement of self-control, can hardly be held to be consistent with simple self-assertion. self-assertion is the assertion of self as it is. the resolution to alter is the denial of self-preservation as regards the existing self. the adaptation to environment involved in self-abnegation is the opposite to self-assertion. are we to suppose that the free will predicated of man is an universal possession of all? if it is a _theoretical_ question, it must be granted that all men's wills are free. but if it is a practical question as to the strength of the will as opposed to external forces, and held to be free in proportion to its relative strength of self-assertion, surely free will is a variable quality. if, again, it is a practical question as to the power of self-rule, are we to suppose that all men have it in equal degrees? do the idiot and the maniac possess it, or on the contrary is it possessed unequally by men, and by some not at all? the writer says, p. , "now, from the moment that self became an object of consciousness, it became also a motive." this consciousness of self is a consciousness of the totality of the activities, a consciousness of the unity of that totality, a consciousness of the continuance of that totality for a more or less certain future. the motive consequent upon such recognition must be the longest continuance of that self, the greatest amount of gratification of the activities of that self, the avoidance of pains to that self, and the aggregation of more activities by that self. the result of that motive would be the co-ordination of actions to attain the final end thus set before the total self, and the subordination of particular motives to their proper places in the co-ordinative scheme. but as the total self is in relation to environment, that environment, physical or societarian, has to be taken into account; and as consequences of actions recoil upon the individual at a later time, the results of actions have to be taken into account. therefore there is brought into activity a large amount of rational consideration and judgment as to the eventualities of conduct in regard to the 'total self'; and finally it is found that action must take one of two forms: either the environment must be adjusted to the organism--this is a form of will--or the organism must be adjusted to the environment--this is free will or self-rule--_i.e._, the free will as here understood. this is the solution implied in the writer's statement that "from the moment that self became an object of consciousness it became also a motive." this rational view of self as an aggregate of faculties and motives likely to last a certain length of time, and surrounded by a social environment which has in great measure formed it, and which exercises upon it a continual pressure, brings forward the relation of free will to ethics in the fact that the acquired power of self-rule has to take into account, in-so-far as it exists in the individuals forming the social coercions and approvals, and in so far as the ego approaches the normal standard of regulating his own sympathies, which together in an instructed community make up personal responsibility to the ethical law, and supply the ethical as distinguished from the merely altruistic motive. the evolutionist's definition of life is "the continuous adjustment of inner to outer relation," or of organism to environment. the principles and results of this continuous adjustment, in the modifications of structure and function, and their transmission by heredity in gradually more permanently established forms, is well understood from the writings of mr. darwin, mr. spencer, and others. the progress of development in the human race has consisted in the _establishment of correspondences_ of a definite and permanent character between organism and environment. why it should have been possible for such a grand development to take place as that which has actually taken place lies beyond the limits of our subject; but if evolution is true, the fact remains that the human organism has continually been increasing the number of its correspondences, in accordance with the increasing complexity of its surroundings. roughly, this establishment of relations with the external world may be classed under two divisions, each containing a great variety of details. firstly, the class of cognitions, including the knowledge of the physical world, the field, the forest, the stream, the animals, the sky and heavenly bodies, and also the knowledge of men, and their ways in society; secondly, the class of direct relations with other individuals, such as the relations of wife, children, parents, chiefs, involving also property, and inducing the feelings of love, friendship, hate, justice, and other social affections. the establishment of a correspondence between the organism and the environment, of such a definite character as to be transmitted by heredity, involves the establishment of motives. the stomach without food experiences hunger, a want, and forms a motive. so of the other organs, and so of all other established relations inwoven in the organism. however subtle and refined any established relation may be, but less in proportion to its later order of development, and directly as its necessity to existence, so its force. it experiences a want in respect of its correlate, and this want becomes a motive or incentive to its own gratification. the kinds of actions, then, may be distinguished as-- the functional, such as the action of the heart, the intestines, &c. these are wholly involuntary. the emotional involuntary, such as the feelings and desires, and the muscular expression of some of them, as in laughing, crying, &c. the emotional volitional, or actions proceeding from the emotions, and constraining the muscles to the means of their gratification. here must be added the rational volitional; and if the rational choice of actions and ordering of conduct, in which the emotions and passions play a subordinate part as factors in a general estimate or judgment, can be interpreted as a recognition of "self as an object," and the establishment of a correspondence therewith, then the "motive of self" as advanced by the essayist may be considered as the highest motive of the emotional volitional class. thus self as an enduring whole becomes established as the predominating object in the mind of the ego, towards which object or ideal attainment in continuity, and in expansiveness of relation the motives of the individual turn--co-ordinating to it all the more special motives; and evolving in a higher degree the powers of self-rule. in this manner self-rule or free will is explained and vindicated as a natural possession of humanity and one of its highest and most characteristic attainments. at the same time it is found to be consistent with a deterministic scheme and not to require the assistance of an incomprehensible self-determining power on the part of the ego. the deterministic theory as regards the actions and conduct of an individual is not, however, so narrow in its purview as this. it recognises a great many kinds of conditions as the more or less direct or remote causes of actions. it recognises-- _heredity_, by which the physical qualities, and emotional and intellectual tendencies, of the parents, more or less obscurely known on account of intermixture, are transmitted to the offspring. the child is born with a certain inherited constitution, containing potentially within it a course of development through certain physiological changes up to decay and old age. this constitution is one of a definite character, having definite proportions of parts, as of head, chest, abdomen, &c., and definite relations of systems, such as nervous, vascular, muscular, visceral, &c., and partly as a consequence of this the child also possesses mental and moral tendencies which, while very susceptible of influence, are primarily derived by heredity. _action of environment._--from the moment of birth, (or sooner), the organism comes into relation with very complex conditions, which variously affect its course of development. the suitable or unsuitable conditions of the mother's health, food, warmth, sleep, &c., influence the development of the child; and thenceforward all through life the conditions of nourishment, diet, climate, exposure, disease, accident, &c., have strong and recognisable effects upon the organism, physical and mental. _general tuition_, or the education by contact with the members of the family, playmates, companions, and the great body of the individuals of the environment with whom the child or youth comes into contact, into the general tone and principles of his age, country, class, or sect, gradually fashioning him into a certain pattern, shaping the general mode of his life, and forming within him certain standards of action, certain codes of obligation, moral or ceremonial, certain customs, fashions, &c., as well as implanting in him the convictions, theological or otherwise, of his time. _special tuition._--tuition affects the whole of the activities of the individual according to the nature of the training, its suitability or unsuitability, its persistence, and the force exerted. the value of a long course of direct education is well understood in all civilised communities, and in modern times is recognised as one of the great means of effecting the general improvement of society, if only it could be thoroughly applied. _the education of circumstances_ affects not only the physical constitution, but also very much the mental and moral qualities of the individual. and as these circumstances are widely varied and the hereditary tendencies very different, the results will be widely diverse in different individuals; but there is no doubt that a condition of poverty or of affluence, good or ill usage, neglect or over-governing, a solitary or a social condition, surroundings of town or country, status of parents, nature of and facilities for amusements and studies, the degree of early responsibilities, the kind of business occupation or other avocation, all largely affect the conduct and modify the motives of the individual. and it is wonderful in a highly developed and complex state of society, where the possession of great wealth creates a large leisure class, and the enormous activity pervading the whole ever tends to put the organisms included into every possible relation with the outer world, and with every relation that can grow up in its own complex social mixture--it is wonderful, we say, in such circumstances, the number of motives that will grow up. the relations extend to the past and the future. the most paltry, evanescent, and adventitious relations become more or less motives of action, and grow more or less established in the individual and more or less transmitted to posterity. besides the great number of these relationships, there is the difference of kind. many are of a concrete sort; as for instance, the love of dogs, horses, &c.; others are of a very abstract description. these latter are principally the outcome of social and intellectual relationships. they are generalisations of conduct, or they are abstractions of the intellect. virtue, ideal conduct, justice, beauty, truth, science, philosophy, a perfected humanity, all become realised abstractions, as it were, with which a relation is established, and which, therefore, assume the guise of motives seeking their means of gratification. we recognize the fact that abstractions may become objects of motives, as distinct from the concrete objects which are definitely in relation with corresponding affections of the organism. these abstractions grow into definite parts of self, and, if they largely predominate in an individual, he will become a martyr rather than abandon his devotion to them. he will esteem them the principal part of self, and let his body perish rather than act against them. such organic abstractions may, indeed, become the objects of the most powerful passions, before which concrete objects sink into utter insignificance. we have found that the recognition of the continuous or "total self" can become such an object and induce the establishment of a corresponding motive. at the outset, we distinguish the province of reason, in which is included the calculation of the results of actions, and the devising of the best means for accomplishing a desired end without incurring pains and inconveniences. if a certain end is desired, the intellect has to forecast the outcome of different modes for effecting the desired result, and to discern that which secures the end with the fewest drawbacks. the end may be good or bad; the motives may be of the most elevated and generous character or they may be of the worst; but all the same, it must be duly considered what is the best means of securing it. what would be the result if i did this? on the other hand, would it not be better to do that? it will be seen that here there is no choice between motives, no dispute to settle between conflicting principles and passions, but only a kind of mental calculus or intellectual engineering. this state of the mind is sometimes taken to be the exercise of a choice, and it may be so; but it is of a different kind to that involved in self-rule, which we now approach. as a power of very gradual growth must we regard that cognition, (with its subsequent establishment as an object and a motive in the human organism) which recognises the self as a whole--as a whole at any given time, and as a whole extending over seventy years, and perhaps indefinitely longer! man's total self can become an object of thought and that object a motive, as distinguished from any of the particular motives of which it is made up. man's future self may be an object of thought as well as the present; and man's continuous self may become a constant and all-predominating object of regard and interest--an all-absorbing motive. indeed, so far may this go, that the long continuous self prospected after death may and has been so much an object of motive as to overshadow and dwarf every interest of the present. and if this continuous self is recognised by the reason as the complete object, the one and chief motive--and it must be so since it includes every motive at every instant of time--then the reason accords to it and claims for it a _ruling_ position, a claim before which every other must give way. there is no doubt that this is substantially taught, although in different terms of exposition, in all ethical books and in all verbal precepts of good counsel. the psychogeny of this development of the continuous self into an object and a motive is to be found in the intellectual recognition of the actual order displayed by nature in the processes of life. it is the harmonising of the volitional actions with the laws of natural change. we have seen that the process of life is the continuous adaptation of organism to environment. but this is a natural, non-volitional process. change in the environment produces change of organism to correspond with it. when cognitions are developed the sequences of action are foreseen, the changes of environment are foreseen, the developments of organism are foreseen; a generalisation is made of all the factors, and logical conclusions drawn as to the necessary adaptations. then follows a rational or intentional adaptation of organism and environment, due to the motive of self which we have just considered; this rational or intentional adaptation may be either incidental or continuous, and the adaptation may be either of organism or of environment. and in this calculus the relation of the individual to the mass of individuals constituting society must be taken into account. a man having regard to his continuous self finds himself in a certain position. the motive relating to the continuous self determines that his conduct shall be regulated by the best regard for that continuous self. and it must be admitted at once that technically it is not qualitatively related to any abstraction, such as virtue, &c., unless, indeed, virtue be interpreted as the establishment of such a harmony, but has regard purely to the establishment of the most harmonious correspondence between himself and his environment for the remainder of his life. it might be that such a resolve would result in a system of ethics, but we wish to limit the consideration to our special subject. and, in the first place, we must recognise the _quantitative_ character of such an adaptation. the self is surrounded by an enormous and highly complex environment; but it may, from heredity, or want of education, or perverse education, be a very narrow, poor, meagre, little self, having very few, weak, feeble correspondences with the environment. a pig in his stye may be well adjusted to his environment; but his correspondences with the external world are few in number and of small intensity. we would therefore assert with mr. spencer as a corollary from the continuous adjustment of the organism and the environment, not merely the establishment of a convenient _modus vivendi_, but an adjustment of the organism by enlargement of the number of its correspondences with the environment, so as to render the adjustment between organism and environment more perfect by making the former co-extensive with the latter. in proportion to the number of points of interest or correspondences established between organism and environment, so is the perfection of the continuous self. in this manner then free will or self-rule in its very nature is related to the conception of a continuous self towards which it acts as the object of a motive, and possesses also an ethical bearing with regard to the enlargement of the correspondences with the external world. for what is there of greater interest in the external world than the subjective individuals of our surroundings, the society of which we form a part, the mysterious past out of which we came and the dependent nations of the future which we are helping to make? it is evident that in thus setting up the continuous self as an object, whose realisation is to be the ruling power in the regulation of conduct, (whether this self be the complete self we have just contemplated, or the incomplete self which we may happen to be, and to be pretty well contented with,) a certain amount of self-regulation will always be necessary in order to effect the object in view, and at occasional crises a very great amount of struggle and effort will have to be exerted in order to put down the influence of some active motive which would, by its hasty and blind gratification, mar the result of that line of conduct already decided upon as the best. here will come in the conflict of passion with reason, and of impulse with prudence, which is really of the greatest practical interest in our study. and here we find, as one of the chief motives in such a conflict, the motive of _regard for the continuous self_. it is not always a ruling motive. it is best that it should be so. the object of education and self-culture is to make it so. but at any rate it is a motive, and a strong one. in proportion to its predominance is the amount of self-rule, of self-control, and, as we read it, of free will. thus the rational regard for self becomes recognised as a motive. the rational volitional becomes the emotional volitional. it has been recognised in many philosophies under various names, advanced sometimes as a motive, sometimes as the very self of self, and sometimes designated by the term "self-determining power," &c.; but its true character and genesis is best explained by evolution. the great practical question is this: has man the power of choice amongst motives? has he the vaunted power of self-rule? and can he cultivate it? we can only reply that, as a matter of fact, some men have it and some have not; that some have in some respects and not in others. as a matter of possibility, most men may attain in a considerable degree to the power of self-rule by judicious self-culture: and in the education of the young, more particularly in home education, a very high standard in this respect may be attained. some feeble minds and flighty or impassioned natures, as well as idiots, may not be able to reach it, and some fools may lose it after they have got it; but as a general rule and a safe fact for all to accept, we may say that a high degree of self-rule may by most people be attained, and that the possession of it is for the most part happiness. adopting, then, the statement of the essayist, "from the moment that self became an object of consciousness it became also a motive," we would add the element of time and recognise a continuous self. then, placing the statement in a subordinate position, as part of the general evolution of life--which is the continuous adjustment of organism and environment--and acknowledging the growth of reason, we would define the course of action which results from all these factors as _the rational quantitative and continuous adjustment of organism and environment_. this is the evolutionist formula of free will or self-rule. thus the consciousness of choice and of the power of self-rule receives an explanation on the evolution of deterministic hypothesis in this respect, that the recognition of the continuous self as an object of thought and an important object of interest and regard, _becomes thereby a motive determining action and conduct_, even against the immediate urgencies of passion. determinism is thus acknowledged to be a correct theory: but the dignity of the claim for self-rule and free choice is vindicated, and the attainment of it by most people is shown to be both desirable and feasible. chapter viii. evolution, ethics, and religion. the recognition of the ultimate tendencies of evolution suggests two further enquiries, one as to the personal relation with the far-off result, and one as to the origin of such a definite progress. perhaps the consideration of the former question is bound up in the latter. nevertheless, within the scope of the former more limited enquiry, the comtists are content to rest. for them the narrow limits of history and its immediate outlook are sufficient. what is actually recorded of humanity, and what is actually revealed in it, together with the indications of its possibilities, suffice for the creed of the comtist. the positivist produced by evolution worships his cause under the name of humanity, and works towards mr. spencer's evolutionist ideal. he seeks no justification in philosophy. the product of evolution--he acts from inward impulse and requires no authority. he has none to appeal to in the inculcation of his worship, but the natural response to be found in the hearts of those who occupy the same intellectual and sympathetic position. but this is after all only a partial grasp of the fundamental problem of history. it is an abandonment, temporary or otherwise, of the intellectual problem, although it is a recognition of the onward sweep of humanitarian evolution. the history and the tendencies are alike sought to be explained by the philosophy of the evolutionist. what, then, is the position of the evolutionist in regard to the problem of religion, and what practical bearing has it upon ethics or moral obligation? the answer to these questions depends upon what is meant by the theory of evolution. if by evolution is meant a complete system of explanations by which all the events comprised in all departments of human knowledge, stretching throughout the whole of history recorded and surmised, are intelligibly accounted for as the results of the interrelation of primordial factors, of which we have a clear apprehension, insomuch that the logical order becomes a picture of the historical order, then our estimate of evolution depends upon our estimate of the original factors. if they are held to be some seventy in number, and to be those elements of which a full account is given in chemistry, and to be subject to general laws, such as those described in works on physics, then our regard for evolution must be one due to the reverence we possess for chemistry, electricity, heat, gravitation, and the like, and our conduct must be made to conform--if we wish to coincide with the eventual tendencies of evolution--with what we judge to be the ultimate tendencies of the evolution of these factors, namely, their ultimate equilibration in universal quiescence. life, according to this view, is an interruption of the process, and a contradiction of cosmical intention. this view of evolution is not saved by the theory that behind these chemical affinities and physical relations there is an unknowable power of which they are but the manifestations: for the power is not unknowable if its manifestations are limited to these known manifestations; and if they are not so limited, but operate in other ways with new factors, not comprised in our estimate of them, then our explanatory system is at fault, and has to be abandoned or amended. the recognition of an unknowable power behind chemistry and physics, yet limited by the laws of chemistry and physics, is equal only to our estimate of chemistry and physics. we could but address it as oh my lord chemistry! oh my lord physics! but we have shown in our previous criticisms that this view of evolution, as dealing with purely physical factors, is inadequate to explain the cosmical histories. we have criticised adversely mr. spencer's attempts so to explain biological development; and we have indicated the necessity for supposing that other superior factors are present in biological evolution. we do not know that mr. spencer disputes it--his work is too vague and inconsistent to enable us to say precisely what he does and what he does not teach. but the admission of additional factors does not destroy the theory of evolution. darwin and spencer and the modern school have established, beyond dispute, the fact of orderly development in the cosmos. we are forced, therefore, to admit both evolution and the presence in it, so far as biology is concerned, and probably also as regards all the changes anterior to the beginnings of life, of a factor over and above the chemical and physical factors. the nature of this factor we do not know, nor do we know how, as having an orderly relation to chemical and physical events, its law is to be expressed in such a manner as to enable us to understand how organisms arose and were developed. here, indeed, we can recognise a power, and an inscrutable one: but inasmuch as it is inscrutable it spoils our philosophy--our systems of explanations--and laughs at our formulas. but after all, if we succeed in establishing purposive actions as incidents in a process of equilibration, what have we gained? we have gained a scientific explanation of all purposive actions as well as of all actions of organisms in general. they all stand upon the same footing--that is to say they are all equally explicable as parts of the universal process. they are all equally equilibrations, and so justified in their order of occurrence. they rank alike as incidents in a line of causation explicable by the law of equilibration. apparently all that is, is right. equilibration does not recognise any distinction as to the quality of actions. this distinction can be explained by equilibration, but cannot be justified by it as a law for future conduct, any more than any other incident of the course of equilibration. if certain laws of living become established, then moving equilibria capable of recognising this fact must act accordingly--they must adapt themselves to the environment: but this does not prevent the organism from adapting the environment to itself, if it can, by changing it or overcoming it--this is merely a matter of equilibration. the law of biology will allow it to cope with an adverse environment in many ways, namely, by conformity, by escape so as to preserve its individuality, and by altering or overcoming the environment. if the forces of the environment be powerful and omnipresent, then conformity is the only resource. it is only a matter of superiority of force, and the resulting conformity is merely a matter of equilibration. it is not that equilibration lends any special sanctity or quality to certain actions. social pressure coerces individual pressure--the mutual coercion of society is equilibration--the result of this equilibration, whatever it is, is a variable ethics. the recognition of great duties and great faults, the facts of moral approbation and condemnation, the phenomena of a private and public conscience are all explicable as equilibrations: but since whatever is, is an equilibration, it is not from the laws of equilibration that any established moral distinction or obligation can be justified for guidance for a single day in advance. there is no universality, either in place or time in ethics thus viewed. the justification of ethics from the evolution point of view must be sought on other grounds than in that of a cosmical equilibration. it is difficult to say what support is rendered to practical ethics by the theory of evolution. according to it, ethics is a history and a prediction; but failing the existence in any individual (as the result of a growth) of the moral sense for which evolution professes to account, the prediction only applies to future generations; and it is difficult to see that practical ethics has for such a person any intrinsic authority. and even if the moral sense, and social pressure (which are respectively the intrinsic and the extrinsic authority, for practical ethics) are sufficient of themselves to enforce moral conduct, then the understanding of how they both came to possess such a power of command, lends them no additional authority, but rather tends, at first sight, to detract from their sacred prestige. the confidence of the philosopher is however soon restored, when he considers that despite the failure of his theory to intellectually establish moral enforcements, nevertheless, the great forces which have produced both the intrinsic and the extrinsic ethical authorities are still at work, and must more and more prevail. if these are natural growths the movement in the hearts of men, and in societarian organization, will ever prevail over and above all reasoning about them. individual opposition and restiveness will be levelled before the might of the advance. the individual must obey or perish; indeed he must himself change and become part of the coercive power. thus it will be found that the apprehension which mr. spencer expresses in his preface, as to the loss of a controlling agency in the decay and death of an older regulative system is not met by the establishment of a new controlling agency which takes the place of the discarded authority, but may be met by the fact disclosed in evolution, that whatever authority men may recognise, nay, even if they do not recognise any, it is all the same--they are part and parcel of an onward growth against which it is useless to rebel. the moral authority is the conviction of the inevitable. thus evolution dispels the fear of a moral anarchy by showing the necessity for the existence of present and future moral order, ensured alike by extrinsic social organization, and by a no less certain prevalence of intrinsic motives. thus, though evolution lends but little additional theoretical force to moral argument, it shows forth the power of natural ethical authority, and declares with convincing efficacy, "magna est veritas et prævalebit." the moral imperative is found to be firstly extrinsic in social pressure, and secondly intrinsic in altruistic sympathy. these are the only authorities competent to say: "thus shalt thou do, and thus shalt thou not do." evolution establishes no absolute morality. it is always relative to the surroundings, and it differs according to the stage of civilization. the more nearly the conduct approaches the relatively perfect the more truly ideal is it. the imagined ideal is not so perfect as the relatively perfect. according as a necessity is universal, so is the degree of moral enforcement which accompanies it, and the degree of accord in the recognition of its imperativeness. the sanctity of life, the condemnation of these who infringe it, the commendation of those who promote it are of first eminence. liberty, property, and other essentials receive little less recognition; and so on by degrees down to the small details of everyday life. the kind of moral imperative is the same throughout, the degree of enforcement differing according to the varying importance of the actions. as this point very properly comes in the evolutionist's view of religion. we take, as our text on this subject, the speech by professor fiske at the spencer banquet held in new york, november th, , and since published in the form of a tractette.[ ] professor fiske here pursues mr. spencer's faulty plan of generalising all religions, and assuming the common or fundamental content as a true finding, besides holding that the fundamental truths of science are identical with this final deliverance of religion. it is not that professor fiske's argument is bad, but that it is badly put. if we confine ourselves to the scientific view, and say that the universe manifests an orderly development; that it is probably altogether the result of the relations of primordial factors; but that of these we can form no adequate conception although, nevertheless, they undoubtedly contained something of the elements of a subjective nature--then we do not transgress the scientific view. neither do we so transgress when, by inductions from the history of man, we assert that the law of development of the subjective is towards altruistic sympathy, quantitative increase of life, and social harmony or equilibration. mr. matthew arnold's recognition of "an eternal power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" is as near an approach to the truth as we can get. mr. spencer's formula should be "an unknowable power, not ourselves, that makes towards equilibrium." the question, thereupon arises, is the subjective a factor in a process of equilibration, and is righteousness subjective equilibration? the question also arises in the latter case, is the "makes for" or "makes towards" a teleological aiming at an end, or a process determined completely by antecedent factors of which it is but the outcome? it is difficult to imagine under a system of evolution, even if an universal subjective factor be admitted, the operation of a teleological activity as ordinarily understood. nevertheless, we find a teleological faculty evolved in man. and even if we accept mr. matthew arnold's description, the question arises, has the eternal power a conscious intention of making towards righteousness from the first or from any time? or is it implicit in the original relations of the subjective to the chemical and physical that it makes through biology towards righteousness--is righteousness merely another expression for a completed biological law involved in the original relations of atoms with an omnipresent subjective and relative factor? and again, what, scientifically viewed, is our personal relation to that inscrutable power which makes for righteousness? here comes in the ethical problem as affected by the religious, and both as affected by our views of evolution. professor fiske says of the propositions recognised by all religions "that men ought to do certain things and ought to refrain from doing certain other things; and that the reason why some things are wrong to do and other things are right to do, is in some mysterious but very real way connected with the existence and nature of this divine power." the fact that personal responsibility to the inscrutable power belongs to the essence of all religions is one thing, and the establishment of it as a scientific truth is another. the fact of its existence and of its universality is a presumption in its favour, but is not more than a presumption. what has science to say to it? with this point professor fiske next deals. he says that science, after all its searchings, finds, in its ultimate enquiries, not only inexplicable laws whose effects it can calculate though the laws themselves remain unexplained, but also long processes which are not explicable by the known laws, and which will probably remain for ever inexplicable. if he does not say so in those words, we presume that must be what he means: for if he only means that all cosmical histories are explicable by known laws, these laws being themselves inexplicable, the inscrutable or divine power is only antecedent to cosmical histories, and is not present in them, nor does it affect the future. nevertheless, what professor fiske has to say of the results of scientific enquiry does not amount to much. "the doctrine of evolution asserts, as the widest and deepest truth which the study of nature can disclose to us, that there exists a power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenomena of the universe, whether they be what we call material or what we call spiritual phenomena, are manifestations of this infinite and eternal power." but this scientific truth does not in its mere enunciation bear upon the question as to our ethical relationship to the unknown power. it is only when we study its spiritual or subjective manifestation as an orderly development that we can recognise a power to which we owe a moral obligation. the scientific evidence of moral obligation to the inscrutable power rests, not upon the recognition of the power of which the cosmos is a manifestation, nor upon the fact of its inscrutability, but upon the knowledge of the subjective factor, its manifested history, and the inductions to be drawn from a study of that history in the laws of the working of altruistic sympathy, of quantitative life, and of the harmony of life as already set forth. professor fiske's conclusion is a good statement of this scientific establishment of personal responsibility to the divine power, and of religion as the crown and sanction of ethics. "now, science began to return a decisively affirmative answer to such questions as these when it began, with mr. spencer, to explain moral beliefs and moral sentiments as products of evolution. for clearly, when you say of a moral belief or a moral sentiment that it is a product of evolution, you imply that it is something which the universe through untold ages has been labouring to bring forth, and you ascribe to it a value proportionate to the enormous effort that it has cost to produce it. still more, when with mr. spencer we study the principles of right living as part and parcel of the whole doctrine of the development of life upon the earth; when we see that, in an ultimate analysis, that is right which tends to enhance fulness of life, and that is wrong which tends to detract from fulness of life--we then see that the distinction between right and wrong is rooted in the deepest foundations of the universe; we see that the very same forces, subtle, exquisite, and profound, which brought upon the scene the primal germs of life and caused them to unfold, which through countless ages of struggle and death have cherished the life that could live more perfectly, and destroyed the life that could only live less perfectly, and humanity, with all its hopes, and fears, and aspirations, has come into being as the crown of all this stupendous work--we see that these very same subtle and exquisite forces have wrought into the very fibres of the universe those principles of right living which it is man's highest function to put into practice. the theoretical sanction thus given to right living is incomparably the most powerful that has ever been assigned in any philosophy of ethics. human responsibility is made more strict and solemn than ever, when the eternal power that lives in every event of the universe is thus seen to be in the deepest possible sense the author of the moral law that should guide our lives, and in obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is incorruptible--which neither inevitable misfortune nor unmerited obloquy can ever take away." this appears to us the best statement yet made of the logical results of the enquiry into evolution when pursued to its furthest point. some enquirers halt at the materialistic point, but an irresistible logic leads the honest and open-minded enquirer beyond this stage of thought, and he finds in the recognition of the existence of the subjective, and in the history of its development, a law of spiritual life. he finds a law of relation in subjective individuals which induces the establishment of a quantitative life in the increase of the number of correspondences with the external world both in time and space, and, which induces also the establishment of altruistic feeling--a feeling that expands to a greater or less comprehension of the great life of the subjective throughout the cosmical history; and in this recognition he finds also a sense of personal responsibility towards a power which demands from him a surrender, so that he shall work towards its great ideal, and find his happiness therein. what more there may be in natural religion is beyond the scope of our present volume, though we hope at same future time to treat of this important subject. our present view is limited to the consideration of ethics, and how that science is affected by the recent large generalisations of biological history. certain definite conclusions of a religious character have come forward as the result of our studies, and since these have an ethical import, it is necessary to refer to them in this place. nevertheless the study of evolution assists ethics, although it can bring no argument to bear upon those who possess little moral aspiration, and can add nothing to the forcefulness of social pressure. its _point d'appui_ is in the existence in most men of the moral aspirations. through them it will work upon individuals of their environment, and upon the teachers and legislators who form and guide society. to them is disclosed the fact that their aspirations coincide with the tendencies of nature. they find that they are going with the stream, are in fact part of the historic stream itself. they recognise in society three movements. the first is the growth of altruism or sympathy. the second is the enlargement of quantititive life. the third is the approach towards a harmony or equilibration of life. the recognition of these truths imparts a deeper faith in moral progress, and gives a greater breadth of view, and a more intelligent and charitable interpretation of human action. philosophers, teachers, and statesmen, understanding the movements of society from age to age, and discerning the goal to which it inevitably works, can read more intelligently its primary phases, and assist more skilfully in its onward movement. the more extended recognition of the social aim throughout society will guide and increase social pressure in a corresponding direction, not only in the proper application of social rewards and penalties, but in the ethical inculcations, and eventually in the hereditarily established intrinsic motives. nor will prophets, the ripest fruit of evolution, be wanting in the future. ages produce not only the working results but the religious voices. there are always men who give utterance to the thought and to the aspirations of their time. standing in the fore-front of the advancing race, they face the mysterious darkness of the future illumined but by the lights drawn from the power working through the subjective history. footnote: [ ] "evolution and religion," by john fiske, m.a., ll.b. london: j. c. foulger, the modern press, . price twopence. chapter ix. summary. whether we consider biology as a process of equilibration of physical factors in a state of moving equilibrium, (including in this formula the process of reproduction and heredity to which biologically speaking the life of a species is limited--which equilibration explanation includes an equilibration of forces, as well as an equilibration of motives, respecting which our conceptions are as yet very indefinite and vague,) or on the other hand consider that the facts of biology require us to include in our explanatory moving equilibrium theory an equilibration of subjective factors with each other, and with the physical forces concerned, it is clear in either case that the dominant law of biology as set forth by mr. spencer is that of equilibration. the place to be assigned to purpose in a process of equilibration is not very clear. in the first place, if the biological explanations are all strictly limited to the chemical and physical factors, it seems evident that there can be no purposive actions, since all actions are determined by the chemical and mechanical relations of molecules, masses of molecules, and organised masses of molecules. to say that what we call purposive actions are explicable by physical and mechanical laws is to abolish purpose and substitute physical causation. can purpose by any means be made lineable in such a sequence? the problem is a fair one to consider and to attempt. we fail to do it, and we think that all who have attempted it have failed. but if a subjective factor is admitted into the problem, then it is necessary to understand in what way it becomes part of, and in what way it affects, a process of equilibration on the part of a moving equilibrium in which it is a factor. the peculiar nature of a biological moving equilibrium, and the respect in which it differs from a physical or mechanical moving equilibrium, consists in the fact that it works towards, if indeed it does not purposely aim at self-continuance by assimilation of force and self-continuance by means of self-protection from adverse forces in the environment. the coincidence of the subjective element with this tendency, in many equilibria, is suggestive of an efficient connexion. yet if we do not understand the law of the relation of a subjective factor with the physical and mechanical factors, how can we understand the resultant process of equilibration and the necessity for the biological law of adaptations for self-preservation and self-protection? how can we understand purpose as an equilibration? ethics to be affiliated upon the cosmical process requires that we should understand how purposive actions can be so affiliated, for ethics relates to purposive actions. in the failure of such a logical connexion, we may understand ethics on partial and limited grounds, but we do not understand it as mr. spencer proposes we should understand it, namely, as part of the cosmical process. according to mr. spencer, we are bound to accept ethics as part of the process of cosmical equilibration for this is after all the main conception of mr. spencer's great work. the apparent and ostensible conception, and that with which he has most succeeded in impressing the public mind, is the principle of evolution or gradual development; but we must not lose sight of the fact that what he proposed to accomplish was an explanation of evolution, and not merely the establishment of its historical verity. this explanation is in terms of equilibration. that conception lies behind and above the celebrated "formula of evolution," and by means of it the fanciful law of the moving equilibrium is posited as the ruling principle of biological change and development, as well as of physical changes proper. the biological law, or law of the moving equilibrium, rules supreme over all actions and developments of organisms: and even if an additional factor of subjectivity is present as one of the forces which equilibrate in a moving equilibrium, it is, nevertheless, subject to the laws of equilibration. it is not yet made clear how the law of equilibration, which necessitates that all forces should come to a state of rest in as speedy a time as possible, can be changed into a biological law working in the antagonistic direction of the self-preservation of a set of motions, and their self-protection against a possible cessation or extinction, with the addition of means of reproduction in view of an eventual cessation or extinction. but it is these biological actions, some of them purposive, and some of them perhaps not consciously purposive, which have to be properly shown as part of the cosmical process of equilibration, before purposive actions, and therefore, before ethics can be explained upon cosmical principles. errata. page xiii, lines and , for "actors" read "factors." page ii, line , for "he bridges over" read "he is supposed to bridge over." page , line , at the end, delete "in the." page , heading, for "the philosophical view" read "the biological view." page , line , for "ethics" read "of ethics." page , line , for "ætheticism" read "æstheticism." page , line , for "eges" read "egos." page , line , for "pervented" read "prevented."