The ethics of Hercules

SOME BORZOI TEXT BOOKS
SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL THEORY Harry E. Barnes THE ORAL STUDY OF LITERATURE Algernon Tassin THE BASIS OF SOCIAL THEORY Albert G. A. Balz ESSAYS IN ECONOMIC THEORY Simon Nelson Patten THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM Nelson A. Crawford THE TREND OF ECONOMICS Various Writers AN ANALYSIS OF WRITING Harold P. Scott
THE ETHICS OF HERCULES
A Study of Man’s Body as the Sole Determinant of Ethical Values
BY ROBERT CHENAULT GIVLER, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy in Tufts College
NEW YORK  ALFRED · A · KNOPF  MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Published, March, 1924
Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York. Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED TO THE THOUSAND MEN OF MY GENERATION WHOSE THOUGHT I HAVE THE HONOR OF MAKING ARTICULATE.
“ Waste not free energy; treasure it and make the best use of it. ” Wilhelm Ostwald, “ The Imperative of Energetics .”
This book deals with ethics as a strictly natural science, and particularly as a branch of mechanistic psychology. It regards the realm of ethics as coterminous with the arena of human activity, and holds that the problems of conduct, being exclusively man’s problems, are to be solved by the methods of applied science. Moreover, since human conduct is in the last analysis dependent upon the postures and manœuvres of our muscle-fabric, he who would understand ethics must first comprehend something of the mechanics of the human organism. Indeed, this book attempts to show, not only that ethics and physiology can no longer be studied apart from one another, but also that it is the structure and functions of the human body which have determined just what our ethical values are.
Such a program is not strictly original, for the student of philosophy will readily find its antecedents. Nevertheless, while many ethical writers have heretofore given numerous intimations of a mechanistic scheme in ethics, yet usually as they proceed to discuss what are called higher things, they seem to forget that it is the human body which performs every human action, even those deeds which move us most profoundly. No such faltering, we trust, will be found in these pages. Indeed, it may be stated at the outset that one of the fundamental conceptions from which this book originated is that the well-being of the physiological organism is the final criterion of whatever is ethically valuable.