An ethical philosophy of life presented in its main outlines

by Felix Adler

[65] Stevenson falls into this error. He confounds Jekyl with the virtuous and Hyde with the vicious side of character. In reality the one should stand for the empirical plus traits, the other for the empirical minus traits.

[66] Contract-keeping is peculiarly the moral rule applicable to mercantile transactions. To apply it without modification to the dealings of employers and wage-earners is to intrude the mercantile standard into the industrial sphere. This is what we are now witnessing. The industrial standard is only in process of development and clarification, and the accepted mercantile standard is really in conflict with it. Among merchants it is of the very essence of their transactions that a contract shall not be invalidated, despite the injurious consequences to one or the other party which it may turn out later on to involve. The security of commercial transactions would be gone if revision of the contract should be permitted whenever consequent loss appears. Again, and this is particularly important, merchants are assumed to be on a footing of equality in dealing with one another, equally free in accepting or rejecting a proposed contract, equally competent to take care of their respective interests. The relation of employers to wage-earners however is not that of economic equals, but of the economically stronger with the economically weaker. And this difference is of cardinal importance in determining the rule of justice as it should obtain in the industrial sphere. I do not of course intend to imply that an agreement between employer and wage-earners once made should not as a rule be kept as scrupulously as that between merchant and merchant. What I affirm is that in view of the greatness of the injury possibly inflicted upon the weaker, the economically stronger party is bound at least to share the responsibility with the weaker for the essential fairness of the terms of the agreement before it is finally completed. Nay, I would go a step farther, and say that despite the indispensable condemnation of contract-breaking, provision should be made for possible revision in cases where it can be shown that exceptional hardships have appeared, unforeseen and unforeseeable at the time when the agreement was made.

[67] In a previous chapter I remarked that the cheap estimate of others and of oneself is due to the habit of regarding human beings from the point of view of the use they can be put to, ignoring the wonderful and mysterious energies and potencies which are exhibited day by day in every human being. If the force stored in an infinitesimal particle of radium is calculated to excite admiration, how much more the forces exhibited in man, looking at him merely as the stage on which the spectacle of these forces is displayed. Consider the occurrence of such a thing as thought, the sheer miracle of mentality, the working of the constructive imagination in the artist, etc. If we sufficiently dwell on these inward facts about men, instead of merely emphasizing their external utility to one another, we shall thereby be put in tune, as it were, for the higher spiritual view of man. The difference I have said is like that between understanding the theory of electricity and merely turning on electric power in the workshop or the home. And yet the scientific contemplation of the miracles of human nature as seen from within, while it serves as a propædeutic, cannot actually bring us up to the ethical point of view. For this sort of contemplation reveals only the working of impersonal forces or powers, thought, feeling, impulse in their endless actions and reactions, similar, in so far as they are impersonal, to the forces observed in nature. The ethical point of view alone discloses a centrality, an underivative, irreducible core, a substantive being, personality.

[68] An expression occurring once only.

[69] Thus the interdependence of nations in respect to their material interests is often erroneously expatiated on as if it constituted an actually ethical bond between them.

[70] While at the same time the ethical personality, unlike the “windowless monads” of Leibnitz is effectuated only in the cross-relations which subsist between each one and his spiritual associates.

[71] I may here point out the bearings of this general point of view on the much-mooted and confused question of the value of the study of history. Ranke holds that the aim of the historian should be to reproduce factually the occurrences of the past. Robinson insists on the uses of history. But uses to what end? The history of the past is fragmentary and full of gaps. The data with respect to some of the most important periods are irrecoverable. The attitude of the human race towards its own history, I take it, should be like that of an individual towards his past. I cannot really resuscitate my past. Memory is treacherous. Much has been forgotten. The events of my youth are discolored when seen in the perspective of later years. I should try to know myself as far as I can, but with a view of pressing on and realizing with such light upon myself as I have, the ethical aim. The same applies to mankind. And the important point is in the review to disengage the ideas that controlled the principal social institutions in the past, and to appraise these ideas from the standpoint of our present ethical insight. Thus, in treating the history of the family, we should single out the ideas that controlled the family relation, the idea of the patria potestas, the feudal idea, or the connection of the family with landed property. In writing the history of the organs of education, we should bring into view priestly education as among the Brahmins, musical or æsthetic education as among the Greeks, the idea of princely education, the idea of preparation for the government of an empire, which accounts for the system of the English universities, the controlling idea of the German universities. And then at the end of our survey we shall be in a better position to discern what is to be the ideal of school and university education in an ethical democracy. The same applies to the controlling ideas of the state, and of the remaining social institutions.

[72] Spurious or bastard organization was based on the empirical preëminence of some function like that of the priest or the warrior.

[73] See Marriage and Divorce, D. Appleton & Co.

[74] Just as the family is the organ of physical reproduction, but in that very capacity is ethically required to bring to birth the spiritual nature of its members.