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

by Cora May Williams

The assumption of a moral sense has already been made in the definition of Good as the object of Approbation.

Our previous reasoning would lead us nevertheless to guess that this sense is not, in its nature, a simple and indecomposable faculty. How, then, did this sense arise, and what is its nature and composition?

In the lowest animal organization, there are merely vague and indefinite states of consciousness corresponding to the undeveloped state of physical function. With the development and specialization of advancing evolution arises Perception; by which likeness and unlikeness among sensations are distinguished, and classification is begun.

"At first only the most obvious resemblances are noticed, but as experience progresses, wider and wider classes ever tend to be formed, till at last we arrive at those highest ideas which are coëxtensive with experience. These, though the last in order of birth, become the starting-points of science—just as men formed the idea of stones falling long before they discovered the law of attraction, yet by that law they afterwards 'explain' the former fact. Thus we trace the whole of Perception or Knowledge to this power of comparison and noting likenesses, and this we see to be coincident with the organization of consciousness into central meeting-places or ganglia, in which different sensations are presented to a common tribunal and so compared together. We see, therefore, that Perception does not originate consciousness; it only organizes and develops it. We cannot, therefore, agree with Mr. Herbert Spencer, who will not allow consciousness to the lowest animals."[63]

The process of perception or Knowledge works, not only on states of consciousness themselves, but on the changes from one state to another, or, in other words, on relations. Thus results, on the one hand, recognition of objects; on the other, argument and reasoning, for the most abstruse reasoning is nothing more than a classification of relations.

"We have now, therefore, two distinct divisions of Consciousness: Sensation, which as before consists only of pleasure and pain, though now of different kinds; and Perception, which classifies states of consciousness and their relations, and is therefore concerned only with change. Knowledge, therefore, has originally no other object than different pleasures and pains, but eventually it attends so much to the differences and resemblances that it ceases to remember the pleasure or pain; in its absorption in the relation it well-nigh forgets the things related. This process is furthered by the fact that, as the medium gets more extended, each part of it has less average effect upon the organism: the primary pleasures and pains being spread over a larger surface are less intense, and so obtrude themselves less. This is exemplified by the common observation that sensation and perception tend to exclude each other.... Nevertheless pleasure and pain ever remain indissolubly connected with consciousness, though their presence is often unheeded, and only the more violent forms force themselves on the attention.

"What is true of these simple forms of consciousness, is true of their later development. The relation of sensation to perception is the same as that between the faculties of which these are respectively the germs, emotion and intellect. For emotion is associated sensations of pleasure and pain; and intellect is associated perceptions of change and relation. Hence by their very nature these are at once mutually exclusive and inseparable. A strong emotion drives out reason, and much reasoning chills emotion.... Yet we can give some reason for any emotion; and we feel some emotion in working a mathematical problem.... In every intentional act it is evident that both are involved; the end being given by emotion, the means by reasoning. Reasoning can give no end, it can only arrange, elicit, suggest; emotion can give no means, for it cannot classify or observe relations. In the building up, therefore, of any moral faculty, both these elements must take a part. Hence it will be well to trace, a little more closely, their mode of formation, and their connection with muscular activity.

"When in the course of experience a certain sequence of sensation frequently recurs, the consciousness becomes habituated to it, and the return of the first sensation is followed by an idea or associative image of the others.... Hence the idea of pleasure or pain not actually felt comes to be associated with objects, which, if placed in certain different positions, would effect us in the way imagined.... Pleasure may thus be associated through a train of ideas of any length.... After a time this process becomes organic, the intermediate terms are lost, and pleasure is directly connected with sensations and ideas that are in themselves not distinctly pleasurable.

"Now by various trains of association, various pleasures and pains are connected with the same object. These different combinations of pleasures and pains, some of which arise, before reasoning, by unintentional association, but the higher of which are the results of automatization of reasoning, form the different emotions....

"Action in its origin is simply the correlative of sensation. Contractility and irritability are the two general properties of vital tissue, or rather are two sides of one fundamental property which is also known under the name of sensibility—the power of contraction under irritation, or of expressing impressed force. Irritability means merely the phenomena of consciousness, the development of which we have hitherto been tracing, though we have been throughout obliged to express ourselves in the language of the inner, and not of the outer experience.... This internal development we have already examined; we must now turn to the obverse external development which takes its origin in contractility.