IX
Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments
Now, here at last, in encountering the ethical process at work, have we detected a breach of continuity? Has the moral sentiment been flung in from outside, or is it a natural result of the cosmic process we have been sketching? Clearly it is the latter. There has been no breach of continuity. When the prolongation of infancy produced the clan, there naturally arose reciprocal necessities of behaviour among the members of the clan, its mothers and children, its hunters and warriors. If such reciprocal necessities were to be disregarded the clan would dissolve, and dissolution would be general destruction. For, bear in mind, the clan, when once evolved, becomes the unit whose preservation is henceforth the permanent necessity. It is infancy that has made it so. A miscellaneous horde, with brief infancies for its younger members, may survive a very extensive slaughter; but in a clan, where the proportion of helpless children is much greater, and a considerable division of labour between nurses and warriors has become established, the case is different. An amount or degree of calamity sufficient to break up its organization will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when Nature's travail has at length brought forth the clan, its requirements forthwith become paramount, and each member's conduct from babyhood must conform to them. Natural selection henceforth invests her chief capital in the enterprise of preserving the clan. In that primitive social unit lie all the potentiality and promise of Human Society through untold future ages. So for age after age those clans in which the conduct of the individuals is best subordinated to the general welfare are sure to prevail over clans in which the subordination is less perfect. As the maternal instinct had been cultivated for thousands of generations before clanship came into existence, so for many succeeding ages of turbulence the patriotic instinct, which prompts to the defence of home, was cultivated under penalty of death. Clans defended by weakly loyal or cowardly warriors were sure to perish. Unflinching bravery and devoted patriotism were virtues necessary to the survival of the community, and were thus preserved until at the dawn of historic times, in the most grandly militant of clan societies, we find the word virtus connoting just these qualities, and no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open in the forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps into it, that the commonwealth may be preserved from harm.
Now the moment a man's voluntary actions are determined by conscious or unconscious reference to a standard outside of himself and his selfish motives, he has entered the world of ethics, he has begun to live in a moral atmosphere. Egoism has ceased to be all in all, and altruism—it is an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the only one available—altruism has begun to assert its claim to sovereignty. In the earlier and purely animal stages of existence it was right enough for each individual to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; it did not endanger the welfare of the species, but on the contrary it favoured that welfare; in its origin avoidance of pain was the surest safeguard for the perpetuation of life, and with due qualifications that is still the case. But as soon as sociality became established, and Nature's supreme end became the maintenance of the clan organization, the standard for the individual's conduct became shifted, permanently and forever shifted. Limits were interposed at which pleasure must be resigned and pain endured, even certain death encountered, for the sake of the clan; perhaps the individual did not always understand it in that way, but at all events it was for the sake of some rule recognized in the clan, some rule which, as his mother and all his kin had from his earliest childhood inculcated upon him, ought to be obeyed. This conception of ought, of obligation, of duty, of debt to something outside of self, resulted from the shifting of the standard of conduct outside of the individual's self. Once thus externalized, objectivized, the ethical standard demanded homage from the individual. It furnished the rule for a higher life than one dictated by mere selfishness. Speaking after the manner of naturalists, I here use the phrase "higher life" advisedly. It was the kind of life that was conducive to the preservation and further development of the highest form of animate existence that had been attained. It appears to me that we begin to find for ethics the most tremendous kind of sanction in the nature of the cosmic process.
A word of caution may be needed. It is not for a moment to be supposed that when primitive men began crudely shaping their conduct with reference to a standard outside of self, they did so as the result of meditation, or with any realizing sense of what they were doing. That has never been the method of evolution. Its results steal upon the world noiselessly and unobserved, and only after they have long been with us does reason employ itself upon them. The wolf does not eat the lamb because he regards a flesh diet as necessary to his health and activity, but because he is hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he likes lamb. It was no intellectual perception of needs and consequences that lengthened the maternal instinct with primeval mothers as the period of infancy lengthened. Nor was it any such intellectual perception that began to enthrone "I ought" in the place of "I wish." If in the world's recurrent crises Nature had waited to be served by the flickering lamp of reason, the story would not have been what it is. Her method has been, with the advent of a new situation, to modify the existing group of instincts; and this work she will not let be slighted; in her train follows the lictor with the symbols of death, and there is neither pity nor relenting. In the primeval warfare between clans, those in which the instincts were not so modified as to shift the standard of conduct outside of the individual's self must inevitably have succumbed and perished under the pressure of those in which the instincts had begun to experience such modification. The moral law grew up in the world not because anybody asked for it, but because it was needed for the world's work. If it is not a product of the cosmic process, it would be hard to find anything that could be so called.
X
The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake of Moral Ends
