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

by Cora May Williams

Carneri further cites Haeckel's definition of the organism as a cell-monarchy, in which different individuals, and different groups of individuals, having different duties, are guided by a central power. He does not intend thus to assume special centres for consciousness and will, but only to assert that, through such centralization, the expression of the whole individual, as total consciousness and total will, takes place.

Not only the brain, but other parts of the nervous system, are affected in perception; and the same parts are operative in remembrance. Thus the association of ideas is explained.

As long as the animal remains upon the plane of mere instinct, it has only blind impulses.[70] Only in the most highly organized animals do we find the first traces of conscious, though not yet of self-conscious, will. In that the animal knows what it will, it distinguishes clearly the objects of its will, and hence its own impulses. Upon the earlier plane of mere self-preservation, the beneficial, harmful, and indifferent were not yet made inward, but only distinguished outwardly by nature in the struggle for existence, in which the fittest survived; in consciousness, however, the harmful and advantageous become inward, taking the form of pain and pleasure. But the animal never gets beyond the concrete case,—in which his inherited instincts, working with a rapidity and freedom we often see imitated in the passions of men, sometimes act so advantageously as almost to deceive us into believing them the result of reflection; yet sometimes, again, bring most disastrous results. The animal never attains to a notion of the Whole. Associations and general perceptions the higher animal species have, but not concepts.

Impulses appear, in their primary form in the animals, as passions.[71] The first beginning of the ethical may be found in the passion of love in the broadest sense of the word, as sexual love and the love of offspring. The first is chiefly exacting, the second is higher, in that it gives.

That which divides man physically from the brutes is merely the union of qualities, all of which, but never all of which united, we find among the animals; that which divides him mentally from them is self-conscious thought, developed by means of speech. Through the development of attention, which arises in connection with a greater and greater centralization, sensation becomes perception, this develops further to general perceptions, and is still further perfected to concepts.

Carneri believes primitive man to have been, not more benevolent than the animals, but less so. Leaving out of account the carnivorous animals, the brutes seem to satisfy their own wants without interfering with the satisfaction of others, and, except where the possession of females is concerned, to live in peace with each other. On the other hand, the influence of man upon the domestic animals may be seen in the greed of the dog, who, as capable of instruction, takes on himself all the evil qualities of his master. The cat, who is not so intelligent as the dog, is not thus influenced.

For nature there is no good and evil. The animal which tears and devours its prey is no worse than the swollen stream, that uproots the trees in its course. With consciousness, intention awakes; yet in the brute this is only secondary; the brute distinguishes between pain and pleasure, but not between these as the result of its own action in distinction from that of nature outside itself. Only the self-consciousness of the human being knows good and evil; nature does not know evil, for she does not know the opposition on which it is based. There is wisdom in the story of Genesis, which sees in the beginning of knowledge, the commencement of evil. The awakening of self-feeling is the beginning of a chasm, through the full development of which the individual is at length separated from nature. With self-consciousness and the feeling of boundless isolation that therein comes over him, man begins his ethical development.

But the ethical does not begin with the human being known to us by natural history; even yet there are races of man which stand lower than many species of animals; and the early development of moral activity was of necessity much more of the nature of that which we call evil than of that which we call good. The mind is a sort of light; and as warmth is indivisible from the motion which we call light, and the first warmth of the sun could only burn, so the motion which we call mind could at first only have destroyed; self-consciousness, in its earliest stages, can have produced only the intense feelings which lie nearer pain than pleasure. As man came to have intention, and gained new wants in development, he could regard the intentions of his fellow-men only with distrust. Envy, hatred, dislike, were developed long before the family, and, later, the tribe furnished opportunity for love. Self-consciousness could, at first, interpret good and evil only as having reference to self, just as it also conceived its freedom as that of its own caprice. The desire for happiness and endeavor to attain it is the primary incentive to all human undertakings. It is erroneous to suppose that man is nearer to the brutes by this impulse; the animal does not possess it, has only the impulse to self-preservation.

The idea that man and wife together first constitute the complete human being, and that the real future of this human being lies in the children—the idea of the family is, certainly, of all ideas, primordial, though it probably came late to consciousness. From the family developed the tribe with the eldest at its head. The more peaceful the tribe, the more others combined against it, and by their combination compelled it still further to strengthen its resources. The feeling of power awakened by the growing concord extended further and further, and finally made its way to the individual with the full force of the Idea. This development, but more especially the compelling power of the struggle for existence, soon called the bravest to command in place of the eldest of the tribe.