HISTORY AS PAST ETHICS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The ethical interpretation of history
Professor Freeman defined history as “past politics.” Mr. Buckle argued that the essence of the historical evolution consists in intellectual progress.[1] Many present-day economists hold that the dominant forces in the historical development are economic.[2] Churchmen consistently make the chief factor in history to be religion.
Whether the upholders of these several interpretations of history would have us understand them as speaking of the ultimate goal of the historic evolution, or merely of the dominant motive under which men and society act, none of these interpretations can be accepted by the student of the facts of the moral life of the race as a true reading of history. To him not only does moral progress constitute the very essence of the historic movement, but the ethical motive presents itself as the most constant and regulative force in the evolution of humanity. His chief interest in all the other factors of the historical evolution is in noting in what way and in what measure they have contributed to the growth and enrichment of the moral life of mankind.
Thus the historian of morals is deeply interested in the growth of political institutions among men, but chiefly in observing in what way these institutions have affected for good or for evil the moral life of the nation. Particularly is the progress of the world toward political unity a matter of profound concern to him, not because he regards the establishment of the world state as an end in itself, but because the universal state alone can furnish those conditions under which the moral life of humanity can most freely expatiate and find its noblest and truest expression.
It is the same with intellectual progress. The student of morals recognizes the fact that the progress of the race in morality is normally dependent upon its progress in knowledge—that conscience waits upon the intellect. But in opposition to Buckle and those of his school, he maintains that, so far from an advance in knowledge constituting the essence of a progressive civilization, this mental advance constitutes merely the condition precedent of real civilization, the distinctive characteristic of which must be a true morality. A civilization or culture which does not include this is doomed to quick retrogression and decay. As Benjamin Kidd truly observes, “When the intellectual development of any section of the race, for the time being, outruns the ethical development, natural selection has apparently weeded it out like any other unsuitable product.”[3]
As with the political and intellectual elements of civilization so is it with the economic. The outward forms of the moral life are, it is true, largely determined by the industry of a people; but the informing spirit of morality is the expression of an implanted faculty. It is elicited but not created by environment. No industrial order from which it is lacking can long endure. Natural selection condemns it as unfit. And this we are beginning to recognize—that economics and ethics cannot be divorced, that every great industrial problem is at bottom a moral problem. To the student of the ethical phase of history all social reformers from the old Hebrew prophets down to Karl Marx and Henry George are primarily moralists pleading for social justice, equity, and righteousness.
And preëminently the same is it with religion. Religion has been a great part of the life of man, and the historian of morals must be a diligent student of the religious systems of the world, but mainly because religion has been in general such a potent agency in the moral education of mankind. For it is the ethical factor in the great world religions which constitutes their universal and permanent element. “It is the function of religion to kindle moral enthusiasm in society at large.”[4] “Christianity has no other function or value than as an aid to morality.”[5] All the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism (reckoning historic Judaism as beginning with the great prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.), Christianity, and Islam—began as moral reforms.[6]
In short, in the words of Wellhausen, “Morality is that for the sake of which all other things exist; it is the alone essential thing in the world.”[7] The really constructive and regulative forces in history are in truth moral ideas and convictions. And there is vast significance in this—that the ethical motive, never absent and always active, is constantly becoming more and more dominant in the processes of the historical evolution. As the ages pass there enters into history—we shall see this to be so later—an ever larger ethical element. Conscience becomes ever more and more involved in the personal, national, and international affairs of the world.
The history of morals in the main a record of the expansion of the circle covered by the moral feelings
Moral progress consists not so much in changes in the quality or intensity of the moral emotions, although these gain in diversity, purity, and refinement as time passes, as in the successive enlargements of the circle of persons embraced by the moral feelings.[8] “It is not the sense of duty to a neighbor, but the practical answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? that has varied.”[9] As we shall see when we come to examine the morality of primitive man, the moral feelings embrace at first only kinsmen, that is, the members of one’s own family, clan, or social group. All others are outside the moral pale. But gradually this circle grows larger and embraces in successive expansions the tribe, the city, the nation, and lastly humanity.
This expansion of the area covered by the moral feelings is the dominant fact in the moral history of mankind. It is the overlooking of this fact that has caused writers like Buckle to make their strange misreading of history and to maintain that though man during historic times has made immense progress on material and intellectual lines, he has made little or no progress in morality. The truth is, as we shall learn, that in no domain has progress been greater, the gains larger or more precious, than in the moral. From clan morality, based on physical kinship, mankind has advanced or is advancing to world morality, based on the ethical kinship of men. This is the one increasing purpose running through all history—the creation of a moral order embracing the whole human race.
Sources for the history of morals
The facts for a history of morals must be sought chiefly outside the literature of ethical theory and speculation. They must be looked for in the customs, laws, institutions, mythologies, literatures, maxims, and religions of the different races, peoples, and ages of history.[10] In all these there is always an ethical element; often this forms their very essence. “In every sentence of the penal code,” as the moralist Wilhelm Wundt remarks, “there speaks the voice of an objective moral conscience.” In truth all law codes, whether civil or criminal, are essentially nothing more nor less than the embodiment of man’s conceptions of what is just and unjust. Mythologies, literatures, and philosophies are charged with moral sentiment. In religion there struggle for utterance the deepest moral feelings and convictions of the human soul.
The moral ideal
The moral life fulfills itself in many ways. Every age and every race has its own moral type or ideal.[11] This, as we shall use the term, may be defined as a group of virtues held in esteem by a given people or a given age. It is the accepted standard of conduct, of excellence, of character. This ideal may be a very simple thing, embracing only a few rudimentary virtues, as in the case of peoples on the lower levels of culture; or it may be a very complex thing, embracing many and refined virtues, as in the case of civilized societies in which the mutual relationships of the members are many and various.
The history of morals is in the main an account of moral ideals or types.[12] Indeed so large is the part that these have played in the growth and decay of races and civilizations that universal history may be defined quite accurately as “the paleontology of moral ideals.”[13]
There is one thing about a moral ideal which sets it apart from all other ideals. It possesses a unique dynamic force. All ideals, it is true, have in them the impulsion to their embodiment in reality. But in a moral ideal there is the added imperative of conscience. There speaks from it the majestic voice of duty, demanding that the ideal be made actual in the life of the individual and of society. It is this that has made moral ideals such molding and constructive forces in history.
Composite moral ideals or types
There is a striking analogy between the different types of moral character and the different types of human beauty. Thus corresponding to the great types of masculine and feminine beauty there are masculine and feminine types of moral excellence. And then, just as the elements of the two chief types of feminine beauty, the blond and the brunette, combine to form a great variety of mixed or composite types, so do the elements of the chief types of goodness blend into many composite types of character.[14]
There is no more instructive chapter in the history of morals than that which has to do with the formation of these composite ethical types, since these are often the most significant results of those great race collisions and comminglings which make up so much of the history of the past; for when races meet and mingle they blend not only their blood but also their consciences. There appears not only a new physical man but also a new moral man.
Thus the fusion of races in Europe has resulted in a great fusion of moralities. The conscience of Europe is a very composite one, including Greek, Roman, Hebraic, Celtic, Gothic, and Slavonic elements. This heterogeneous conscience, so different, for instance, from the comparatively homogeneous conscience of ancient Egypt and of China, has been the most important factor in the life and civilization of the European people. It is largely because Europe has been constantly getting a new conscience that its history has been so disturbed and so progressive, just as it is largely because China has had the same Confucian conscience for two thousand years and more, that her history has been so uneventful and unchanging.
Causes which determine and which modify the moral type
Though every race and every age, since man is by nature a moral being, must have some type or standard of moral goodness, still the cast and content of this type is determined by a great variety of circumstances, such as the stage of intellectual development, the physical environment, social and political institutions, occupation, and speculative and religious ideas.[15]
The stage of intellectual development of a given society determines in general whether the moral standard shall be high or low. Peoples still on the level of savagery must necessarily have a very simple moral code, embracing only a few rudimentary virtues. As a people or race progresses in intelligence and the mental horizon widens, the moral sense becomes clarified and the moral standard comes to embrace new and refined virtues, corresponding to the larger and truer mental life; for, speaking broadly, there is a general coincidence between intellectual and moral growth. To create a new intellectual life is to create a new moral life.[16]
Physical environment is also a potent agency in determining the cast of the moral type. Thus the hot depressing climate and the prodigality of nature in the tropics foster the passive, quietistic virtues; while the harsher and more grudging nature of the temperate regions favors the development of the active, industrial virtues. The strongly contrasted moral types of the peoples of the tropic regions of the earth and those of the temperate lands may without reasonable doubt be ascribed, in part at least, to differences in the climatic and other physical influences to which these peoples have been subjected through long periods of time.
More positively influential in the formation of moral ideas and feelings are social institutions. Thus the place which a whole group of moral qualities that we designate as domestic virtues are assigned in the ethical standard is determined by the place which circumstances may have given the family in the social organism. In ancient Sparta, for example, where certain influences subordinated the family in an unusual degree to the state, the family virtues held a very low place, indeed scarcely any place at all, in the moral ideal; while in China, where certain notions of the relation of the spirits of the dead members of the family to its living members created a remarkable solidarity of the family group, the domestic virtues, and among them preëminently the virtue of filial piety, came to determine the entire cast of the general ideal of goodness.
Government is another potent agency in molding the moral type. Patriarchal monarchy and popular government tend each to nourish a distinct morality, so that we speak of the ethics of monarchy and the ethics of democracy. As time passes, governments, speaking broadly, become constantly more and more ethical in aim and purpose, and hence act more and more dynamically upon the moral evolution. The greatest force making for a truer and higher morality in the world to-day is political democracy.[17]
More effective than any of the agencies thus far mentioned in determining the moral code of a people is occupation. “Man’s character,” as the economist Alfred Marshall truly affirms, “has been molded by his everyday work ... more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals.”[18] Every occupation develops a characteristic group of virtues. This is especially true of agriculture. “The cultivation of the soil,” says Wedgwood, “cultivates much besides—it molds ideals, implants aspirations, creates permanent tendencies. It gives, where it is the predominant industry, to the character of a people its moral stamp.”[19]
Finally we mention religion as the most potent of all agencies in the molding of the moral type.[20] Religion has been the great schoolmaster in the moral education of the race. It is true that religion has to go to school itself in morals before it can become a schoolmaster. That is to say, religion in its beginnings is in the main unethical. In its lower manifestations it is hardly more than a system of incantations and sorcery. One of the most important facts of the moral history of the race is the gradual moralization of man’s at first unethical conception of the gods, and the rise out of the unethical religions of primitive times of the great ethical world religions.
In what virtue or moral goodness consists
Having defined ethical ideals and noted the agencies determining their cast and content, we may now seek an answer, in terms of the ethical ideal, to the question, In what does moral goodness consist? All the truly great seers and moral teachers of the race have here the same word for us, and it is this: Do the thing thou seest to be good; realize thy ideal. In the words of Sabatier, “The essential thing in the world is not to serve this ideal or that, but with all one’s soul to serve the ideal which one has chosen.” Such loyalty to one’s ideal is moral goodness.[21] This imperative of conscience that one be true and loyal to the best one knows is the only thing absolute and categorical in the utterance of the moral faculty.
Every age must be judged by its own moral standard
“A man must learn a great deal,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to enable him to pass a correct judgment on another man’s acts.”[22] And among the things which he must first learn is this—that the men of every age have their own standard of excellence and that they can be judged fairly only by their own code of morals.[23] It is largely because of the general ignorance of the history of moral ideals that there is so much uncharitableness in the world, so much intolerance, so much race prejudice and hatred. As one’s intellectual outlook broadens, as he becomes acquainted with the various types of goodness of different peoples and different ages, he becomes more liberal and charitable in his moral judgments, since he comes to understand that moral character is determined not by the ideal of conduct but by the way in which this ideal is lived up to. “There may be as genuine self-devotion,” declares the moralist Professor Green, “in the act of the barbarian warrior who gives his life that his tribe may win a piece of land from its neighbors, as in that of the missionary who dies in carrying the gospel to the heathen.”[24]
Studying the ideals of races and epochs in the spirit of these words, we shall make some fruitful discoveries. We shall learn for one thing that since the beginning of the truly ethical age there has ever been about the same degree of conscientiousness in the world; that the different ages, viewed in respect to their moral life, have differed chiefly in the degree of light they have enjoyed, and consequently in their conceptions of what is noblest in conduct, of what constitutes duty, not in their fealty or lack of fealty to their chosen standard of excellence. That is to say, speaking broadly, the majority of men in every age and in every land have ever followed loyally the right as they have been given to see the right.[25] “If men and times were really understood,” the historian Von Holst truly observes, “the moral fault of their follies and crimes will almost always appear diminished by one half.”