A common political ideal does not mean a universal peace. Coarser forms of dispute disappear, but, on the other hand, as nations grow more refined in their ideals, they grow more susceptible. What a political humanity, or a political community of Europe, would mean, is the substitution of international punishment for the self-willed conflicts of irresponsible nations.
We cannot say what the future of society and of morality may be,—whether mankind will be able to take mechanical means against a period of ice, or whether human society may not, as a whole, be destroyed, to be replaced by a higher type of existence, which may arise on the earth from the development of humanity, or may, on some other planet, take up the tale of human civilization as we take up that of the civilization of Greece and Rome.
Two things follow from the progressive character of the moral ideal: (1) that the classification and description of duties will vary with each age; (2) that, as the ideal changes from age to age, the highest moral principle or sentiment will change with it.
At the present time, a belief has gained great authority, that the sense of duty is transitory and will finally disappear; but whether we, with Spencer, identify obligation with coercion, or understand it as the relation of a part of conduct to the rest, in neither sense is the proposition true as it stands. If duty means constraint, it by no means follows that constraint will cease with progress; for constraint arises from confronting one inclination with a higher idea, and its disappearance would mean that inclinations had become constant; this is, however, impossible. The fiction of a final stage of mobile equilibrium is an unwarranted conclusion from the fact that all morality involves a cycle of conduct in mobile equilibrium. But the theory represents a truth,—the truth that morality at no time implies in itself the sense of duty. The sense of duty, as involving the hard feeling of compulsion, of subjection to authority, and bound up with the sense of sin, a sense stronger in proportion to merit or the interval between first inclination and final moral willing, may and is giving place to a higher conception. In the family, this may already be found, where self-sacrifice and aid are matters of affection and rendered freely. In the higher ideal, we have that love of man for a higher and larger order than himself which morality represents as solidarity with society, a continually progressive society of free individuals; which religion represents as the love for and of God.
And at the last two questions may be asked: (1) whether the difficulties in which Christianity is placed at the present day do not arise from absorption of its highest idea into the conceptions and the practice of morality, so that the religious sentiment is starved; and (2) whether the ideal of a free coöperation in the progress of humanity may not be used to interpret the belief in immortality, putting in the place of individual immortality the continuance of life in the persons whom the individual may affect. In "The International Journal of Ethics" July, 1892, Alexander combats some misinterpretations of "Natural Selection in Morals," which he says are partly due to Spencer's Individualism. Natural Selection in social life does not mean necessarily destruction of individuals, but is a struggle of ideals, such as that between Individualism and Collectivism,—in which Selection seems to favor Collectivism.
FOOTNOTES:
[82] The reference is here to Wundt, "Phys. Psych.," I. p. 485 (ed. II.).