In the latest stages of man's development, conscious regard for law and custom, the fear of gods, the explicit recognition of duty and conscience, and the direct pursuit of ideals-all the reflective considerations that we may lump together under the word "conscientiousness"-play their ever increasing part and complicate the psychological situation. But even in modern civilized man the underlying animal forces count for far more. And without them the later self-conscious forces would not have come into play at all. There is a small class of people who are dominated throughout their activities by consciously present ideals or obedience to religious injunctions. But the average man still acts mainly under the pressure of the more primitive forces which we have enumerated.
How far has the moralizing process been blind and how far conscious?
(1) To a very large extent the moralizing process has been a merely mechanical one. Through slight differences in nerve-structure individuals have varied a little in their response to the pressure of inward cravings and outward perils. The braver, the more prudent, the more industrious have had a better chance of survival. So by the process which we have come to call natural selection there has been a continual weeding-out of the relatively lazy, cowardly, reckless, and imprudent. Much of our morality is the result of tendencies thus long cultivated by the ruthless methods of nature; we inherit a complex nervous organization, the outcome of ages of molding and selection, which now instinctively and easily responds to stimuli with a certain degree of inbred morality. This is the case much more than is apparent upon the surface. The child seems very unmoral, the mere prey of passing impulses; but latent in his brain are many aptitudes and tendencies which will at the proper time ripen and manifest themselves. The period of adolescence is that during which the changes in mental structure which were effected during the later stages of evolution are being made in the mind of this new individual; he reenacts, as it were, in a few years, the history of the race, and emerges without any conscious effort, the possessor of the fruits of that long struggle of which he was always the heir.
(2) In all the later stages of animal evolution, however, moral development is largely conscious, or semi-conscious. Besides our inner inheritance of altered brain-paths there is a social inheritance of habits which each generation adopts by imitation of its predecessors. Without any deliberate intention, the young of every species imitate their parents, and then the older members of the flock or herd. "Suggestion" is said by some to be the chief means of moralization; we are brave or industrious because we see others practicing these virtues and naturally do as they do. At any rate, whichever are more important, the inherited tendencies or those acquired by contagion, both of these factors play a large part in the development of the individual's morals.
(3) The third method of moral development is that which we call "learning by experience." The pain or dissatisfaction which a wrong impulse brings in its train, the satisfaction which follows a moral act, are remembered, and recur with the recurrence of a similar situation, becoming perhaps the decisive factors in steering the animal or man toward his true welfare. Many animals quite low in the organic scale learn by experience; and though of course the degree of consciousness that accompanies these readjustments varies enormously, this method of moralization may be said to be always, like the preceding, a more or less conscious process. Learning by experience is subject, of course, to many mistaken judgments; the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc leads many learners to avoid perfectly innocent acts as supposedly involving some evil result with which they were once by chance connected; and the true causes of the evils are often overlooked. Even when dimly conscious readjustments become highly conscious deliberation, the results of that deliberation may be less forwarding morally than the unconscious and merciless grinding of natural selection.
More and more, of course, as men grew in power of reflection, did they consciously shape their morals; and this intelligent selection, which has as yet played a comparatively small role, is bound, as men become more and more rational, to supersede in importance the other factors in moral evolution. But in the later phases of evolution all three of these processes blend together; and it would be impossible for the keenest analyst to tell how much of his conduct was determined in each of these ways.
H. Spencer, Data of Ethics (also published as the first part of his
Principles of Ethics), chap. I and chap. II, through sec. 4; or J.
Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, part II, chap, XXII, first half, to "We are
now prepared to deal." L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, part
I, chap. I, secs. 1-4. I. King, Development of Religion, pp. 48-59
A great mass of concrete material will be found in E. Westermarck's
Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, H. O. Taylor's Ancient Ideals,
W. E. H. Leeky's History of European Morals.
CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL MORALITY
How early was social morality developed?