Thus war, a heritage (as a phase of the “struggle for existence”) of the human from the lower animal world, becomes early in the human stage of the cosmic evolution a drag upon the moral progress of the race.[68]
CHAPTER III
THE MORAL LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT: AN IDEAL OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
I. Circumstances and Ideas which molded and motived Morality
A homogeneous population and a comparatively static civilization
Egypt was the China of the ancient Mediterranean world. Like the Chinese, the Egyptians were a comparatively unmixed people. During the historic period no new elements of importance were incorporated with the native population. Again, like the civilization of China, that of Egypt throughout a great part of the historic age was singularly static. After having made wonderful advance in early times the Egyptians ceased to make further noteworthy progress.
Both these fundamental facts of Egyptian history had great significance for Egyptian morals; for since when races mingle their blood they mingle also their moralities, it is a matter of supreme importance to the moral life of a people whether on the one hand it has, as the centuries have passed, undergone a change in physical type through the incorporation of new racial elements, or on the other hand has preserved unchanged its racial type and physical characteristics.
Equally important for the moral ideal is it whether the civilization of which it forms one element is progressive or unprogressive; for changes in the moral standard are largely dependent on changes in the other elements of civilization. Where the intellectual life and the religious ideas remain unmodified, and where all political, social, and industrial institutions remain essentially unchanged, we need not look for fundamental changes in ethical ideas and convictions. How the history of conscience in ancient Egypt illustrates these truths we shall see a little further on.
The teaching that immortality is conditioned on righteousness
We have seen how potent an influence the notion of a life beyond the tomb exercised upon the conduct of the members of the primitive kinship group, giving birth to some of the noblest virtues of their simple code of morals. Now this idea of continued existence after death dominated the life of no other civilized people of antiquity so completely as it dominated the life of the Egyptians; and probably in the case of no other people ancient or modern has the belief exerted so profound an influence upon conduct. This was so for the reason that the conception was here early moralized and represented the blessed life in the hereafter as dependent upon rightdoing in the present life. No soul that had done evil was admitted to the bark of the ferryman at the Egyptian Styx. In this discrimination we find “the earliest traces in the history of man of an ethical test at the close of life.”[69]
The ethical qualities of the sun-god Ra