Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

But morality comprehends also the self-regarding virtues, those which directly affect the individual, and which affect society but remotely and incidentally. How did the idea of these originate? There is a very wide difference between the morality of savages, in respect to the self-regarding virtues, and the morality of civilized nations. Among the former, the greatest intemperance, utter licentiousness, and unnatural crimes are very common. But as soon as marriage was introduced, whether monogamous or polygamous, jealousy led to the inculcation of female virtue; and this, being honored, spread to the unmarried females. Chastity, the hatred of indecency, temperance, and many other self-regarding virtues, originating first in the social instincts, have come to be highly prized by civilized nations as affecting, first, the welfare of the community, and, secondly, the welfare of the individual. This was the origin of the so-called "moral sense." It rejects the intuitive theory of morality, and bases its origin on the increasing perception of the advantage of certain conduct to the community and the individual.[122]

Sophereus. And in this origin of the social and the self-regarding virtues, which I understand you to say is the theory of Darwin, is the idea of a divine command to practice certain things, and to avoid doing certain other things, left out?

Kosmicos. The idea of a divine command, as the source of morality, is not necessary to the explanation of the mode in which the social or the self-regarding virtues were gradually developed. In the progress from barbarism to civilization, what is called the moral sense has been slowly developed as an increasing perception of what is beneficial, and this has become an inherited faculty. We thus have a sure scientific basis for the moral intuitions which we do not individually stay to analyze when we are called upon to determine the morality or the immorality of certain actions. The supposed divine command is something that is aside from the process by which the idea of morality or immorality became developed.

Sophereus. And is this also Mr. Spencer's philosophy of the moral sense?

Kosmicos. Let me read you what Spencer says: "I believe that the experience of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, has been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition—certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility."[123] I have emphasized certain words in this passage in order to make its meaning distinct. Mr. Spencer's theory is that we have certain faculties of moral intuition, which have become such by transmission and accumulation; that the original ideas of right and wrong sprang from perceptions of utility; and that when to the individual the question of a good or a bad action in others or himself is now presented, he feels an emotion which responds to right or wrong conduct, and feels it in the faculty which he has inherited from ancestors, without referring it to his individual experience of the utility or inutility of certain conduct.

Now, in regard to the divine command as the origin of our ideas of right and wrong, if you turn to Mr. Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," you will find an immense collection of evidence which shows the genesis of deities of all kinds. Beginning with the ideas formed by the primitive men of souls, ghosts, spirits, and demons, the ideas of another life and of another world, there came about the ideas of supernatural beings, aided in their development by ancestor-worship, idol-worship, fetich-worship, animal-worship, plant-worship, and nature-worship. Hence came the ideas of deities of various kinds, one class of which is that of the human personality greatly disguised, and the other is the class which has arisen by simple idealization and expansion of the human personality. The last class, although always coexisting with the other, at length becomes predominant, and finally there is developed the idea of one chief or supreme deity. Having traced the origin of this idea of a supreme deity, Mr. Spencer puts and answers this question: "While among all races and all regions, from the earliest times down to the most recent, the conceptions of deities have been naturally evolved in the way shown, must we conclude that a small clan of the Semitic race had given to it, supernaturally, a conception which, though superficially like the rest, was in substance absolutely unlike them?"[124] He then proceeds to show that the Hebrew Jehovah, or God, was a conception that had a kindred genesis with all the other conceptions of a deity or deities. "Here," he says, "pursuing the methods of science, and disregarding foregone conclusions, we must deal with the Hebrew conception in the same manner as with all the others." Dealing with it by the scientific method, he shows that behind the supernatural being of the order of the Hebrew God, as behind the supernatural beings of all other orders, there has in every case been a human personality. Thus, taking the narrative as it has come down to us of God's dealing with Abraham, he shows that what Abraham thought, or is described as thinking by those who preserved the tradition, was of a terrestrial ruler who could, like any other earthly potentate, make a covenant with him about land or anything else, or that he was the maker of all things, and that Abraham believed the earth and the heavens were produced by one who eats and drinks, and feels weary after walking. Upon either idea, Abraham's conception of a Deity remains identical with that of his modern Semitic representative, and with that of the uncivilized in general. But the ideas of Deity entertained by cultivated people, instead of being innate, arise only at a comparatively advanced stage, as results of accumulated knowledge, greater intellectual grasp, and higher sentiment.[125]

To return now to the supposed divine command as the origin of morality, it is obvious that the conception of the being who has uttered the command makes the nature of the command partake of the attributes ascribed to that being. Accordingly, the grossest superstitions, the most revolting practices, the most immoral actions, have found their sanction in what the particular deity who is believed in is supposed to have inculcated or required. I do not need to enumerate to you the proofs of this, or to tell you that the Hebrew God is no exception to it. One illustration of it, however, is worth repeating. Speaking of the ceremony by which the covenant between God and Abraham is said to have been established, Mr. Spencer says: "Abraham and each of his male descendants, and each of his slaves, is circumcised. The mark of the covenant, observe, is to be borne not only by Abraham and those of his blood, but also by those of other blood whom he has bought. The mark is a strange one, and the extension of it is a strange one, if we assume it to be imposed by the Creator of the universe, as a mark on a favored man and his descendants; and on this assumption it is no less strange that the one transgression for which every 'soul shall be cut off' is, not any crime, but the neglect of this rite. But such a ceremony insisted on by a living potentate, under penalty of death, is not strange, for, as we shall hereafter see, circumcision is one of various mutilations imposed as marks on subject persons by terrestrial superiors."[126]

So that the Hebrew God who made the covenant with Abraham was not, in Abraham's own conception, the First Cause of all things, or a supernatural being, but he was a powerful human ruler, making an agreement with a shepherd chief. In all religions, the things required or commanded by the supposed deified person have been marked by the characteristics of human rulers; and as a source of morality, or as a standard of morality, the requirements or commands of the deified person, however they are supposed to have been communicated, fail to answer the indispensable condition of a fixed and innate system of morality, which is that it must have proceeded from the Creator of the universe, and not from a being who partakes of human passions, infirmities, and desires, and is merely a deified human potentate.

Pass, now, to Mr. Spencer's "Principles of Morality"; and although but one volume of this work has been as yet published, we may see that he is entirely consistent with what he has said in his "Sociology" and his other writings.[127] He does not leave us in any doubt as to his theory of morals. It appears, from the preface to his "Data of Ethics," that he has been compelled by ill-health to deviate from the plan which he had mapped out for himself, and to publish one volume of his "Principles of Morality" before completing his "Principles of Sociology." But while we have reason for his sake and for the sake of the world to regret this, we can easily understand his system of morality. He means to rest the rules of right conduct on a scientific basis, and he shows that this is a pressing need. In his preface, he says:

I am the more anxious to indicate in outline, if I can not complete, this final proof, because the establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing need. Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it. Most of those who reject the current creed appear to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may be safely thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling agency. Meanwhile, those who defend the current creed allege that, in the absence of the guidance it yields, no guidance can exist; divine commandments they think the only possible guides. Thus, between these extreme opponents there is a certain community. The one holds that the gap left by disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics need not be filled by a code of natural ethics; and the other holds that it can not be so filled. Both contemplate a vacuum, which the one wishes and the other fears. As the change which promises or threatens to bring about this state, desired or dreaded, is rapidly progressing, those who believe that the vacuum can be filled are called upon to do something in pursuance of their belief.