History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

FOOTNOTES

[1] Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1891), vol. i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867.

[2] For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, 2d ed.

[3] Social Evolution (1894), p. 307.

[4] Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 254.

[5] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Practical Reason; cited by Fisher, History of the Christian Church (1888), p. 623.

[6] “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons.”—T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 361.

[7] Prolegomena to the History of Israel, tr. Black and Menzies (1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.

[8] Wake, The Evolution of Morality (1878), vol. ii, p. 4; Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 237; George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 79.

[9] T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 240.

[10] “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality, which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly, “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man, as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore, the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history of mankind” (Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life, tr. Gulliver and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.

[11] “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”—George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54.

[12] “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole realm of ethics.”—Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1887), p. 201.

[13] S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 354. The same thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral graveyard ... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall spring.”

[14] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.

[15] “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the inner by the outer.”—G. Lowes Dickinson, “Ideals and Facts,” Hibbert Journal for January, 1911, p. 266.

[16] “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”—Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development (1897), p. 397.

[17] See [Chapter XVIII]. “The activity of a free people creates a great number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights; so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests and high faculties of our nature.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 10.

[18] Principles of Economics, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilized nations.”—Lecky, The Map of Life (1900), pp. 53 f.

[19] The Moral Ideal, new and revised edition, p. 19.

[20] “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and purified by its religions.”—William Newton Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God (1909), p. 13.

[21] “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an attainment” (Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 301).

[22] Meditations, tr. Long, xi, 18.

[23] “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”—James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 261.

[24] Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 291.

[25] After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours” (The Malay Archipelago, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings Millward in National Geographic Magazine for March, 1909, p. 287).

[26] “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the clan.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 54.

[27] The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2 Sam. v. 1.

[28] Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”

[29] W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 267. See also Coulanges, The Ancient City, bk. ii, chap. ix.

[30] Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a member of his own kindred or political community; ... he may deceive, rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).

[31] It should be carefully noted that this is very different from saying that his life is immoral. To pronounce it immoral would be like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason” (Physics and Politics (1873), p. 115).

[32] “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral idea.”—Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 191.

[33] See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.

[34] Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks: “The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather than positive” (The Naturalist on the River Amazon). Cf. Edward Howard Griggs, The New Humanism, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.

[35] For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of morality, see Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.

[36] “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 149.

[37] “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic hearth.”—Helen Bosanquet, The Family (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 171.

[38] The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship group.

[39] When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor, a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality now consists in obedience to the law.

[40] Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.

[41] “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), p. 37.

[42] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 283.

[43] The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a merely preventive measure—not as a measure of justice or punishment. But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.

[44] “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons, because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without protection.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 90.

[45] Gen. iv. 13, 14.

[46] “Blood atonement ... was one of the very earliest cases we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social obligation.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 506.

[47] “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”—Wines, Punishment and Reformation (1895), p. 33.

[48] On the Lex talionis consult Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the Lex talionis has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all peoples.

[49] The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 267.

[50] Seeck (Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (1901), Bd. i, S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as the slave of the winner.

[51] The Truth about the Congo (1907), p. 29.

[52] “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal, however, from a white employer ... is no sin.”—Starr, The Truth about the Congo (1907), pp. 28 f.

[53] See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.

[54] On this subject see Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”

[55] Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks, Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 73).

[56] Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to the stranger. See Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.

[57] Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the Greenlander ... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for which their language has no word” (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 334).

[58] Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing slaves.

[59] Quoted by Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. vi.

[60] Often we find vestiges of the abandoned practice in what may be called celestial cannibalism (see W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 224). Thus the god of war of the Mexican Aztecs and the gods of many Polynesian tribes were cannibals, for human sacrifices must be regarded as a sort of celestial cannibalism, when the offering is made in the belief that the god actually repasts on the blood and the finer essences of the sacrificial victim. Where men have thus made their gods like unto themselves, and the practice of cannibalism has been consecrated by religion, the gods, because religion is always conservative, are certain to remain anthropophagi much longer than their worshipers. Consequently we find human sacrifices still lingering on as a kind of survival among peoples, as, for instance, the Mexicans, who have themselves left far behind the practice of eating human flesh.

[61] Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. 185.

[62] Od. i. 260.

[63] Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 350.

[64] Ibid. vol. i, pp. 355 f.

[65] Ibid. vol. i, pp. 368, 398, 401.

[66] Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 359 f.

[67] Ibid. vol. i, p. 349.

[68] For the influence of the war ethics of the modern nations upon their peace ethics, see VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.

[69] Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 65.

[70] Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 176.

[71] Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 250.

[72] Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 172.

[73] This moralization of pure physical myths marks the advance of all races in culture and morality. As we shall see, Greek and Hebrew mythologies underwent just such an ethicalizing process.

[74] Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), p. 73.

[75] “It has long been recognized that the Egyptians had a much more highly organized conscience than that of most other nations of early times.”—Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 86.

[76] Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 193 f.

[77] Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), pp. 62 f.

[78] Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 64.

[79] The same evolution is to be traced in China. “Imitations made of wood, clay, straw, paper, and of other material have been substituted for the real things.... Slaves and servants, wives and concubines are also burned, i.e., in paper imitations. They point back to the time when actual human sacrifices were the custom” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 71).

[80] Primitive Culture (1874), vol. ii, p. 85.

[81] Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 187 ff.

[82] Truthfulness was one of the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian ideal. The requirements here were very exact: “I have not altered a story in the telling of it; I have repeated what I have heard just as it was told to me,” are the words of one in the judgment hall of Osiris. Cf. Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), pp. 76 f.

[83] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.

[84] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.

[85] Annihilation appears to have been the lot of the very wicked; but the texts are not perfectly clear on this point. Consult Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 55.

[86] Here are six declarations of the confession which correspond almost exactly with six of the Ten Commandments: (1) I have not blasphemed; (2) I have not stolen; (3) I have not slain any one treacherously; (4) I have not slandered any one, or made false accusations; (5) I have not reviled the face of my father; (6) I have not eaten my heart through with envy. See Rawlinson, History of Ancient Egypt, 2d ed., vol. i, p. 142.

[87] Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 135.

[88] Ibid. p. 162.

[89] “In this judgment the Egyptian introduced for the first time in the history of man the fully developed idea that the future destiny of the dead must be dependent entirely upon the ethical quality of the earthly life, the idea of future responsibility,—of which we found the first traces in the Old Kingdom” (Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 173). Professor Breasted suggests a connection between the growth of the ideal of an ethical ordeal in the hereafter with the discontinuance of the building of immense pyramids. He says: “It is impossible to contemplate the colossal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty, so well known as the pyramids of Gizeh, and to contrast them with the comparatively diminutive royal tombs which follow in the next two dynasties, without ... discerning more than exclusively political causes behind this sudden and startling change.... The recognition of a judgment and the requirement of moral worthiness in the hereafter ... marked a transition from reliance on agencies external to the personality of the dead to dependence on inner values. Immortality began to make its appeal as a thing achieved in a man’s own soul” (Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), pp. 178 f.).

[90] Records of the Past, New Series, vol. iii. For extended comments on the maxims of Ptah-hotep, see Amélineau, Essai sur l’évolution historique et philosophique des idées morales dans l’Egypt ancienne (1895), pp. 93 ff.

[91] Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (1899), p. ii.

[92] For other documents of this age which embody the same spirit of social justice as the precepts of Ptah-hotep, see Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), lect. vii.

[93] Amélineau, Essai, pp. 140 f.

[94] Alongside slavery proper there existed the system of serfdom, the nature of which is revealed by the history of the Children of Israel in Lower Egypt. The status of the Egyptian serf appears to have been somewhat like that of the Helots of Laconia in Greece. If we rightly interpret the Biblical account of the servitude of the Children of Israel, the number of serfs, if their increase seemed dangerous, was kept down by enforced infanticide (Ex. i. 7–22).

[95] Laurent, Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité, t. i, p. 321.

[96] Amélineau, Essai, p. 344. The monotheist Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV), the reform Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it is true, pursued throughout his reign a peace policy, but this policy manifestly was dictated by temperament, or the king’s preoccupation with religious affairs, and not by moral scruples. His reform was essentially a religious and not a social or moral one. Not one of the historical documents of the age contains a word in condemnation of war as inherently wrong (see Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), vol. ii, pp. 382–419), though in these “the customary glorying in war has almost disappeared” (Petrie, A History of Egypt (1896), vol. ii, p. 218).

[97] This, however, must not be regarded as wholly an act of wanton savagery. The killing of his prisoners by the king was probably a sort of sacrifice in honor of the god who had given him victory over his enemies. See Amélineau, Essai, p. 12.

[98] Essai, p. ix; see also p. 252, n. 1.

[99] For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see Amélineau, Essai, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. x; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387.

[100] Petrie, Egypt and Israel (1911), p. 133.

[101] Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest indifferently the good and the bad.

[102] It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 297.

[103] King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (1899), p. 220.

[104] The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.

[105] Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:

O my god who art angry with me, accept my prayer;

* * * * *

May my sins be forgiven, my transgressions be wiped out.

May the ban be loosened, the chain broken,

May the seven winds carry off my sighs.

Let me tear away my iniquity, let the birds carry it to heaven;

* * * * *

May the beasts of the field take it away from me,

The flowing waters of the stream wash me clean.

Let me be pure like the sheen of gold.

Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 323.

[106] Cf. above, p. 35.

[107] The stele which bore this code of laws was discovered at Susa in 1901–1902. The reign of Hammurabi is placed at about the end of the third millennium B.C. There are translations of the code by C. H. W. Johns (1903) and Robert Francis Harper (1904).

[108] “If a man owe a debt and Adad [god of storms] inundate his field and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall not pay the interest for that year.”—Code, sec. 48. [We have used throughout Harper’s translation.]

[109] Code, secs. 196, 197, 200. Cf. similar provisions of the Mosaic code: Ex. xxi. 23–25; Deut. xix. 21.

[110] Ibid. secs. 209, 210.

[111] Ibid. secs. 229, 230.

[112] The provisions read: “If a man aid a male or female slave of the palace, or a male or female slave of a freeman to escape from the city gate, he shall be put to death.”

“If a man harbor in his home a male or female slave who has fled from the palace or from a freeman, and do not bring him [the slave] forth at the call of the commandant, the owner of that house shall be put to death” (Code, secs. 15, 16).

[113] Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 744.

[114] Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 41.

[115] Records of the Past, New Series, vol. ii, pp. 143 ff.

[116] “The white man has no doubt committed great barbarities upon the savage, but he does not like to speak of them, and when necessity compels a reference he has always something to say of manifest destiny, the advance of civilization and the duty of shouldering the white man’s burden in which he pays tribute to a higher ethical conscience” (Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 27). King Leopold may have been responsible for barbarities committed against the natives of the Kongo as atrocious as those of the Assyrians, but he paid tribute to the modern conscience by refraining from portraying them in imperishable marble at The Hague.

[117] Cf. Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 226.

[118] Though the people are shut out from participation in the state worship, they have set up for themselves a multitude of local shrines where they worship the spirits of almost every earthly thing, such as mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. “Men debarred from communion with the Great Spirit resorted more eagerly to inferior spirits, to spirits of the fathers, and to spirits generally.... The accredited worship of ancestors, with that of the departed great added to it, was not enough to satisfy the cravings of men’s minds.” (Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 176).

[119] The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 274.

[120] Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. ii, p. 239.

[121] We do not mention Buddhism in this connection for the reason that it is not possible to trace any decisive influence, save in the promotion of toleration, that this system has exercised upon Chinese morality. Buddhism enjoins celibacy, and this, like Christian asceticism, is in radical opposition to the genius of Confucianism. For this reason, in conjunction with others,—among these its early degeneracy,—Buddhism has remained practically inert as an ethical force in Chinese society. What little influence it has exerted has been confined almost wholly to the monasteries.

[122] “The dread of spirits is the nightmare of the Chinaman’s life.”—Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 197.

[123] The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 34.

[124] The Taoist doctrines are contained in the Tao-teh-king, supposed to have been written by Lao-tsze, a sage who lived in the fifth century B.C. The religion which grew out of his philosophy became in time degenerate, absorbed the worst elements of Buddhism, and is to-day a system of gross superstitions, magic, and sorcery, which has undeniably a blighting effect upon morality.

[125] De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), pp. 139 ff.

[126] Ibid. 138.

[127] Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 229.

[128] De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 143.

[129] Nietzscheism is in essence at one with Taoism. Nietzsche insists that man should behave as Nature behaves; for instance, that the strong should prey upon the weak. The difference between Lao-tsze and Nietzsche lies in their different readings of the essential qualities of the universe. See below, p. 355.

[130] Taoism is too lofty a doctrine for the multitude. They are enjoined to imitate the ancient sages, and as these imitated the way of heaven and earth, in imitating them they are really imitating the universe.

[131] De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 143.

[132] The imitation of the qualities of nature “have given existence to important state institutions, considered to be for the nation and rulers matters of life and death.” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 139).

[133] The Works of Mencius (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. ii), bk. vi, pt. i, chap. ii, 2.

[134] “This inference [that man is naturally good] comes into prominence in the classics as a dogma, and therefore has been the principal basis of all Taoistic and Confucian ethics to this day” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 137). Every schoolboy is taught this doctrine: “Man commences life with a virtuous nature” (Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 217).

[135] The Works of Mencius, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. ii, 2. And so Confucius: “An accordance with this nature [man’s] is called the Path of Duty” (The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. i; The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i).

[136] The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. i, chap. vii, 2, 3.

[137] Confucian Analects (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i), bk. xvii, chap. ii. The student of biology will see in this view an anticipation of the latest teaching of modern science in respect to the relative importance of heredity and education in the determining of character.

[138] “There is nothing in this world so dangerous for the national safety, public health and welfare as heterodoxy, which means acts, institutions, doctrines not based upon the classics.”—De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 48.

[139] Confucius thus describes himself: “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients” (Confucian Analects, bk. vii, chap. i).

[140] The Religions of China (1881), p. 255.

[141] Chinese literature bears unique testimony to the high consideration in which the virtue of filial devotion and reverence is held. It abounds in anecdotes exalting this virtue, holding up great exemplars of it for imitation by the Chinese youth. See Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese.

[142] The Hsiao King (Sacred Books of the East, vol. iii), chap. xviii.

[143] Ibid. chap. xi.

[144] Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese (1868), p. 103.

[145] Ibid. p. 103.

[146] China in Law and Commerce (1905), p. 34.

[147] “The chief characteristic of Chinese society and the essence of Chinese morality is reverence for the past.”—Reinsch, World Politics (1900), p. 90.

[148] The Great Learning (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i), chap. iii, 5.

[149] Confucian Analects, bk. xi, chap. xv, 3.

[150] It is interesting to compare the portraiture of The Princely Man, as depicted by the pagan Chinese moralist, with that of The Prince, as portrayed by Machiavelli.

[151] “The standard of excellence [in The Princely Man] is placed so high as to be absolutely unattainable by unaided human nature; and though [the author] probably intended to elevate the character of his grandfather [Confucius] to this height, and thus hand him down to future ages as a shing jin, or ‘perfect and holy man,’ he has in the providence of God done his countrymen great service in setting before them such a character as is here given in the Chung Yung. By being made a text-book in the schools it has been constantly studied and memorized by generations of students to their great benefit.”—Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. i, pp. 655 f.

[152] Confucian Analects, bk. viii, chap. xii.

[153] The Great Learning (text), par. 5.

[154] Quoted by Pfleiderer, Religions and Historic Faiths, p. 96.

[155] The Great Learning, chap. x, 22.

[156] The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xiii, 6.

[157] The Great Learning, chap. ix, 8.

[158] Confucian Analects, bk. xii, chap. xix.

[159] The Great Learning, chap. x, 21.

[160] Confucian Analects, bk. xiii, chap. xi.

[161] Okakura-Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East (1905), p. 239.

[162] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 265.

[163] The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. viii, 8.

[164] Ibid. bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. iv, 1.

[165] Ibid. bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. ii, 1. While denouncing the essential wickedness of war, Mencius sanctioned rebellion against a tyrannical and wicked ruler.

[166] The Great Learning, chap. vi, 2.

[167] The Works of Mencius, bk. iv, pt. i, chap. xx.

[168] Confucian Analects, bk. iii, chap. iv, 3.

[169] Ibid. bk. iv, chap. xv, 2.

[170] Ibid. bk. vi, chap. xvii.

[171] Ibid. bk. ix, chap. xvii.

[172] Ibid. bk. xv, chap. xxiii. The same precept is found in bk. xii, chap. ii, of the Analects, and also in The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xiii, 3.

[173] The Works of Mencius, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xvii.

[174] Ibid. bk. iv, pt. ii, chap. xii.

[175] Ibid. bk. vi, pt. i, chap. x, 1.

[176] Confucian Analects, bk. vii, chap. xv.

[177] The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 2.

[178] Ibid. bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 5.

[179] Ibid. bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xviii, 1.

[180] The Chinese pay worship, it is true, to the multitude of inferior gods of Buddhism, but there is little in these cults calculated to awaken and discipline the moral feelings.

[181] The Religions of China (1881), p. 256.

[182] See Colquhuon, China in Transformation (1898), p. 189.

[183] Reinsch, World Politics (1900), p. 98. In their relations with foreigners the Chinese bankers have won an enviable reputation for integrity and the scrupulous observance of engagements. The word of a Chinaman in financial matters is his bond.

[184] The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 214.

[185] Froebel has an illuminating comment on the danger to true morality that lurks here: “A life whose ideal value has been perfectly established in experience never aims to serve as a model in its form, but only in its essence, in its spirit. It is the greatest mistake to suppose that spiritual, human perfection can serve as a model in its form. This accounts for the common experience that the taking of such external manifestations of perfection as examples, instead of elevating mankind, checks, nay, represses, its development” (The Education of Man, pt. i, sec. 10).

[186] Etiquette has been well defined as “the formal expression of courtesy,” and courtesy as “morality in trifles.” In Japan, as Kikuchi informs us, etiquette forms a part of the moral instruction in the schools. See Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, vol. ii, p. 342.

[187] Edward A. Ross (The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 193) says native authorities admit that from one tenth to one twentieth of the girl infants are abandoned or made away with.

[188] “Female infanticide in some parts is openly confessed and divested of all disgrace and penalties everywhere” (Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. i, p. 836). Jernigan, however, says, “When carried to the extreme there is a public sentiment in China which condemns it, and there are official proclamations against infanticide” (China in Law and Commerce (1905), p. 123).

[189] The primitive kinship group is a characteristic feature of Chinese society. “Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively persons having the same surname and the same ancestors” (A. H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (1894), p. 226). “I have seen a town of 25,000 people, all belonging to the same clan and bearing the same family name” (Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 272). Along with this clan constitution of society goes the principle of collective responsibility. The group is to a great degree held responsible for the conduct of each of its members. In case of serious crime, as, for instance, treason, all the male adult members of the criminal’s family are punished along with the offender (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 45). Recently the punishment of relatives of the offender has been abolished in certain cases.

[190] The efforts of the Chinese government to put an end to the use of opium among its subjects—the anti-opium decree was issued in 1906—is the most noteworthy matter in the recent moral history of China. This movement is motived by moral feeling as truly as is the movement among ourselves for the suppression of the liquor traffic. It is, in the words of Professor Edward A. Ross, “the most extensive warfare on a vicious private habit that the world has ever known” (The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 146).

[191] “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”—Japanese Constitution, art. iii.

[192] The state in Japan occupies the place of the Church with us. “To look up to the state as a sacred institution has always been characteristic of the people, and from the great work of the recent reformation onward there has not been a single event of national consequence which has not originated in this peculiar turn of mind” (Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, p. 559).

[193] Corresponding to the knights in European feudalism were the samurai, above them the daimios, and at the head of the system the Shogun.

[194] Japanese boys and men, Dr. William Elliot Griffis affirms, are “more tender and careful with all living creatures than are those of Christendom” (The Religions of Japan (1895), p. 294). Buddhism caused in large measure the disuse of flesh for food.

[195] This word means “the way of the warrior,” or “the rule of knighthood.”

[196] Nitobé, Bushido: the Soul of Japan, p. 98. The edition cited throughout this chapter is that of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905. The Introduction is by William Elliot Griffis.

[197] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 32.

[198] Ibid. p. 30.

[199] For the subject of the downfall of feudalism and the Restoration, see Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. i, chap. ii.

[200] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 189.

[201] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 323.

[202] Scherer, What is Japanese Morality? (1906), p. 10.

[203] Nitobé, Bushido, p. vi.

[204] The works of Molière, it is said, have been put under the ban of the censor in Japan and their circulation forbidden, for the reason that Molière ridicules old age, and constantly, like the comic supplement of the newspapers, “makes some father the butt of jokes and gross wit by his child or children.”

[205] “Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”—Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East (1895), p. 89.

[206] Okakura-Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (1904), p. 179. Romantic love is almost unknown in Japan. B. H. Chamberlain affirms that in a residence of twenty-eight years he heard of only one love match, and then the young people had been brought up in America.

[207] Out of the East (1985), p. 80.

[208] Five per cent of the men have concubines.

[209] “The central idea in Japanese life is obedience to parents and reverence for ancestors. Should a Japanese father have misfortunes, his daughter would think it her filial duty to sell her body. She would not be regarded as fallen and disgraced, but as having done a right and noble deed, and might afterwards be restored to her place in society. But, though it is hard to explain, the Japanese woman is as chaste and pure and exalted in her ideas of womanhood as any woman on the globe.”—Sir Edwin Arnold (in an interview).

[210] Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women (1891), p. 121.

[211] Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 4th ed., p. 220. By “the ancient way” is meant hara-kiri, or disemboweling. The death by his own hand of General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, during the funeral of his departed sovereign Mutsuhito (September 13, 1912), reveals another motive for suicide which is wholly foreign to our modes of thought and feeling. “In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of jun-shi, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living Japanese retainers with their dead lord. The custom gradually died out, but voluntary suicide as a means of showing personal devotion or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries” (George Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” New York Outlook for October 5, 1912). It was this ancient custom that Count Nogi followed. “When all was over”—such is Mr. Kennan’s interpretation of his act—“he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan, but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral atmosphere of that time.”

[212] Japanese feudalism began about the eleventh century. The year 1868 saw its final downfall.

[213] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 99.

[214] Okakura-Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (1904), p. 175. Count Okuma makes a similar assertion: “The humanitarian efforts which in the course of the recent war were so much in evidence, and which so much surprised Western nations, were not, as might have been thought, the products of the new civilization, but survivals of our ancient feudal chivalry” (Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. i, p. 124). By no people has the Red Cross movement been taken up with greater enthusiasm than by the Japanese.

[215] Consult Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, pp. 566 f.

[216] “The obloquy attached to the calling brought within its pale such as cared little for social repute” (Nitobé, Bushido, p. 66). “The trades-people,” writes Chamberlain, “stood at the very bottom of the scale. The hucksters or traders were a degraded class in old Japan, and degraded their business morals remain, which is the principal cause of the difficulties experienced by European merchants in dealing with them” (Things Japanese, 4th ed., p. 93).

[217] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 67.

[218] The statement has obtained wide currency that all the banks in Japan employ only Chinese as cashiers because they cannot find honest Japanese for these positions of trust. Chinese are sometimes employed in Japanese banks, but the true reason for their employment is not the one here assigned. One well qualified to speak authoritatively on this subject says:

Chinese bankers and cashiers are largely Shansi men, that is, men from the province of Shansi, where the profession of banking has become hereditary in a large number of families. They are all, or nearly all, members of the powerful organization known as the Bankers’ Guild, which has branches in every part of the Empire. The Bankers’ Guild has discovered that it is practically impossible to conduct large financial operations without honesty; and it therefore enforces honesty by means of a discipline that is as rigorous ... as that of the New York Stock Exchange.... If a Chinese banker breaks faith, violates a contract, or betrays a trust, he is expelled from his guild and the doors of banks are closed against him for all time. In the first place, therefore, the Chinese cashier is honest because honesty is a condition of his business existence. He may not be honest in other respects,—often he is not,—but he is absolutely honest in the handling of money. In the second place, he is probably the most expert man living in the rapid calculation of exchanges. The monetary system of his country is the most confused, chaotic, and complicated system in the world. There are fifteen or twenty different kinds of taels, no one of which bears a fixed relation to any other, or to any established monetary standard.... The necessity of dealing in some way with this great mass of unstable and fluctuating currency and of earning a subsistence from it has made the Chinese cashier one of the most expert of living accountants. He will solve difficult monetary problems by short cuts of mental arithmetic, and he calculates exchanges to eight points of decimals. In the third place, the Chinese cashier counts and manipulates bank bills and coins with extraordinary skill and accuracy. I have had dealings with him in many parts of the Far East, but I cannot remember ever to have seen him count a sum of money twice, and I have never caught him in an error....

Now, when you get a man whose honesty is guaranteed by his guild, whose manipulation of money is phenomenally dexterous, and who can calculate exchanges to eight points of decimals, you have an ideal cashier; and if Japanese bankers employ him, it shows their good business sense rather than their distrust of their own people. But all Japanese bankers do not employ him. In some of the largest banks in Tokyo, Kioto, and Osaka there are no Chinese at all—or at least I have never seen any. This explanation would not be worth, perhaps, the space that I have given to it, if the story of the Chinese cashier had not been so widely circulated, and if it were not typical of a whole class of cases in which the Japanese are misjudged on the basis of a single incident or a solitary fact.—George Kennan, “Are the Japanese Honest?” the New York Outlook for August 31, 1912.

[219] “If the descendants of the samurai can erect a standard of commercial integrity at all comparable to their fine record for courage and loyalty, we shall be their debtors, not they ours.”—The New York Nation for July 30, 1908, p. 90.

[220] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 343.

[221] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 331.

[222] Ibid. vol. ii, p. 319.

[223] Ibid. vol. ii, p. 230.

[224] “I certainly consider that the courage and devotion of the Japanese soldiers during the late war was to a great extent the result of this systematic moral instruction and training in schools.”—Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 344.

[225] Wedgwood (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 22) suggestively likens the reduction to unity of the various gods of polytheism to the correlation of the physical forces—light, heat, electricity, and magnetism. Just as all these are found to be merely different manifestations of a single force or energy, so are all the deified phenomena of nature at last discovered to be but different manifestations of a single primal power—the One, the Supreme, the Eternal. This correlation of the gods, this reduction of polytheism to monotheism, holds the same place in the records of the religious and moral evolution of the race that the correlation of the physical forces holds in the records of the progress of science.

[226] There may be some philosophers and scientists who profess materialism, and who make an infinite and eternal unconscious energy the primal cause of all things. But this is a philosophy of the universe which has never secured a wide acceptance in the West.

[227] Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 59.

[228] Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 356.

[229] This was the work of the Brahmans, who, to secure the ascendancy of their own class, falsified and misinterpreted the sacred books.

[230] Laws of Manu (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv), i. 31, 87.

[231] Cf. Hearn, Kokora, chap. xii.

[232] Laws of Manu, vi. 63.

[233] Ibid. xii. 9, 53–58. The germs out of which this system was developed by the Brahmans formed a part of the animistic conception of the world held by the conquered natives. By the sixth century B.C. the system had been fully elaborated. See Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), pp. 16 f.

[234] The theory was also undoubtedly in part the creation of the same ethical necessity that called into existence the purgatory of the medieval Church. The reincarnations have for aim and purpose not merely retribution, but expiation and purification.

[235] The reader of Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of Ages, wherein the author attempts to explain the inequalities of earthly life by the theory of preëxistence, will be able to appreciate this effort of Indian philosophers to solve the same problem.

[236] Indian pessimism is doubtless to be attributed in part to the hot, depressing climate, but more largely to the burdensome caste system and an oppressive government, which made free and joyous life impossible to the masses, shutting them up, without hope, to an existence of ache and pain and wretchedness. “Politics and society, in our opinion,” says Dr. Hopkins, “had more to do with altering the religion of India than had a higher temperature and miasma” (The Religions of India (1895), p. 199). But cf. Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda (1908), pp. 263 ff.

[237] Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 149.

[238] Ibid. p. 187.

[239] This Brahmanic notion of sacrifice, that the gods need food, is the underlying notion in all religions of which sacrifices form a part. “That the purpose of sacrifice was simply to feed the gods was admitted on all sides in the controversy which accompanied the diffusion of Christianity in the ancient world.... The altar, in the words of Dean Spenser, was merely the table on which food and drink were set before the languishing deity” (Payne, History of the New World called America (1892), vol. i, pp. xi f.). “It is on precisely the same principle that the Mexicans kept their great war-gods ... alive and vigorous by the blood of young human victims selected from their tributaries, and the Peruvians maintained the Creator, Sun, Moon, and Thunder, on whose favor their crops depended, in youth and vigor by the continual smoke of burnt llamas” (Ibid. vol. i, p. 484). Consult also Frazer, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. All these were divinities of vegetation, which were believed to die and to come to life again, as with the revolution of the seasons vegetation died and was renewed. Along with this belief went the notion that by magical ceremonies the worshipers of the gods could aid them in recovering their wasted energies.

[240] Laws of Manu, i. 88–91.

[241] Ibid. i. 93.

[242] Ibid. ii. 32, 35.

[243] The Gentoo Code (1776), xvi. 1.

[244] Laws of Manu, iv. 80, 81.

[245] Ibid. viii. 379.

[246] Ibid. viii. 380.

[247] Ibid. viii. 381.

[248] Ibid. iv. 147.

[249] Laws of Manu, xi. 247.

[250] Ibid. iv. 148.

[251] Even the sudra is not shut out from this hope. If he be pure, the faithful servant of his betters, gentle in his speech and free from pride, he will at death be reborn into a higher caste (Laws of Manu, ix. 335).

[252] Laws of Manu, xi. 60, 69, 71, 72, 132–138, 140–142, 144. Especially severe is the penance imposed for killing a cow. See Ibid. xi. 109–117.

[253] Ibid. vi. 68.

[254] Ibid. vi. 69.

[255] It is better, however, to abstain wholly from the use of meat, since this can be obtained only through pain to sentient beings (Laws of Manu, v. 48). There is no sin in eating meat, “but abstention brings great rewards” (Ibid. v. 56).

[256] Laws of Manu, v. 40.

[257] Ibid. v. 45.

[258] Ibid. vii. 101.

[259] Ibid. vii. 103.

[260] Laws of Manu, vii. 90–93, 104.

[261] Ibid. viii. 84.

[262] Ibid. v. 106.

[263] Ibid. xi. 231.

[264] Ibid. vi. 48.

[265] Ibid. viii. 312.

[266] Laws of Manu, viii. 313.

[267] Gautama or Buddha, “The Enlightened,” the founder of Buddhism, died about B.C. 480. Long before he began his teachings moral reform was in the air in India. Many reforming sects came into existence. The most important of these was the sect of the Jains. The central teaching of Jainism is the sacredness of all life, and its first and chief commandment, Do no harm to any living thing. Its spirit of universal benevolence left a deep impress not only upon Buddhism but also upon later Hinduism.

[268] Dhammapada (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. x), xiv. 190, 191. Cf. Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 209.

[269] Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 286.

[270] Cf. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 21; Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), pp. 316 f.

[271] Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 220.

[272] Dhammapada, xx. 283. This doctrine that peace and contentment of mind come through suppression of desire was also the teaching of the Greek Cynics.

[273] “No sentient being can tell in what state the karma that he possesses will appoint his next birth, though he may be now, and continue to be until death, one of the most meritorious of men. In that karma may be the crime of murder, committed many ages ago, but not yet expiated; and in the next existence its punishment may have to be endured. There will ultimately be a reward for that which is good, but it may be long delayed. It acts like an hereditary disease.”—Hardy, Manual of Buddhism (1880), p. 411.

[274] “The difficulties attendant upon this peculiar dogma [karma] may be seen in the fact that it is almost universally repudiated.... In historical composition, in narrative, and in conversation, the common idea of transmigration is continually presented” (Hardy, Manual of Buddhism (1880), p. 412). By 250 B.C. “in the North and also in the South the old heresy of the soul-theory had crept back by side issue into the doctrine from which it had been categorically and explicitly excluded by Gautama and his earlier followers” (Rhys Davids, Buddhism (1896), p. 198).

[275] Hibbert Lectures (1881), pp. 31, 206. Cf. Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 321.

[276] But this, as we have just seen, is not the Buddhism of the Buddhist world in general. The masses in Buddhist lands have never accepted the doctrine of Nirvana in the sense of extinction of existence. The following conversation between Moncure Conway and a Singhalese priest discloses the meaning of the term to an orthodox Buddhist of Ceylon: “I asked, ‘Have those who are in Nirvana any consciousness?’ I was then informed that there is no Singhalese word for consciousness. Sumangala said, ‘To reach Nirvana is to be no more.’ I pointed to a stone step and said, ‘One is there only as that stone is here?’ ‘Not so much,’ answered the priest; ‘for the stone is actually here, but in Nirvana there is no existence at all’” (My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), p. 134).

[277] These eight requirements are often condensed into four, and then the formula is called the fourfold path to deliverance.

[278] Cf. Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 211; Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 305.

[279] There is in this teaching respecting desirelessness an apparent inconsistency, for with all other desires suppressed, there remains the desire for Nirvana. But the difficulty here is only apparent. A Buddhist priest, questioned respecting this, replied as follows: “The desire for Nirvana escapes from the mesh that entangles all other desires, because it is not desire for any object at all” (Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), p. 134). But all other desires aside from this desire for Nirvana are in a sense sins of covetousness. And this is the cardinal sin in the view of the true Buddhist, for covetousness “is a strong desire for something, and all desire is a hindrance in one’s way to Nirvana.”

[280] This teaching that mental illumination comes through contemplation is the doctrine in general of the religious and moral teachers of the East, and of all mystics. It differs fundamentally from the scientific view, which makes observation and study the means of enlightenment.

[281] Buddhism limits transmigration to the animal creation; Brahmanism, it will be recalled, supposes the soul to transmigrate into vegetable as well as into animal forms.

[282] “To be a true Buddhist, one must renounce, as lust, all desire of evil, which brings evil; and must live without other hope than that of extinguishing all desire and passion, believing that in so doing he will at death be annihilated.”—Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 564.

[283] Dhammapada, vii. 90–99.

[284] But—and differing in this from Dr. Hopkins—Professor Rhys Davids makes this perfection which results in annihilation to consist not in the extinction of every desire, but only of craving desire and evil passions.

[285] The Religions of India (1895), p. 322.

[286] Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 317. Stoicism indeed approaches Buddhism in this respect; but its attitude toward the doctrine of a future life was in general merely agnostic—it made no positive denial of immortality.

[287] Cf. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 123.

[288] Zeller represents Pythagoreanism as springing from an effort to give an ethical content to life. “We may consider it proved,” he says, “that the school of Pythagoras, believing in the almighty favor of the gods, and in future retribution, enforced purity of life, moderation and justice, minute self-examination and discretion in all actions, and especially discouraged self-conceit” (History of Philosophy (1881), vol. i, p. 496). Oldenberg (Ancient India (1896), p. 87) conceives Pythagoreanism—together with the Orphic worship—as “a bit of Buddhism in the midst of Greek civilization.”

[289] Gautama’s attitude toward ascetic practices is shown by the following: “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires” (Dhammapada, x. 141).

[290] Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 366.

[291] This is well illustrated in the following incident related by Moncure Conway. In the island of Ceylon he was visited by an aged Buddhist priest, who came in a sedan borne by men. Asked why he did not use a carriage drawn by horses, the priest replied that “he was afraid a horse might be vitally injured by carrying him.” “But,” said Mr. Conway, “might it not be the same with one of those men while he is carrying you?” After a moment’s silence the priest answered, “But a man can tell me if he is suffering” (My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), pp. 116 f.).

[292] Thousands of rats were formerly kept at public expense in a hospital at the Indian town of Kutel.

[293] Toleration is not even recognized as a virtue in the moral codes of ancient Judaism, dogmatic Christianity, and Islam.

[294] Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 231.

[295] Under Asoka, it is true, Buddhism, like Christianity under Constantine the Great, became militant. But Asoka was a gentle warrior and made war gently. He neither killed his prisoners nor tortured them, a common practice with Oriental conquerors, nor did he sell them as slaves.

[296] “Les paisibles sujets du Grand-Lama thibetain ont cessé d’aimer la guerre et presque de la faire” (Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. 213).

[297] Edward A. Ross, The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 29.

[298] See above, p. 79.

[299] Mozoomdar, a leader of the Brahmo-Somaj.

[300] Buddhism, like Christianity, teaches that hatred must be overcome by love: “Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good” (Dhammapada, xvii. 223). “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule” (Ibid. i. 5).

[301] For the influence of Buddhism on the Japanese character, see Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, chap. iv, “Japanese Religious Beliefs: Buddhism.”

[302] Laws, tr. Jowett, x. 896. And the thought is near even in the latest philosophy: “But it feels like a real fight,” says Professor William James, “as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to reform.”

[303] Is. xlv. 7.

[304] This dualistic world philosophy is regarded by some students of the Zend-Avesta as being in the nature of a protest against “the inert asceticism of Buddhism and the ethical indifference of Brahmanism” (Darmesteter, “Introduction,” Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv, p. lxviii). Ranke views it as the product of environment: “If we keep well in view the contrasts between the various districts and nations included within the limits of Persia and her provinces, the incessant struggle between the settled populations and the inhabitants of the steppes, between the cultivated regions and the desolation of the desert, thrust back, indeed, yet ever resuming its encroachments, the ideas of the Zend-Avesta will appear to us natural and, as we may term it, autochthonic” (Universal History, vol. i (1885), p. 105).

[305] The way in which such a conception acts upon the moral life is well illustrated in the history of English Puritanism. The ethical strenuousness of the Puritan was the outcome of his deeply felt consciousness of the ineradicable antagonism between good and evil. It is all brought vividly before us in Bunyan’s Holy War, in the struggle between Immanuel and Diabolus—of which the myth of Ahura and Ahriman was the prototype.

[306] Mihir Yasht (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii), vii. 26.

[307] See Jackson, Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran.

[308] See above, p. 115.

[309] Zoroastrian ethics, as Wedgwood says, is best understood when viewed as a protest against the Hindu conception of the universe and life. “The injunction to industry, the elaborate provisions for agriculture, the constant stimulus to exertion of every kind, are most intelligible when we see in them a recoil from the faith which appeared to this active race [the Iranian] a confusion of good and evil” (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 59).

[310] Vendîdâd (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv), Farg. iv. 47.

[311] Ibid. Farg. iii. 33.

[312] Ibid. Farg. iv. 49.

[313] “Aryan morality came down from the heavens in a ray of light” (Selected Essays of James Darmesteter, ed. Morris Jastrow, p. 304).

[314] Vendîdâd, Farg. ii. 29.

[315] Ibid. Farg. iv. 49 (bis)-55.

[316] Mihir Yasht, i. 2.

[317] Ibid. xxix. 116, 117.

[318] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., pp. 71 ff. It is significant that the sacred standard of the early Persians was the apron of a blacksmith.

[319] Vendîdâd, Farg. iii. 31.

[320] Ibid. Farg. iii. 4.

[321] Laws of Manu, x. 84.

[322] Vendîdâd, Farg. iii. 38, 39.

[323] The king who reigned in Persia at the time of Nero, going from Asia to Italy, traveled by land along the shore instead of going by ship, “because the Magi are forbidden to defile the sea” (James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv, p. xl). But the anxious observance by the Persians of the requirements of the code is best disclosed in the disposition which they made of their dead. Since corpses could neither be burned nor buried nor thrown into the water without defiling a sacred element, they were exposed on the summits of mountains or on the top of low towers (dakhmas), the so-called “Towers of Silence,” that the flesh might be eaten by birds of prey.

[324] Zend-Avesta, pt. ii, Yasht xxii (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii, pp. 314 ff.).

[325] Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi, “Introduction,” p. xx.

[326] “Their [the servitors of Mithra] dualistic system was particularly adapted to fostering individual effort and to developing human energy.”—Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (1903), p. 141.

[327] Herod. i. 139. We quote Rawlinson’s version.

[328] Herod. i. 136.

[329] Rawlinson’s Herodotus, vol. i, p. 214, n. 10. We omit the references.

[330] Cf. Herod. ix. 109.

[331] Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies (1871), vol. iii, p. 170. The exception was the case of the Barcæans. Cf. Herod. iv. 201.

[332] The modern Persians, who have exchanged the truth-impelling creed of Zoroaster for that of Mohammed, seem to have lost this ancestral virtue. It is noteworthy, however, that the Indian Parsees, the inheritors and preservers of the faith of ancient Persia, are noted for their uprightness and veracity.

[333] “They [the Parsees] form one of the most esteemed, wealthy, and philanthropic communities on the west coast of India, notably in the city of Bombay.”—Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda (1908), p. 15.

[334] “The whole history of the religion of Israel is a history of the development of the moral consciousness, and consequently of the deepening and widening of the opposition between that which ought to be and that which is.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), vol. ii, p. 92.

[335] It may be urged that the moral character given to Yahweh was the creation of the moral consciousness of his worshipers; but even so, this conception of deity once formed would inevitably react upon the moral sense to deepen and purify the feelings that gave it birth.

[336] Geschichte des Volkes Israel (1889), Bd. i, S. 429.

[337] Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile (1899), pp. 35 ff.; Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 307; W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), pp. 75 ff.

[338] W. Robertson Smith urges that sacrifice among the Hebrews had its origin in the sacramental communal idea. According to this belief the clansmen and their god are of the same stock, and the bond of kinship is renewed and strengthened through the human and the divine members of the community partaking together of the flesh and blood of an animal slain.

[339] Job iii. 19.

[340] Eccl. ix. 5; and so ix. 10: “For there is no work, nor desire, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol, whither thou goeth.”

[341] Is. xxxviii. 18.

[342] See below, pp. 165 f.

[343] Cf. Chapter II.

[344] The oldest form of the Decalogue is found in Ex. xxxiv; cf. Ex. xxxiii.

[345] If we compare the morality of this Hebrew Decalogue with that of the Egyptian Negative Confession, we shall find it to belong to about the same stage of ethical development.

[346] In the Book of Judges are preserved some traditions which are illustrative of the moral state of society at this time; for though all the details of these stories may not be historical, still they doubtless reflect the general condition of things during this period. There is a striking similarity between these traditions of gross and incredible crimes and the traditions of the atrocious immoralities of the Merovingian Age in European history.

[347] The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian power 722 B.C.; the kingdom of Judah fell before Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, 586 B.C.

[348] Cf. Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel.

[349] The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel (1877), p. 344.

[350] Cf. 1 Kings xxi—the story of Naboth’s vineyard.

[351] “The life-work of Elijah was a turning-point in the history of the religion of Israel, similar in its consequences to those which followed the appearance of Zarathustra in Iran.... It was the ethical idea of God matured in the soul of the prophet by the need of his time which broke through with irresistible power to the demand for a final choice between Jehovah, the holy God, and the unholy nature gods of the heathen.”—Pfleiderer, Religions and Historic Faiths (1907), pp. 225 f.

[352] History of the People of Israel (1892), vol. ii, p. 275.

[353] Calamities were at this time befalling Israel. “The national distress served to awaken Israel’s conscience. The obligation covenanted at Sinai knocked again at the door of their hearts” (Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile (1899), p. 93).

[354] Amos iii. 10.

[355] Ibid. v. 11, 12.

[356] Ibid. viii. 5, 6.

[357] Ibid. v. 21.

[358] Ibid. v. 22.

[359] Ibid. v. 24.

[360] Hosea vi. 6.

[361] To Amos and Hosea, Yahweh is simply the supreme god, the suzerain of all other gods.

[362] Is. ii. 3, 4; cf. Micah iv. 1–3. See Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1897), p. 229, for the opinion of different commentators on the possible exilic or postexilic date of these passages.

[363] Is. i. 11–17.

[364] Micah vi. 6–8.

[365] Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885), p. 414.

[366] This festival was probably of Babylonian origin. It was associated with astronomical phenomena—with the seven planets of ancient astronomy and with the phases of the moon.

[367] The feast of Purim is another transformed festival; “Babylonian in origin, it was given a Jewish dress and became incorporated into the system of Jewish observances” (David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907), p. 3).

[368] Thus the festival of Dionysus, which “in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits, is transmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art” (Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 14).

[369] Deut. vi. 14.

[370] Montefiori, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1892), p. 197.

[371] Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885), p. 402. Renan speaks of Deuteronomy in the same strain: “This Thora was the worst enemy of the universal religion which the prophets of the eighth century had in their dreams” (History of the People of Israel (1891), vol. iii, p. 175).

[372] Cf. Chapter XVI. The persecutions of the medieval Church were largely the outcome of this legislation which made the extermination of God’s enemies, that is, idolators and misbelievers, a pious duty. “The terrible Directorium Inquisitorum of Nicholas Eymeric follows Deuteronomy word for word” (Renan, History of the people of Israel (1891), vol. iii, p. 179).

[373] Deut. xx. 16.

[374] Ibid. vii. 2.

[375] Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), p. 45. The teachings of this same intolerant monolatry has, down to the present day, exerted a retarding influence upon the development of international morality, especially upon the war ethics of the Christian nations.

[376] We meet with the same phenomenon in medieval times. The Christian Church, which was so harsh in its dealings with misbelievers, was a tender mother toward the poor and the afflicted of the faith.

[377] The origin of these cities may date from a much earlier time than the reform under King Josiah. The code may simply register changes already effected in the customary law. See Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 61.

[378] Deut. iv. 41, 42; xix. 1–13.

[379] Deut. xv. 7, 8.

[380] Ibid. xxiv. 6.

[381] Ibid. xxiv. 12, 13.

[382] Ibid. xxiv. 17.

[383] Ibid. xxiv. 14, 15.

[384] Ibid. xxiii. 19, 20. Cf. Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 760. The poor in these early times were, in all the lands advancing in civilization, literally devoured by the money lenders.

[385] Deut. xxiv. 19.

[386] Ruth ii. 4–17.

[387] Deut. v. 14, 15.

[388] Ibid. xv. 12.

[389] Ibid. xv. 13, 14.

[390] All these regulations respecting slaves, however, lack universalism. It is compassion for the slave not as a man, but as a Hebrew, that moves the legislator. The laws are in general for the benefit of Hebrew slaves alone. Gentiles or foreigners are not included in these humane provisions. See Lev. xxv and Ex. xxi. 2.

[391] See Is. xl-lxvi.

[392] “Deutero-Isaiah was the first to emphasize and make use of this plenary and unconditional monotheism.”—Montefiori, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1892), p. 269.

[393] Is. xliii. 10.

[394] Ibid. xliv. 6.

[395] Ibid. xliv. 24.

[396] Ibid. xlv. 5.

[397] Ibid. xlvi. 9.

[398] There is a repetition of this in the Koran, where the Prophet of Arabia speaks as one to whom the idea of the unity of deity had come as a new thought.

[399] W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 81.

[400] See above, pp. 18–20.

[401] “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”—Deut. v. 9.

[402] Ezek. xviii. 2.

[403] Ibid. xviii. 3.

[404] Ezek. xviii. 20. The entire chapter is devoted to this single subject. This truer view had dawned upon the compilers of the Deuteronomic code. Cf. Deut. xxiv. 16 and Jer. xxxi. 29, 30.

[405] See below, p. 364.

[406] See lii. 13-liii. 12.

[407] Cf. Bennett, The Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets (1907), pp. 326 ff.

[408] In the year 539 B.C. Cyrus, king of Persia, having captured Babylon, issued a decree giving the Jewish exiles in Babylonia permission to return to their own land and to rebuild the Temple destroyed fifty years before by Nebuchadnezzar. A band returned and set themselves to the task of restoring their houses and rebuilding the Temple. After many interruptions and long delay the building was finished and dedicated anew to the worship of Yahweh (516 B.C.).

[409] “The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law, after Ezra’s reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth in post-Reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of salvation, and particularly the tendency to formalize and almost to deify the literal inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.”—Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 95.

[410] For life under the law consult Schürer, History of the Jewish People, division ii, vol. ii, pp. 90 ff.

[411] Matt. xxiii. 23.

[412] Ibid. xv. 11, 20. “The identification of morality with ritual in his [Jesus’] day had confused the issue before human life much as that issue is now confused by the identification of morality with opinion” (Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 62).

[413] Ps. cxxxvii. 9; see Ps. cix.

[414] On this subject see Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), pp. 246 ff.

[415] “The people had learned to draw nigh to God without the aid of sacrifice.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 215.

[416] Cf. Mark i. 21; vi. 2.

[417] Renan, History of the People of Israel (1895), vol. iv, p. 195.

[418] Consult on this subject Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life (1898–1899).

[419] See above, pp. 139 f.

[420] See Cheyne, Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), p. 229; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), pp. 378, 386.

[421] Ps. xvi. 10, Rev. Ver.

[422]

“I know without me God cannot a moment live;

If I to death should go, He, too, would death receive.”

Quoted by Blow, A Study of Dante (1887), p. 102.

[423] Cf. above, p. 44; see also Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387; Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 216.

[424] The Pharisees; cf. Acts xxiii. 6–8.

[425] We see a repetition of all this in what is going on to-day among the Jews in the great cities of the New World. Liberal Judaism is largely the outcome of just such influences as brought forth Christianity out of the narrow ritual Judaism of the Alexandrian Age. See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907), chap. xii.

[426] “Those psalms into which a sense of something like the brotherhood of nations begins to penetrate are for various reasons later than 382 B.C.... Not till the coming of the Macedonian reconciler of East and West could there be a presentiment of the truth of the divine education, not only of Israel, but of the human race.”—Cheyne, Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), pp. 134 f.

[427] To Hillel is credited the maxim, “What thou wouldst not have another do to thee, do not thou to another.”

[428] The teaching of the Orphic sects that there are two elements, one good and another bad, in man’s nature, was an esoteric doctrine which had no influence on the popular mind and conscience. Cf. G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, 6th ed., pp. 31 f.

[429] There are, it is true, gods of the lower world unfriendly to man, but there is nothing in the Greek world-view corresponding to the Egyptian conception of the struggle between the good Osiris and the wicked Set, or of the Persian idea of the conflict between the beneficent Ahura Mazda and the evil-working Ahriman. Nor was there anything in this view like the Babylonian or Persian notion of malicious spirits.

[430] The Dionysian cult fostered art, but not directly morality. In so far as the Attic drama was an elevating moral influence, the cult may be said to have indirectly promoted morals. But the foreign orgiastic god had to be thoroughly converted before he could strengthen others.

[431] The pre-Hellenic Oriental cult of Aphrodite had undoubtedly an unfavorable influence on morality. “Some part of this evil character [was] transplanted into Greek legend, but very little into Greek worship.... What we know is that until the declining period of Greek history the cult of Aphrodite, so far as it appears in written or monumental record, was as pure and austere as that of Zeus and Athena” (Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. ii, pp. 657, 663).

[432] Cf. Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 165.

[433] Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 74, quoting Charondas, the Sicilian legislator.

[434] Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. iv, pp. 177 ff.

[435] Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 2d ed., p. 292.

[436] History of Greece (1900), pp. 320 f.

[437] Thucyd. i. 70.

[438] For an illuminating comparison of the Greek virtues of fortitude and temperance with the corresponding Christian virtues, see T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., pp. 304 ff.

[439] Ethics, iii. 10.

[440] “But let [each man] know,” says Plato, “how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as in him lies, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of happiness” (Republic, tr. Jowett, x. 619).

[441] Socrates, it is true, taught that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, but he was here far in advance of the common Greek conscience.

[442] Quoted by Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 247.

[443] Christian Ethics (1873), vol. i, p. 63.

[444] The Greek View of Life (1909), p. 205.

[445] If we contrast the Greek conception of man’s nature with that of certain systems of Christian theology, we shall better understand the ethical value of such ideas and beliefs. On the occasion of a college commencement one of the speakers, a stout upholder of the doctrines of the fall of man, original sin, and the utter depravity of the natural man, roundly denounced this injunction of Pindar’s. He said to the young people who had chosen as their class motto, “Be what you are,” that that was just what they ought not to be. He then went on to show them that their nature was wholly corrupt, that all their natural inclinations were toward evil continually, and that if they ever hoped for salvation they must become what they were not.

[446] “Aristotle may be almost said to have made the difference between Greek and barbarian the basis of his moral code.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 200.

[447] Politics, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 14, sec. 21.

[448] For the ethics of Greek slavery consult Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 203–219.

[449] Thebes, but not from moral scruples seemingly, prohibited under the penalty of death the destruction of healthy infants.

[450] The reader of Plato will recall how Socrates uses this practice of the exposition of infants to illustrate his art of bringing to birth true and false ideas (“lies and shadows”) in the minds of his pupils, and exposing to die those that are vain shadows. See his Dialogues, tr. Jowett, vol. iii, pp. 350 f.

[451] The practice of the exposition of female infants in the Hellenistic Age, when luxury increased and children became a burden, seems to have been more common than in earlier times.

[452] Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 120.

[453] Politics, vi. 4, sec. 12. This contempt for tradesmen and laborers, generally speaking, continued through all periods of Greek history. In some states, however, particularly in Athens, it underwent modification. “The later Athenians began to consider trade an honorable road to riches, and aristocrats like Nicias were known as careful trade masters.” In Rhodes, also, trade became honorable.

[454] Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly, p. 62 n.

[455] Laws, tr. Jowett, xi. 919.

[456] They were charged with adulteration of foods, cheating in measure, etc. Demosthenes declares that a man honest in commercial transactions was a prodigy. Cf. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 419.

[457] See above, p. 89.

[458] This ethical feeling is to be reckoned with in dealing with Asiatics—until there is a change in their ideal of manliness. The overlooking of an injury is apt to be regarded by them as an indication of weakness and cowardice.

[459] Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 312.

[460] Herod. vi. 24. The Delphian oracle tried to cure this defect in the national character. See the story of Glaucus, Herod. vi. 86.

[461] Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 413.

[462] Ethics, tr. Welldon, i. 4.

[463] Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 95.

[464] Od. xix. 396–398.

[465] Thucyd. i. 5.

[466] Il. xxii. 485–499.

[467] See Xen. Mem. ii. 1, 21, for the parable, by the Sophist Prodicus, of the choice of Heracles at the parting of the ways.

[468] The Republic, iii. 386–392.

[469] See above, p. 35.

[470] “The blessed islands of the West were indeed even then [in the Homeric Age] a home for the dead, but they had not yet been opened to moral worth, as in the days of Pindar.”—Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 26.

[471] See Zeller, History of Philosophy (1881), vol. i, p. 125, and Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 99. “Strictly speaking,” says Professor Seymour, “Homer knows of no instance of rewards, and of only one case of punishment after death” (Life in the Homeric Age (1908), p. 469).

[472] For the Greek view of the underworld, and the incoming of the idea of rewards and punishments in the after life, see Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 97 ff., and Rhode, Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeits Glaube der Griechen, 4te Auflage, Bd. i, S. 301–319.

[473] This moralization of Hades is carried still further by Vergil. It is instructive to compare his vision of Hades with Homer’s.

[474] Republic, x. 614–616; see also Gorgias, 523–527.

[475] Herod. i. 30–32. But Nemesis appears later in the story, and Crœsus is represented as being punished for the crime of an ancestor.

[476] Ibid. vii. 10. The views which the historian here attributes to the Persian Artabanus were of course a reflection of Greek belief. For further instances in Greek literature of the conception of the envy of the gods, consult Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 78–84.

[477] Thucyd. vii. 77.

[478] Pericles (1890), p. 312.

[479] “The very event [the Persian war] which determined the sudden splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction to the already existing morality.”—Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1880), vol. ii, p. 17.

[480] Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 129. After the tale had been moralized by Æschylus, Phidias carved the story on the great Zeus throne at Olympia, using it to give emphasis to the conception of the god as the guardian of the moral order of the world.

[481] Thucyd. v. 84–116.

[482] The attitude of the later philosophers toward the notion that the gods are envious is fairly represented by Plato’s protest: “He [the Creator] is good, and no goodness can have any jealousy of anything” (Timæus, tr. Jowett, 29).

[483] “The dispensation which takes the aspect of divine envy to mortals might, it seems, from a higher point of view, be discerned as the very opposite; human vicissitude is the result of a divine love anxious to share the true blessedness which comes in the form of sorrow.”—Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 112.

[484] Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 227.

[485] Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1891), vol. i, p. 129.

[486] Republic, tr. Jowett, x. 613.

[487] See James Adam, The Vitality of Platonism (1911), chap. v, “Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil.”

[488] When we contrast with this Sophocles’ treatment of the same theme in Antigone we realize how great an advance during the interval the Greeks had made in humanitarian feeling.

[489] See Thucyd. iii. 53–59.

[490] The Spartan admiral Callicratides (the successor of Lysander, 406 B.C.) refused to sell his Greek prisoners of war as slaves, but he stood almost or quite alone in this. See Xen. Hellen. i. 6, 14.

[491] Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 235.

[492] The war brought into fearful exaggeration the salient weakness of Greek morality. The most reprehensible moral faults of the Greeks were the outgrowth of political factions and cabals, of party jealousies and rivalries in the close quarters of city walls. These faults were lifted into the most savage passions by the war. Thucydides in a memorable passage (iii. 82) draws a striking picture of the disastrous moral effects of the prolonged quarrel.

[493] See above, p. 180.

[494] Republic, v. 469–471.

[495] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 267; see also A. Ræder, L’Arbitrage international chez les Hellenes (1912).

[496] Études sur l’histoire de humanité (1880), t. ii, p. 105. Because of its long exemption from the ravages of war, Elis was more populous and wealthy than any other district of the Peloponnesus (Polyb. iv. 73, 74). The contrast presented by Greece in general constituted an impressive commentary on the fatal consequences for Greek civilization of the war system. Speaking of the depopulation which incessant wars had caused over almost all the world he knew, Plutarch says of Greece, a land once “strong in cities,” that the whole country could raise barely three thousand men, the same number that the single city of Megara sent to Platæa at the time of the Persian war (Philosophical Essays, “On the Cessation of Oracles,” sec. viii).

[497] See above, p. 18.

[498] “Really to see the good and to know it as such, yet not to love and pursue it, is impossible; the vision carries with it its own persuasion and authority.”—Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 74. “Mere school and word knowledge, of course, is powerless, but real knowledge, knowledge that represents real personal conviction, cannot fail to influence life.”—Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 62.

[499] “There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war; there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association—resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparities or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account; there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct this ancient mental compound, and who has not been driven to it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial Elenchus no longer stands in the market place to lend him help and stimulus.”—Grote, History of Greece (1888), vol. vii, pp. 168 f.

[500] Quoted by Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 396.

[501] “His [Socrates’] significancy for moral philosophy lies in his calling attention to rational knowledge as the source of the moral.”—Wuttke, Christian Ethics (1873), vol. i, p. 69.

[502] Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, pp. 125 f.

[503] Cf. Gorgias, 478, 479.

[504] Laws, tr. Jowett, xi. 913. Plato saw what the socialist-philosopher Lloyd saw when he wrote, “More searching ... than the Golden Rule is that which commands us to inquire if what we desire for ourselves and others is a right desire” (Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 147).

[505] In the Republic Plato reaches the conception of a Greek brotherhood, but beyond this he never advanced.

[506] Xen. Mem. ii. 6, 35.

[507] Politics, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 2, sec. 15; 14, sec. 21.

[508] Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 228.

[509] “A moral ideal which was not coextensive with the whole spiritual nature of man was taken by the schoolmen from the Aristotelian ethics, and then the so-called religious virtues were more or less cumbrously and precariously built upon it. Supernaturalism in morals was added to the classic naturalism as a divine appendix to ethics.”—Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 133.

[510] The downfall of the institutions of the free city state was to Greek morality what the downfall of the papal Church would have been to the morality of the medieval ages.

[511] Philopœman and Aratus.

[512] This ascetic tendency in Stoicism is doubtless to be attributed to the influence of the Orient upon Greek life and thought.

[513] Consistently so, since only through self-control and the avoidance of all excesses of passion, appetite, and desires can one maintain that tranquillity of mind which is the condition precedent of happiness.

[514] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 228.

[515] Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, p. 264. The author contrasts this humaneness of the laws of the Athenian democracy four centuries before Christ with the atrocious cruelty of the criminal laws of Christian Europe down almost to the nineteenth century.

[516] Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 269.

[517] Ibid. p. 554.

[518] The Apostle Paul at Athens, seeking common ground with his hearers for the doctrine he preached that God hath made of one blood all nations of men, finds it in the familiar line of the Stoic Cleanthes—“We are the offspring of God.”

[519] Plutarch died about 40 A.D.

[520] “From contact with the Greeks, therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that an ideal long known to the Western world, the Stoic ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the preaching of the Apostles was in this respect not out of harmony with the wants and aspirations of the higher and better minds of the age.”—Mahaffy, Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire (1905), p. 146.

[521] “The essential oneness of human moral experience has shown itself in the ethical results achieved by these various peoples.”—Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 337.

[522] Coulanges, The Ancient City, ii, 9.

[523] The authority of the father over each and every member of the family was legally absolute, extending to life and death. Not until late in the Empire did the law forbid fathers to kill their grown-up children or to sell them as slaves. Cf. McKenzie, Studies in Roman Law, 6th ed., p. 141; and Sohm, Institutes (1901), p. 53.

[524] Inge, Society in Rome under the Cæsars (1888), p. 8.

[525] This Roman virtue of obedience to the state has been just such an enduring force in the moral life of the Christian world as has the Jewish virtue of obedience to a revealed law (see [Chapter IX]). Historically regarded, the Protestant Church, which makes obedience to a written revealed law a necessary virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical feeling and conviction of ancient Israel; while the Roman Catholic Church, which makes submission to ecclesiastical authority an indispensable virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical tradition and spirit of ancient Rome. See H. M. Gwatkin (co-author), Early Ideals of Righteousness (1910), pp. 71 ff.

[526] Tacitus, Annals, iii. 16, 17.

[527] This legal subjection of the son to the father, while it developed and strengthened the virtue of obedience, seemed to deaden filial affection. “Of all the forms of virtue,” says Lecky, “filial affection is perhaps that which appears most rarely in Roman history” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 299).

[528] De Off. i. 17.

[529] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 177 f.

[530] See [p. 245], on the ethics of persecution.

[531] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 148.

[532] Cf. Chapter XVIII.

[533] The citizen army, which had been the seed plot of those heroic virtues that cast such a halo around the earlier history of Rome, had been replaced by a mercenary force in which only the coarser military virtues could find sphere for exercise.

[534] “The unchecked power of the master ... produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 12.

[535] Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms (1888), Bd. i, S. 479–481; English ed., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, vol. i, pp. 243 f.

[536] “The senator was forbidden down to the last age of the empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 102.

[537] De Off. i. 42.

[538] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 271.

[539] Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms (1889), Bd. ii, S. 414; English ed., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, vol. ii, p. 77.

[540] “The unusual enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 238.

[541] In an eloquent passage Lecky thus sums up the demoralizing effects of the spectacles: “Those hateful games, which made the spectacle of human suffering and death the delight of all classes, had spread their brutalising influence wherever the Roman name was known, had rendered millions absolutely indifferent to the sight of human suffering, had produced in many, in the very centre of an advanced civilization, a relish and a passion for torture, a rapture and an exultation in watching the spasms of extreme agony, such as an African or an American savage alone can equal”. (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 467).

[542] The period which witnessed the greatest inequality of fortunes was the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire.

[543] It should be borne in mind that the clients of this period were wholly different from the clients of the earlier times. The relations of the early clients to their patrons were those of clansmen to their chief; the relations of these later clients to their patrons were the degrading relations of idle, needy dependents to newly rich men without family traditions and socially and morally wholly unfit for their elevation.

[544] The History of Rome (1888), vol. ii, p. 524.

[545] “The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and subject.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 29.

[546] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 204.

[547] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 332 ff.

[548] Ibid. 3d ed., vol. i, p. 227.

[549] “Men ceased to be adventurous, patriotic, just, magnanimous; but in exchange they became chaste, tender-hearted, loyal, religious, and capable of infinite endurance in a good cause.”—Seeley, Roman Imperialism (1889), p. 33.

[550] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 187.

[551] About 40–120 A.D.

[552] Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 64.

[553] Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, pp. 231 f.

[554] Cf. Ibid. p. 232.

[555] Stoicism is second only to Christianity as a moral force in European civilization. “One of the most important expressions of the moral sense for all time,” affirms Professor Clifford, “is that of the Stoic philosophy, especially after its reception among the Romans” (Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 108). Mahaffy declares that the Stoic philosophy, “above all the human influences we know, purified and ennobled the world” (The Silver Age (1906), p. 103). Denis thinks that it was through Stoicism that Rome did most for civilization (Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. ii, p. 5).

[556] Taken from Menander.

[557] “One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant assertions of the duty of charity to the human race occurs in the treatise of Cicero upon duties.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 240.

[558] De Off. iii. 5.

[559] Ibid. iii. xi.

[560] Ibid. i. 16.

[561] De Finibus, v. 23.

[562] Meditations, vi. 44. This and the following citations are from Long’s translation, 2d ed.

[563] Ibid. iv. 23. The moral element in the conception of the universal city must not be overlooked. There was implied in it the idea of universal brotherhood, of the ethical oneness of mankind. The creation and promulgation of this conception was one of the great services which Stoicism rendered to civilization.

[564] Ibid. iii. 4.

[565] Ibid. viii. 59.

[566] This subject is dealt with by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 295 ff.; Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, vol. ii, essay xi, “The Law of Nature.”

[567] Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 143.

[568] Sophocles, Antigone.

[569] Commenting on the consequences of the inspiration of Roman law by this doctrine of Stoicism, Lecky says: “To the Stoics and the Roman lawyers is mainly due the clear recognition of the existence of a law of nature above and beyond all human enactments, which has been the basis of the best moral and of the most influential, though most chimerical, political speculations of later ages, and the renewed study of Roman law was an important element in the revival that preceded the Reformation” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 297).

[570] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 129. Lecky instances (vol. i, p. 292) three ways in which Stoicism worked for good in the Empire: (1) it raised up good emperors; (2) it led men to engage in the public service; and (3) it rendered the law more catholic and humane.

[571] Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 376.

[572] “In the Stoic emperors ... we find probably the earliest example of great moral principles applied to legislation on a large scale.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays, vol. ii, p. 108.

[573] Public feeling in regard to the exercise of the patria potestas had been slowly changing during the centuries. Seneca relates (De Clem. i. 14) how within his memory the people furiously assaulted in the Forum a certain knight because he had whipped his son to death.

[574] “The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of the Greek view.”—Mommsen, Roman Provinces (1887), vol. i, p. 296.

[575] “The majority of the free population had probably either themselves been slaves, or were descended from slaves.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 237.

[576] Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 3.

[577] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 312.

[578] De Clem. i. 18.

[579] Tacitus, Annals, xiv. 42–45.

[580] Manumissions were frequent even in Seneca’s time. Pliny the Elder was a kind master, regarded his slaves as “humble friends,” and manumitted many of them.

[581] The client class of the imperial period was made up almost wholly of freedmen.

[582] It is surprising that while in the Stoic and other schools there was, during these centuries, great advance in theoretical ethics in various domains, in that of war there was no essential modification of the views and feelings of the teachers and leaders of moral reforms. In the whole range of Roman literature and philosophy there are to be found scarcely any expressions of disapproval of war. The attitude of the Roman moralists in this matter appears to have been altogether like that of the Greek philosophers. The right to wage war for empire and for glory was taught even by Cicero, only such wars, he insisted, should be waged more gently than wars to recover property, to punish insult, or to avenge a wrong (De Off. i. 12).

[583] For the ethics of Christian persecution, see below, p. 324.

[584] See on this subject Fiske, Excursions of an Evolutionist (1883), pp. 238 ff.; Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894), p. 17; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 147.

[585] Besides this main motive of the persecutions there were these minor ones: (1) The teachings and practices of the new sect offended the prevailing spirit of luxury and sensuality; (2) families were divided; (3) the business of many, as that of the silversmiths of Ephesus, was threatened (Acts xix. 24–41); and (4) fear on the part of the government of the danger from the growth of such a strong semi-secret organization as the Church was becoming within the Empire (Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894), p. 165).

[586] “Upon the approach of Christianity humanity took a consciousness more alert and sensitive, and during the first three centuries of our era all the ideas, all the sentiments which constitute morality developed on parallel lines and with remarkable force in the growing Church and in expiring paganism.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. ii, p. 145.

[587] De Off. i. 25.

[588] Meditations, xi. 18.

[589] Ibid. vii. 36.

[590] Ibid. ix. 9; cf. vi. 47.

[591] Ibid. vi. 6.

[592] Fragments, tr. Long, lxviii; cf. lxvii.

[593] Meditations, iii. 4.

[594] De Prov. i. 1.

[595] Meditations, x. 21.

[596] Ibid. ii. 11.

[597] Ibid. xii. 5.

[598] Ibid. ii. 17.

[599] Arrian, Epict. ii. 14; quoted by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 246.

[600] Meditations, vii. 31.

[601] Ethical Essays, v, “On those who are punished by the Deity late.”

[602] De Off. ii. 14.

[603] Ibid. ii. 5.

[604] Ibid. i. 7.

[605] Ibid. iii. 6.

[606] Ibid. iii. 4. Compare this expression of the ancient Greek and Roman moral consciousness with that of the modern Japanese (see [p. 86]).

[607] Ibid. ii. 12.

[608] De Clem. ii. 6. The trouble with this philosophy, as has been said, is that if one does not feel pity for the sufferings of others he will not be likely to help them.

[609] Cicero, however, denied the right of self-destruction, and Vergil mildly censured the act. See Æneid, vi. 434.

[610] Discourses, i. 9.

[611] Meditations, v. 29.

[612] Ep. lxx; quoted by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 218.

[613] De Prov. i. 2.

[614] Zeno, the founder of the school, and Cato, its exemplifier in active life, both committed suicide.

[615] Compare the views on this subject of the ancient classical peoples with those of the modern Japanese (see [p. 85] and [p. 86] [n. 1].).

[616] Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 3d ed. (1909), p. 67.

[617] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 324.

[618] Paulsen, A System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), pp. 111 f.

[619] The cult of Isis when introduced into the Western lands favored illicit love, but by the second century of our era it had, in its new environment, become so far transformed as to be a true moral force in society. “Sacrament and mystery lent their aid to fortify the worshiper [of Isis] in the face of death, but, to derive their full virtue, he must exercise himself in temperance, abjure the pleasures of the senses, and purify himself for the vision of God” (Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 583).

[620] On this subject see Franz Cumont, Les Mystères de Mithra (1892); English ed., The Mysteries of Mithra, tr. McCormack.

[621] “It [Mithraism] is perhaps the highest and most striking example of the last efforts of paganism to reconcile itself to the great moral and spiritual movement which was settling steadily, and with growing momentum, toward purer conceptions of God, of man’s relations to Him, and of the life to come.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 585.

[622] “On peut dire que, si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été Mithriaste.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5^me ed., p. 579.

[623] “Isis and Serapis and Mithra were preparing the Western world for the religion which was to approve the long travail of humanity by a more perfect vision of the divine.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 574.

[624] Acts xvii. 29.

[625] New to the multitude. Some of the Stoic philosophers, as we have seen, held and taught this doctrine.

[626] The Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, and some Oriental cults, particularly that of Mithra, imported into the Roman Empire, made the participation in a blessed life beyond the grave dependent upon moral purity of life on earth and through this doctrine exercised a favorable influence upon morality (see [p. 254]).

[627] This thought and conviction of the immortality of the individual was, it is possible, in part the outcome of the decay of the ancient city, whose fancied eternity had satisfied for a time the instinct of immortality. But when some centuries had passed, the “Romans sailed round the Mediterranean and recognized that the cities of the past were not eternal, and with the same waft of conviction came a compensating belief that eternity was the heritage of every son of man. Immortality arose on the horizon of the man, as its last glow faded from the city” (Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 341). It was the same in Judea; as immortality faded from the political horizon of Israel, it arose on that of the individual soul.

[628] Though the account of the fall of man forms the prelude of the Hebrew Scriptures, the conception never influenced to an appreciable degree pre-Christian ethics.

[629] See Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 322.

[630] “L’humanité cherche l’idéal; mais elle veut que l’idéal soit une personne; elle n’aime pas une abstraction.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5^me ed., p. 582.

[631] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 8.

[632] On this subject consult Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), lect. xii, “The Transformation of the Basis of Christian Union: Doctrine in the Place of Conduct.”

[633] “After the middle of the third century, ... Christianity may be just as truly called a Hellenic religion as an Oriental.”—Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, pp. 393 f.

[634] The change of emphasis from moral life to correct doctrine took place during the last half of the second and the first half of the third century. “Under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the word faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions, propositions in abstract metaphysics” (Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), p. 310).

[635] The Athanasian Creed, which by the end of the ninth century was in use in the churches of the West as an authoritative symbol and exposition of the Roman Catholic faith, says, “Whosoever will be saved, before all things, it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith, which faith, except every one who do keep entire and unviolated, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Philip Schaff, Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis, vol. ii, p. 66).

[636] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 68.

[637] “The virtues of the intellect, freedom and boldness of thought and the power to doubt, the vital principle of scientific research, are, in the eyes of primitive Christianity, worthless and dangerous.”—Paulsen, A System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 68.

[638] Cf. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, chap. v, “The Religion of Authority and Reason.”

[639] See Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), bk. i, chap. iii.

[640] The ascetic movement was a reaction not only against the moral dissoluteness of pagan society, but also against the moral degeneracy which, before the end of the third century, had set in within the Christian community itself. The Church had become to a lamentable degree conformed unto the world, and had lost much of that moral fervor which characterized it during the first two centuries.

[641] Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints (the Fathers, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints, compiled from monuments and other authentic sources), 12 vols. (1854). Orig. ed. pub. 1754–1760.

[642] “If you do any good beyond what is commanded by God, you will gain for yourself more abundant glory, and will be more honored by God than you would otherwise be,” was the teaching of the Church respecting the meritoriousness of ascetic practices. Cf. Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 313.

[643] The “Dialogue” is of course a purely literary creation of some monk. Oisin was not a contemporary of St. Patrick.

[644] J. H. Simpson, Poems of Oisin (1857), pp. 42 ff. We have reproduced only a small part of the poem.

[645] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 34.

[646] Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 252.

[647] Cf. Dante, Inf. xiii.

[648] See above, pp. 175, 215.

[649] Ireland was foremost in this missionary movement because she was so given over to the monastic spirit. See Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. ii, p. 397.

[650] According to Westermarck (The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 565–569) charity took the place of sacrifice in the primitive cults, and for this reason became such a prominent religious duty in all the higher faiths.

[651] Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. i, pp. 397 f.

[652] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, pp. 86 ff.

[653] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 369.

[654] See above, p. 245.

[655] “The suppression of all religions but one by Theodosius, the murder of Hypatia by the monks of Cyril, and the closing by Justinian of the schools of Athens, are the three events which mark the decisive overthrow of intellectual freedom.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 428.

[656] See above, p. 6.

[657] Physics and Politics (1873), pp. 70 f.

[658] “One may find ... the chief characteristic of the period of the migrations in a complete uprooting of public morality, a universal overturning of inherited conceptions of right and wrong.”—Francke, Social Forces in German Literature, 2d ed., p. 12.

[659] Parliament of Religions (1893), vol. i, pp. 574 f.; consult also Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 237.

[660] Qur’ân, tr. Palmer (Sacred Books of the East, vols. vi, ix), suras ii. 184–189, 212–215; iv. 90; viii. 40; ix. 5–14, 29; xlvii. 4, and many others.

[661] Ibid. suras ii. 149; iii. 151; ix. 113.

[662] Sura xxiv. 33. The New Testament nowhere inculcates the manumission of slaves, but the spirit of its teachings is opposed to slavery, and the early Fathers of the Church encouraged the emancipation of slaves.

[663] Sura iv. 3.

[664] Suras vi. 138, 141, 152; xvii. 33.

[665] Suras ii. 216; v. 93.

[666] R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), p. 204.

[667] Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 283.

[668] According to the principles of the Koran, though no Moslem captive might be reduced to servitude, all non-Moslem prisoners could, as spoils of war, be enslaved: “We make lawful for ye ... what thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the booty God has granted thee” (sura xxxiii. 49).

[669] “The recognition of the slave traffic by Mohammedanism has been, and is to this day, a curse to Africa and a source of disturbance to the world’s politics.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 307.

[670] In an address. Cf. R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), pp. 59 ff.

[671] Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 328. The author maintains that Mohammed himself did not intend that his rules should be binding for all time.

[672] This teaching is one which does not show itself as a generally recognized principle in the pre-Christian centuries, as does the principle of love, or self-devotion to the common good, or universal benevolence. “Christianity at its inception did not take over this moral principle, ready-made, from any of the older cults or cultures from which the Christian movement was in a position to draw. It is not found, at least in appreciable force, in the received Judaism; nor can it be derived from the classical (Greco-Roman) cultures, which had none of it” (Thorstein B. Veblen, “Christian Morals and the Competitive System,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1910).

[673] “Christian mores in the Western Empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are inconsistent.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 116.

[674] For opinions of early Christian writers and the attitude of the Church on the soldier’s profession and the rightfulness of war, see Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, tr. Whewell, pp. 49 ff.

[675] Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. ii, p. 205.

[676] See above, p. 277.

[677] Throughout the medieval ages and down almost to our own day these Old Testament records, misread, were used to justify many of the cruelties of war, and other atrocities:

Plunder and pillage were supported by reference to the divinely approved “spoiling of the Egyptians” by the Israelites. The right to massacre unresisting enemies was based upon the command of the Almighty to the Jews in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. The indiscriminate slaughter of whole populations was justified by a reference to the divine command to slaughter the nations round about Israel. Torture and mutilation of enemies was sanctioned by the conduct of Samuel against Agag, of King David against the Philistines, of the men of Judah against Adonibezek. Even the slaughter of babes in arms was supported by a passage from the Psalms, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Treachery and assassination were supported by a reference to the divinely approved Phinehas, Ehud, Judith, and Jael; and murdering the ministers of unapproved religions, by Elijah’s slaughter of the priests of Baal.—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 85 f.

[678] Lecky believes this to have been the main cause of the transformation in the Church. “The transition,” he says, “from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades was due chiefly ... to the terror and the example of Mohammedanism” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 252). But, as we have seen, the transition was already nearly complete before the rise of Islam.

[679] In a portrayal of the character of the Scandinavians, the Church historian Schaff observes: “Their only enthusiasm was the feeling of duty; but the direction which had been given to this feeling was so absolutely opposed to that pointed out by the Christian morality, that no reconciliation was possible” (History of the Christian Church, vol. iv, p. 110). Yet in the important domain of ethics which we are here examining this is exactly what did happen.

[680] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 253.

[681] Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908).

[682] “So great, it is said, was the knights’ respect for an oath, a promise, or a vow, that when they lay under any of these restrictions, they appeared everywhere with little chains attached to their arms or habits to show all the world they were slaves to their word; nor were these chains taken off till their promise had been performed, which sometimes extended to a term of four or five years. It cannot be expected, of course, that reality should have always come up to the ideal.”—Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 102.

[683] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 272.

[684] First printed in 1873, from MSS. compiled probably as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is an English translation by Charles Swan (1877).

[685] “There can be little doubt,” says Lecky, “that the Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 367). And so Professor Nathaniel Schmidt: “The chivalry of the medieval knight from which our modern treatment of woman so largely is derived cannot be regarded as solely a product of Christianity, for it has a deep root in the dreamy reverence for woman characteristic of our pagan ancestors. Yet it would not have become what it was but for the veneration accorded to the Virgin Mary” (The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 324).

[686] See Curtis M. Geer, The Beginning of the Peace Movement (1912).

[687] Kluckhohn, Geschichte des Gottesfriedens (1857), p. 38.

[688] This part of the week was chosen because these days had been consecrated by Christ’s passion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

[689] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 314.

[690] The last instance of an arrangement for ransom of prisoners was an agreement between England and France in 1780. See Hall, International Law, 5th ed., p. 414, n. 1.

[691] One center of these reform movements was the celebrated French monastery of Cluny. The influences which radiated from the cloisters of this convent had a profound effect for centuries upon the moral life of Christendom.

[692] See Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi.

[693] History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, p. 266.

[694] “There was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations.... The value of such an ideal on an age hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated” (Lea, History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, pp. 260 f.). See also Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 325.

[695] See above, p. 262.

[696] “Ethics on the basis of authority becomes a mere legal casuistry.”—Hall, The History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), pp. 296, 326.

[697] “But meanwhile by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule.”—Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 143.

[698] It must be borne in mind that the spirit of the Renaissance was at work long before the Renaissance.

[699] In this there is substantial agreement among historians of the Inquisition: consult Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, pp. 236 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 98, 395 f.; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), essay vi, “The Theory of Persecution”; Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, article on “Inquisition.”

[700] “The case for theological persecution is unanswerable if we admit the fundamental supposition that one faith is known to be true and necessary for salvation.”—Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 155.

[701] Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition.”

[702] Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and predisposed men to inflict suffering” (Rationalism in Europe, new ed. (1890), vol. i, p. 347).

[703] Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, p. 234. “The representatives of the Church were children of their own age.... Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest, stood by the code of their day and sought to explain and justify it” (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition”).

[704] “It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began.”—Gerald Stanley Lee, “Business, Goodness, and Imagination,” Hibbert Journal for April, 1912, p. 651.

[705] On Machiavellism see The Prince, and introductions to different editions by Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Henry Morley; Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), pp. 81–107; John Morley, Machiavelli (Romanes Lecture for 1897).

[706] It should be borne in mind that in Machiavelli’s age politics had been secularized, that is, divorced from theology, and this with the approval of most men. Machiavelli would now go farther and separate politics and morality. This is Lord Morley’s interpretation of The Prince. He thinks we shall best understand Machiavelli, yet without for a moment approving his teaching, “if we take him as following up the divorce of politics from theology, by a divorce from ethics also. He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art; the end of that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the fundamental principle from which he silently started, without shadow of doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application of moral standards to this business is as little to the point as it would be in the navigation of a ship. The effect was fatal even for his own purpose, for what he put aside, whether for the sake of argument or because he thought them in substance irrelevant, were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong” (Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture for 1897).

[707] “Catherine de Medici, Philip II, Alva, Des Adrets, Tilly, Wallenstein were simply incarnations of the Machiavellian theories which ruled this period.”—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 86 f.

[708] Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1903), p. 22.

[709] Ibid. p. 25.

[710] Special emphasis was laid upon this virtue of courtesy in the ideal of courtliness. And rightly so, for, as has been well said, “To be courteous is just as much a duty as to be honest, for rudeness rouses more hatred and bitterness than good honest cheating.”

[711] In many lives of this period there was a combination of the ideal of the courtier and that of the monk. There is a fine portrayal of such a character in Shorthouse’s John Inglesant.

[712] See above, p. 276.

[713] The best authority on this subject is Lea, Superstition and Force, 4th ed., pp. 101–247.

[714] See above, p. 304.

[715] The last judicial duel in England was fought in 1492, but the practice was not abrogated in Russia till 1649.

[716] Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 34. And so Thomas Cuming Hall: “The glory of Protestant ethics as founded by Luther and developed by Kant is the autonomous, democratic, unpriestly character stamped upon it” (History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 527).

[717] Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 145.

[718] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 370.

[719] See below, p. 362.

[720] On this subject see Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), chapter on Thomasius.

[721] S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 391.

[722] History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. ii, p. 220.

[723] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 126.

[724] The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 84.

[725] Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics (1909), p. 232.

[726] An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, tr. Voltaire (1793), p. 157.

[727] See Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 341.

[728] “It won’t do any longer to lay the blame for poverty wholly upon its victims. These cruel theories cannot face a growing suspicion that poverty is somehow involved in the ethics of distribution.”—Louis F. Post, in address; see The Public for June 21, 1912, p. 593.

[729] Lloyd, Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 135.

[730] The most practicable proposal for the undoing of this ancient and ever-augmenting wrong of private monopoly in land is that presented with singular force and clarity by Henry George in his epochal work, Progress and Poverty. His proposal is to exempt from taxation industry and all forms of property save land, and to lay upon land values, or, in other words, upon actual or potential ground rents, a tax that would reclaim practically the whole of these for society, and secure to the public all future increments in land values created by communal growth and enterprise. Since this tax is to take the place of all other forms of taxation it has become known as “the single tax.” Such a change in the tax system would inevitably create a hardship in a few cases, but a hardship almost infinitesimal as compared with that now inflicted upon the many by the preëmption of the earth by a class. The reform would undoubtedly, as claimed by its advocates, destroy private monopoly in land, the root which nourishes most other monopolies, and secure to all equal right of access to the earth and its resources.

[731] Dewey and Tufts, Ethics (1908), p. 162.

[732] See Ira Woods Howerth, “Competition, Natural and Industrial,” The International Journal of Ethics for July, 1912.

[733] “We may fairly ask whether there is a single moral question of any magnitude which intelligent and educated men would answer to-day in precisely the same fashion as they would have done before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct (1901), pp. 57 f.). See also Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1899). Huxley maintains that the “cosmic process” is nonethical and in direct opposition to the ethical evolution going on in human society.

[734] “The best is wanting when selfishness begins to be deficient” (“The Twilight of the Gods,” The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Alexander Tille, vol. xi, p. 191). “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish.... What is more injurious than any crime? Practical sympathy for all the ill-constituted and weak—Christianity” (“The Antichrist,” ibid. vol. xi, p. 238). This way of thinking and talking is by no means exclusively modern. Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias, says to Socrates: “And therefore this seeking to have more than the many is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior” (Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, vol. iii, p. 72).

[735] See Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.

[736] “The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress” (Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1909), p. 293). See also Bixby, The Crisis in Morals (1891), p. 235.

[737] See Dewey, “Is Nature Good,” Hibbert Journal for July, 1909.

[738] “‘Ye have compassion on one another’: this struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,—how had it been then? This is a great direct thought, a glance at first hand into the very fact of things” (Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, “The Hero as Prophet”). The Gâthas have the same thought: “Who, O Great Creator! is the inspirer of the good thoughts (within our souls)? Who ... hath made the son revering the father?” (Yasna xliv. 4, 7, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi).

[739] “In the new way of looking at things, which came to the world from Darwin, there is hope and cheer, if we but take the matter aright. Only consider what his doctrine of the shaping power of environment is leading us to do in bettering the conditions of the poor, the defective, the prone to crime. His demonstration that circumstances may make or break a man, is a clarion call to humanitarian zeal. And his teaching of the infinite variability of species, and of the indefinite progress which man may make in the cultivation of humane and moral qualities, is one that looks distinctly to the perfectibility of the race.”—The New York Nation for January 7, 1909, p. 7.

[740] On this subject see Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898).

[741] When in 1654 matches for cockfighting were forbidden in England the reason for the prohibition was not that it was cruel to the birds, but for the reason that the matches were “commonly accompanied with gaming, drinking, swearing, quarreling, and other dissolute practices” (Pike, A History of Crime in England (1873), vol. ii, p. 186). Consult further, Lecky, Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. i, pp. 307 f.

[742] Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898), p. 18. Darwinism has without doubt also aided the vegetarians in their crusade against the use of animal flesh for food, and in conjunction with the influence of Eastern ideas and convictions may cause ultimately a great change in the ethical feelings of the Western peoples respecting this practice. They may come to regard it with the same deep moral reprobation as is now felt by Eastern moralists. “For my part,” says the Japanese writer Nitobé, “the surprising thing is that European ethics can be so atavistic as to stoop to a sort of cannibalism” (Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, p. 462).

[743] See Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality (1903), 2 vols.; Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man (1909); James H. Hyslop, Enigmas of Psychical Research (1906); W. F. Barrett, Psychical Research (1912).

[744] The Survival of Man (1909), p. 341.

[745] George William Knox, “Religion and Ethics,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1902.

[746] George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 392.

[747] Christian Ethics (1892), p. 11. Lecky makes a similar observation: “Generation after generation the power of the moral faculty becomes more absolute, the doctrines that oppose it wane and vanish, and the various elements of theology are absorbed and recast by its influence” (History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. i, pp. 351 f.).

[748] “It is because the ethical ideals of Christendom have become so wonderfully enlarged and perfected within the last half century that the character of God has taken on such new and glorious forms. The God whom Christian people generally believe in and worship is a very different being from the one they were thinking about and praying to when I began my ministry.”—Washington Gladden (in report of address).

[749] See above, pp. 35, 164 and 187.

[750] Cf. Borden Parker Bowne, The Essence of Religion (1910), chap. iv, “Righteousness the Essence of Religion.”

[751] Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. i, p. 72.

[752] See above, p. 18.

[753] “Along with the gloomy record of the two hundred fifty years of negro slavery we find the history of its abolition; perhaps the most impressive history on record of the origin and completion of a purification of the moral consciousness of peoples.”—Caldecott, English Colonization and Empire (1891), p. 196.

[754] “In Elizabeth’s time Sir John Hawkins initiated the slave trade, and in commemoration of the achievement was allowed to put in his coat of arms ‘a demi-moor, proper bound with a cord’; the honorableness of his action being thus assumed by himself and recognized by Queen and public.”—Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 468.

[755] By a provision of the Peace of Utrecht (1714) England secured the contract known as the Assiento, which gave English subjects the sole right for thirty years of shipping annually 4800 African slaves to the Spanish colonies in America.

[756] In the Southern colonies the opposition to the further importation of negroes sprang in general from the fear of the insurrection of the slaves, should they become too numerous. The little opposition that existed in some of the Middle States was based almost wholly on economic grounds.

[757] The first abolition paper was established in 1821, but the movement it represented soon died out. The movement started anew with the appearance of The Liberator in 1831. See Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), pp. 173 ff.

[758] “When Garrison began his work, he thought nothing was more like the spirit of Christ ... than to bring a whole race of people out of sin and debasement, ... but he soon found that neither minister nor church anywhere in the lower South continued to protest against slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him, and that many northern divines entered the lists against abolition, especially Moses Stuart, Professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary, who justified slavery from the New Testament; President Lord of Dartmouth College, who held that slavery was an institution of God, according to natural law; and Hopkins, Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who came forward as a thick and thin defender of slavery. The positive opposition of churches soon followed” (Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), p. 211). In 1832 took place the secession of students from Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, because the trustees and Dr. Lyman Beecher had forbidden them to discuss the slavery question. Four fifths of the student body withdrew.

[759] Cf. Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents (1893); Zebulon R. Brockway, Fifty Years of Prison Service (1912).

[760] The New York Nation of March 19, 1908, p. 254.

[761] The Century Magazine for September, 1912, p. 886.

[762] Pike, A History of Crime in England (1876), vol. i, p. 50.

[763] Wines, Punishment and Reformation, 6th ed., p. 103.

[764] Pike, A History of Crime in England (1876), vol. ii, p. 287.

[765] His Essay on Crimes and Punishments appeared in 1764 and produced a profound impression. It did much to abolish torture in judicial proceedings.

[766] “In proportion as punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, as a fluid rises to the same height with that which surrounds it, grow hardened and insensible.”—Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1793), p. 95.

[767] Wines, Punishment and Reformation, 6th ed., pp. 122 ff.

[768] The penitentiary system was inaugurated in 1704 by Pope Clement XI, who in that year established the Hospital of St. Michael at Rome. For the history of the penitentiary movement see Wines, Punishment and Reformation.

[769] “The whole conception and method of these courts suggests the religious spirit and almost startles us with its indication of the spiritualizing of the civil power.”—Edward O. Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 344.

[770] The progressive purification of the social conscience may be traced further in the changed feeling in regard to dueling, lotteries, gambling, and the use of intoxicating liquors. Less than a century ago dueling was common among all the European peoples. To-day in all Anglo-Saxon lands the duel is condemned by the common conscience and prohibited by law. During the last few decades in the United States lotteries have been transferred “from the class of respectable to a class of criminal enterprises.” So too is it the growing moral disapproval of the use of alcoholic drinks that has caused drunkenness both in England and in our country to become much less common among the reputable members of society than it was only two or three generations ago.

[771] Thus formulated by the distinguished jurist James Brown Scott. Cf. Report of the Seventeenth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference (1911), pp. 35 ff. Professor Scott here shows how the growth of juridical institutions between nations is similar to that within nations, only later and slower. The stages of this growth are self-redress, arbitration, courts of justice.

[772] See Sir Charles Bruce, “The Modern Conscience in Relation to the Treatment of Dependent Peoples and Communities,” Papers on Inter-Racial Problems (1911), pp. 279 ff.

[773] Papers on Inter-Racial Problems (1911), ed. G. Spiller, p. 286.

[774] For this subject viewed from a Chinese standpoint, see Edward Alsworth Ross, The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 170.

[775] Grotius (Hugo de Groot), The Rights of War and Peace, tr. Campbell (1901–1903). On Grotius see Hill, History of Diplomacy (1905–1906), vol. ii, pp. 569 ff.; Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 55 ff.; Dunning, A History of Political Theories (1905), vol. ii, chap. v.

[776] Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), p. 79.

[777] See above, p. 240.

[778] James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 167.

[779] Hill, History of Diplomacy (1905–1906), vol. ii, p. 573.

[780] Seven Great Statesmen (1910), p. 73.

[781] We cannot concur with the author, Norman Angell, of The Great Illusion in his contention that there will be no change in the practice of nations regarding war and preparations for war till there is a change in ideas respecting the economic advantage to be derived from successful war. Moral idealism, finding expression in revolutions and reforms, is constantly giving denial to the validity of the economic or materialistic interpretation of history when the economic motive is thus made the dominant motive in human action. War will become a thing of the past only when men can no longer fight with a good conscience.

[782] Machiavelli (The Romanes Lecture for 1897).

[783] This archaic nature of the code is shown especially in its retention as a survival of the principle of collective responsibility, which, long outgrown by ordinary morality, still forms the very basis of the war system. Again, the true nature of the war code as a heritage from the low level of savagery is shown in its retention of the primitive rule that the one suffering an injury shall be the judge of his own cause and the avenger of his wrong, a principle of self-redress long since discarded by the private law of all civilized peoples.

[784] Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), p. 94.

[785] Pike, A History of Crime in England (1873), vol. i, p. 211; vol. ii, p. 414.

[786] Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), p. 96.

[787] Telemachus was an Asiatic monk who journeyed to Rome for the purpose of making a protest against the bloody spectacles. “The Romans were provoked by the interruption of their pleasures; and the rash monk, who had descended into the arena to separate the gladiators, was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. But the madness of the people soon subsided; they respected the memory of Telemachus, who had deserved the honors of martyrdom; and they submitted without a murmur to the laws of Honorius, which abolished forever the human sacrifices of the amphitheatre” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxx).