MORALITY
Dualistic ethics—The categorical imperative—Monistic ethics—Morals and adaptation—Variation and adaptation—Habit—Chemistry of habit—Trophic stimuli—Habit in inorganic bodies—Instincts—Social instincts—Instinct and morality—Right and duty—Morals and morality—The good and the bad—Morals and fashions—Sexual selection—Fashion and the feeling of shame—Fashion and reason—Ceremonies and cults—Mysteries and sacraments—Baptism—The Lord's Supper—Transubstantiation—The miracle of redemption—Papal sacraments—Marriage—Modern fashions—Honor—Phylogeny of morals.
The practical life of man is, like that of all the social higher animals, ruled by impulses and customs which we describe as "moral." The science of morality, ethics, is regarded by the dualists as a mental science, and closely connected with religion on the one hand and psychology on the other. During the nineteenth century this dualistic view retained its popularity especially because the great authority of Kant, with his dogma of the categorical imperative, seemed to have given it a solid foundation, and because it agreed admirably with the teaching of the Church. Monism, on the other hand, regards ethics as a natural science, and starts from the principle that morality is not supernatural in origin, but has been built up by adaptation of the social mammals to the conditions of existence, and thus may be traced eventually to physical laws. Hence modern biology sees no metaphysical miracle in morality, but the action of physiological functions.
Our whole modern civilization clings to the erroneous ideas which traditional morality, founded on revelation, and closely connected with ecclesiastical teaching, has imposed upon it. Christianity has taken over the ten commandments from Judaism, and blended them with a mystical Platonism into a towering structure of ethics. Kant especially lent support to it in recent years with his Critique of Practical Reason, and his three central dogmas. The close connection of these three dogmas with each other, and their positive influence on ethics, were particularly important through Kant formulating the further dogma of the categorical imperative.
The great authority which Kant's dualist philosophy obtained is largely owing to the fact that he subordinated pure reason to practical reason. The vague moral law for which Kant claimed absolute universality is expressed in his categorical imperative as follows: "So act that the maxim (or the subjective principle of your will) may at the same time serve as a general law." I have shown in the nineteenth chapter of the Riddle that this categorical imperative is, like the thing in itself, an outcome of dogmatic, not critical, principles. As Schopenhauer says:
Kant's categorical imperative is generally quoted in our day under the more modest and convenient title of "the moral law." The daily writers of compendiums think they have founded the science of ethics when they appeal to this apparently innate "moral law," and then build on it that wordy and confused tissue of phrases with which they manage to make the simplest and clearest features of life unintelligible, without having ever seriously asked themselves whether there really is any such convenient code of morality written in our head, breast, or heart. This broad cushion is snatched from under morality when we prove that Kant's categorical imperative of the practical reason is a wholly unjustified, baseless, and imaginative assumption.
Kant's categorical imperative is a mere dogma, and, like his whole theory of practical reason, rests on dogmatic and not critical grounds. It is a fiction of faith, and directly opposed to the empirical principles of pure reason.
The notion of duty, which the categorical imperative represents as a vague a priori law implanted in the human mind—a kind of moral instinct—can, as a matter of fact, be traced to a long series of phyletic modifications of the phronema of the cortex. Duty is a social sense that has been evolved a posteriori as a result of the complicated relations of the egoism of individuals and the altruism of the community. The sense of duty, or conscience, is the amenability of the will to the feeling of obligation, which varies very considerably in individuals.
A scientific study of the moral law, on the basis of physiology, evolution, ethnography, and history, teaches us that its precepts rest on biological grounds, and have been developed in a natural way. The whole of our modern morality and social and juridical order have evolved in the course of the nineteenth century out of the earlier and lower conditions which we now generally regard as things of the past. The social morality of the eighteenth century proceeded, in its turn, from that of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, and still further from that of the Middle Ages, with its despotism, fanaticism, Inquisition, and witch trials. It is equally clear from modern ethnography and the comparative psychology of races that the morality of barbarous races has been evolved gradually from the lower social rules of savage tribes, and that these differ only in degree, not in kind, from the instincts of the apes and other social vertebrates. The comparative psychology of the vertebrates shows, further, that the social instincts of the mammals and birds have arisen from the lower stages of the reptiles and amphibia, and these in turn from those of the fishes and the lowest vertebrates. Finally, the phylogeny of the vertebrates proves that this highly developed stem has advanced through a long series of invertebrate ancestors (chordonia, vermalia, gastræada) from the protists by a process of gradual modification. We find, even among these unicellulars (first protophyta, then protozoa), the important principle which lies at the base of morality, association, or the formation of communities. The adaptation of the united cell-individuals to each other and to the common environment is the physiological foundation of the first traces of morality among the protists. All the unicellulars that abandon their isolated eremitic lives, and unite to form communities, are compelled to restrict their natural egoism, and make concessions to altruism in the common interest. Even in the globular cœnobia of volvox and magosphæra the special form and movement and mode of reproduction are determined by the compromise between the egoistic instincts of the individual cells and the altruistic need of the community.