The moral life shows its continuity in two ways. First, the earlier type of group and customary morality persists in part; in the second place, when the moral is differentiated from the other spheres of life in which it was embedded, it does not have to find entirely new conceptions. It borrows its terms from the group life or from the various spheres, religious, political, æsthetic, economic, which separate out from the older group unity.
The following quotation from Grote will serve as a vivid restatement of the régime of custom:
"This aggregate of beliefs and predispositions to believe, Ethical, Religious, Æsthetical, and Social, respecting what is true or false, probable or improbable, just or unjust, holy or unholy, honorable or base, respectable or contemptible, pure or impure, beautiful or ugly, decent or indecent, obligatory to do or obligatory to avoid, respecting the status and relations of each individual in the society, respecting even the admissible fashions of amusement and recreation—this is an established fact and condition of things, the real origin of which is for the most part unknown, but which each new member of the group is born to and finds subsisting.... It becomes a part of each person's nature, a standing habit of mind, or fixed set of mental tendencies, according to which particular experience is interpreted and particular persons appreciated.... The community hate, despise or deride any individual member who proclaims his dissent from their social creed.... Their hatred manifests itself in different ways ... at the very least by exclusion from that amount of forbearance, good will and estimation without which the life of an individual becomes insupportable.... 'Nomos (Law and Custom), king of all' (to borrow the phrase which Herodotus cites from Pindar) exercises plenary power, spiritual and temporal, over individual minds; moulding the emotions as well as the intellect, according to the local type ... and reigning under the appearance of habitual, self-suggested tendencies."[96]
The important facts brought out are (1) the existence in a social group of certain habits not only of acting, but of feeling and believing about actions, of valuing or approving and disapproving. (2) The persistent forcing of these mental habitudes upon the attention of each new member of the group. The newcomer, whether by birth or adoption, is introduced into a social medium whose conditions and regulations he can no more escape than he can those of his physical environment. (3) Thus the mental and practical habits of the newly introduced individual are shaped. The current ways of esteeming and behaving in the community become a "standing habit" of his own mind; they finally reign as "habitual, self-suggested tendencies." Thus he becomes a full member of the social group, interested in the social fabric to which he belongs, and ready to do his part in maintaining it.
1. Persistence of Group Morality.—Comparing this state of affairs with what obtains to-day in civilized communities, we find certain obvious points of agreement. The social groups with which an individual comes in touch are now more numerous and more loosely formed. But everywhere there are customs not only of acting, but of thinking and feeling about acting. Each profession, each institution, has a code of which the individual has to take account. The nature of this code, unexpressed as well as formulated, is brought to the attention of the individual in countless ways; by the approval and disapproval of its public opinion; by his own failures and successes; by his own tendency to imitate what he sees about him, as well as by deliberate, intentional instruction.
In other words, group morality does not vanish in order that conscious and personal morality may take its place. Group and customary morality is still the morality of many of us most of the time, and of all of us for a good deal of the time. We do not any of us think out all of our standards, weigh independently our values, make all our choices in a rational manner, or form our characters by following a clearly conceived purpose. As children we all start in a family group. We continue in a school group and perhaps a church group. We enter an occupation group, and later, it may be, family, political, social, and neighborhood groups. In every one of these if we are members, we must to a certain degree accept standards that are given. We have to play according to the rules of the game. As children we do this unconsciously. We imitate, or follow suggestions; we are made to conform by all the agencies of group morality—group opinion, ritual, pleasure and pain, and even by taboos;[97] above all, we act as the others act, and coöperate more or less to a common end. We form habits which persist, many of them as long as we live. We accept many of the traditions without challenge. Even when we pass from the early family group to the new situations and surroundings which make us repeat more or less of the experience of the race, a large share of our conduct and of our judgments of others is determined by the influences of group and custom. And it is fortunate for progress that this is true. If every one had to start anew to frame all his ideals and make his laws, we should be in as melancholy a plight morally as we should be intellectually if we had to build each science anew. The fundamental safeguards which the group provides against individual impulse and passion, the condition of close association, interdependence and mutual sympathy which the group affords, the habituation to certain lines of conduct valued by the group—all this is a root on which the stem and flower of personal morality may grow. Individualism and intellectual activity, however necessary to man's progress, would give no morality did they not start out of this deeper level of common feeling and common destiny. The rational and personal agencies of the "third level" come not to destroy, but to fulfill the meaning of the forces and agencies of the first and second levels described in Chapters III and IV.
2. The Moral Conceptions.—The conceptions for the moral are nearly all taken from the group relations or from the jural and religious aspects, as these have been gradually brought to clearer consciousness. As already noted, the Greek term "ethical," the Latin "moral," the German "sittlich," suggest this—ethos meant the "sum of the characteristic usages, ideas, standards, and codes by which a group was differentiated and individualized in character from other groups."[98]
Some specific moral terms come directly from group relations. The "kind" man acts as one of the kin. When the ruling or privileged group is contrasted with the man of no family or of inferior birth, we get a large number of terms implying "superiority" or "inferiority" in birth, and so of general value. This may or may not be due to some inherent superiority of the upper class, but it means at least that the upper class has been most effectual in shaping language and standards of approval. So "noble" and "gentle" referred to birth before they had moral value; "duty" in modern usage seems to have been principally what was due to a superior. Many words for moral disapproval are very significant of class feeling. The "caitiff" was a captive, and the Italians have their general term for morally bad, "cattivo," from the same idea. The "villain" was a feudal tenant, the "blackguard" looked after the kettles, the "rascal" was one of the common herd, the "knave" was the servant; the "base" and "mean" were opposed to the gentle and noble. Another set of conceptions reflects the old group approvals or combines these with conceptions of birth. We have noted the twofold root of kalokagathia in Greek. "Honor" and "honesty" were what the group admired, and conversely "aischros" and "turpe" in Greek and Latin, like the English "disgraceful" or "shameful," were what the group condemned. "Virtue" was the manly excellence which called out the praise of a warlike time, while one of the Greek terms for morally bad originally meant cowardly, and our "scoundrel" has possibly the same origin. The "bad" was probably the weak or the womanish. The economic appears in "merit," what I have earned, and likewise in "duty" and "ought," what is due or owed—though duty seems to have made itself felt especially, as noted above, toward a superior. Forethought and skill in practical affairs provided the conception of "wisdom," which was highest of the virtues for the Greeks, and as "prudence" stood high in mediæval systems. The conception of valuing and thus of forming some permanent standard of a better and a worse, is also aided, if not created, by economic exchange. It appears in almost identical terms in Plato and the New Testament in the challenge, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?"[99] From the processes of fine or useful arts came probably the conceptions of measure, order, and harmony. A whole mode of considering the moral life is jural. "Moral law," "authority," "obligation," "responsibility," "justice," "righteousness," bring with them the associations of group control and of the more definitely organized government and law. Finally the last named terms bear also a religious imprint, and numerous conceptions of the moral come from that sphere or get their specific flavor from religious usage. The conceptions of the "soul" have contributed to the ideal of a good which is permanent, and which is made rather by personal companionship, than by sensuous gratification. "Purity" began as a magical and religious idea; it came to symbolize not only freedom from contamination but singleness of purpose. "Chastity" lends a religious sacredness to a virtue which had its roots largely in the conception of property. "Wicked" is from witch.
We have indeed certain conceptions drawn from individual experiences of instinct, or reflection. From the sense recoil from what was disgusting such conceptions as "foul," and from kindred imagery of what suits eye or muscular sense come "straightforward," "upright," "steady." From the thinking process itself we have "conscience." This word in Greek and Latin was a general term for consciousness and suggests one of the distinctive, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the moral. For it implies a "conscious" thoughtful attitude, which operates not only in forming purposes, but in measuring and valuing action by the standards it approves. But it is evident that by far the larger part of our ethical terms are derived from social relations in the broad sense.