A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution

by Cora May Williams

The materialist calls triumphant attention to the constancy of material phenomena, and proves, by careful comparison with coördinate psychical phenomena, the uniformities in the latter. Disease of every kind, but particularly those forms of disease which attack especially the nervous system—brain and spinal cord and the nerve endings—furnish the strong points of his argument, which is thus based on facts no lover of truth desires to gainsay; but when the materialist has shown us all these facts, has he not proved, with regard to the psychical, exactly that constancy which entitles it to consideration as a part of the actual universe subject to natural law?

The materialist objects that if the physical side of nature is the essential one, the psychical cannot be essential. On what grounds is this claim based? Is the color of an object not essential to it because its shape is essential, or do the actual existence and change of color according to natural law interfere with the actual existence and change of shape according also to natural law? Does only one of our senses give us truth?

Logic is very ready with its definitions of "things" and their "properties" and "accidents," as Physics is very ready with its analyses of light and color and sound, and Physiology with its analyses of the sense organs and their relations to color and sound. But shall we accept only the physiological analysis of cell form and action, and reject the sense-synthesis of sight or hearing as less important, less actual? Or are we to believe that the sense-function alone is essential and not also some actuality in its object, as of this or that color? Are we to believe that any property or accident of a thing may change, and the thing remain yet actually the same thing? What are our essences as separated from their properties and accidents? As a matter of fact, we know nothing except we know it as some particular thing, every change in which leaves it something different from what it was before. Changes of particular form or color are changes to some other particular form or color, unless they are such changes as withdraw the object from the reach of the special sense of sight before appealed to, as for instance in the case of evaporation. That one form of force may accompany or pass into another makes neither one of the concomitants and neither the preceding nor the succeeding form less real. As a fact, however, much superstition still remains with us as unconscious result of just such withdrawals from the perception of one sense and analogous new appeals to some hitherto unaffected sense, although we are accustomed to flatter ourselves that science has long overcome this superstition. There is no change that is not a particular change, that is not according to constant laws of nature, and, as such, essential to nature. There is no phase of nature that exact science can consistently regard as non-essential. So that, even if reason does not exist in combination with all matter, we have no ground for regarding it as non-essential where it does exist, and no more reason for defining it as effect than we have for defining it as cause. Result it may be, as physiological function is result,—that is, an end-form of processes of change which we call evolution.

But we have found our disproof and also our proof of the existence of reason outside the human species fail us wherever the direct evidence of extreme analogy is wanting, as soon as we cease to regard reason as a cause of physiological change. Perhaps it will be well for us to define more closely the province of reason, before we proceed further in our considerations. An exhaustive analysis is not necessary to our purpose and it would be useless to attempt it at this point of our argument. The relation of reason to action is what chiefly concerns us here, and in this connection Mr. Leslie Stephen's definition of it as that faculty which enables us to act with regard to the distant and future might seem to designate its important function.[123] Simple reaction on the present action of force belongs to all matter. However, when we consider further, a certain doubt may rise as to the exact correctness of this definition or description, for does not that which we call instinct often perform the same office for the animal as that which we have designated as the office of reason? Let us look into this question a little more closely. We may take, for instance, the case of those insects and other animals which, though never caring for or indeed seeing their offspring after the hatching of the latter, make provision at the laying of the eggs for their nourishment during the helplessness of the first period of their life; are we to suppose that these animals have any means of knowing that they are providing for their offspring? Can they have learned the fact from their own parent whom they never saw, or from others of their own species who are in the same predicament as themselves? As Schneider points out,[124] the human infant must have sucked before it could have had any ideas, as individual, of the act of sucking. The newly hatched chickens of Eimer's experiments above referred to could scarcely have had any conception of the act of eating before they picked at their food. How happens it that the young of many of the lower animals which give no care to eggs or offspring yet know how to care for themselves after the peculiar manner of their kind? Once it is admitted that any acts which attain results that constitute desirable ends for the acting subject need not be regarded as caused by knowledge of the ends, there is no reason to suppose that the principle may not hold of many acts in which a distinct knowledge of the end seems to play a part. But what do we mean by end?

Let us take, for instance, the act of eating. The biologist and the physiologist tell us that the end which eating serves is the preservation of life; and the biologist may further add—not the life of the individual, alone, but that of the species. The very consistent physiologist may principally have in view, in eating, the preservation of his own health, and may even take into consideration, in a degree, his possible future offspring, guarding his own health with a view to theirs. With a minority of other men these more general and distant results may to some extent be kept in view as ends. But it is evident that, with the majority of people, they are, where ends at all, subordinate ones, the immediate satisfaction of hunger, the pleasure of eating, or the relief of physical depression, appearing oftener as chief end. And what is to be said of the new-born infant, which sucks when the breast is placed between its lips? what is the end which it has in view in taking nourishment? Shall we suppose it, as individual, to have any definite conception of the contrast between states of hunger and states of satisfaction, and to possess the knowledge that the act of sucking is the proper means to the attainment of satisfaction as an end? As the infant becomes the boy seating himself at table with a distinct conception of pleasure to be attained by the gratification of a vigorous appetite, so the boy may become the physiologist eating with a view chiefly to his own health and to the further end of health in his offspring. How does it happen that, thus, the same act, the significance of which remains the same, may be performed and by the same individual yet with quite different ends, or perhaps in some cases (that of the infant) no end at all, in view?

When we perceive the sphex providing its eggs, as is its wont, with living and yet motionless and helpless insects, we can scarcely refrain from believing that it is inspired by parental affection thus to provide for its future young; and yet we might, with quite equal reason, suppose that the act of copulation, in the case of the sphex, must have in view the propagation of offspring and the preservation of the species, since this is its result also; we refrain from so supposing, simply because a common experience furnishes us with the knowledge that the act of copulation, most necessary to the propagation of offspring and the preservation of the species, may yet be performed with no direct view to either of these ends, the birth of offspring being even regarded, in many cases, as something to be avoided if possible. With respect to all manner of acts, we continually fall into error by imputing what would be our own end, in case we performed the act, to another individual of our own species performing it; and the danger of error is doubtless increased when we attempt to judge the ends of an entirely different species by ends in a degree common to our own species. There is no reason why we should not suppose that some less ultimate end than that of the preservation of offspring may be present to the consciousness of the sphex placing food about its eggs, just as some nearer end than preservation of the species, health of offspring, or even individual health may be present to the human individual in the acts of copulation or of food-taking. And there remains still the further question as to whether the care of the sphex for its eggs may not be, and continue forever, on the plane of the first act of food-taking in the human infant; and then the question again arises as to what the nature of that plane of action may be.

These questions must remain, I believe, in great part unanswered, considerations such as those noticed above making the inference even of like ends from like acts very untrustworthy, the inference of similar ends from similar acts still more so, and the inference of the existence of no end or consciousness at all a logical impossibility. However, a certain general clew is given us in the constant coördination of our own nervous system with psychical processes, from which we may infer psychical processes in some manner and degree similar to our own in species whose nervous system greatly resembles our own; the similarity need not be that of ends, however. The decreasing similarity of nervous organization as we descend the animal scale may be supposed to be coördinate with some decrease of psychical similarity. Wherein this increasing dissimilarity consists, however, we have yet to inquire.

If we return to the act of food-taking in the individual, we perceive that, avoiding any exact assumption as to the definite nature of the act in its first appearance in the infant, we may make the general assertion that, as in the case of the supposed physiologist who finally comes to eat with a direct view to the preservation of health in his offspring as well as his own preservation and health, the act itself, while remaining unchanged in nature, connects itself, in the process of development, with various ends. As the individual becomes conscious of farther and farther reaching and more and more complicated results of the act, he postulates these as ends, not forgetting, however, important ends earlier postulated. He may eat, as a boy, for the pleasure of eating, later with his health and the capacity for useful work in view, and finally to the end also, or perhaps primarily, of securing healthy offspring; but he eats, in all these cases; and it is even supposable that he may eat the same kinds of food, healthful food being, from the beginning, agreeable to him. The widening of knowledge by experience, in the case of the human individual, furnishes him with more distant and more complex ends, which were earlier impossible to him, since he knew nothing of them.

Something similar appears to be the truth in the case of the mental progress of the human species as a whole. The growth of knowledge is, in fact, a growth of consciousness of the constant connection of particular processes with particular results, and of human acts as affecting these; with which increase of knowledge a further coördinate development in the sense of a postulation of further and further and more and more complex ends keeps pace. We are continually making "discoveries,"—performing or observing operations some or all of the observed results of which are unforeseen by us, though these very results may be later sought as ends. We are often able to predict the results even of entirely new experiments; but we foresee, and can therefore assume as end, no results the elements of which in their connection with their conditions have not first come, in some way, within our knowledge. Nothing is a discovery which does not involve some new element or new combination of elements. The growth of knowledge, in individual and species, and the increase in distance and complexity of ends never attain completeness, not all results become known; new discoveries are constantly being made which show us that we have hitherto been blind to results continually before our eyes, action in accordance with which would have been most advantageous to us.