[731] Dewey and Tufts, Ethics (1908), p. 162.
[732] See Ira Woods Howerth, “Competition, Natural and Industrial,” The International Journal of Ethics for July, 1912.
[733] “We may fairly ask whether there is a single moral question of any magnitude which intelligent and educated men would answer to-day in precisely the same fashion as they would have done before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct (1901), pp. 57 f.). See also Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1899). Huxley maintains that the “cosmic process” is nonethical and in direct opposition to the ethical evolution going on in human society.
[734] “The best is wanting when selfishness begins to be deficient” (“The Twilight of the Gods,” The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Alexander Tille, vol. xi, p. 191). “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish.... What is more injurious than any crime? Practical sympathy for all the ill-constituted and weak—Christianity” (“The Antichrist,” ibid. vol. xi, p. 238). This way of thinking and talking is by no means exclusively modern. Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias, says to Socrates: “And therefore this seeking to have more than the many is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior” (Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, vol. iii, p. 72).
[735] See Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
[736] “The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress” (Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1909), p. 293). See also Bixby, The Crisis in Morals (1891), p. 235.
[737] See Dewey, “Is Nature Good,” Hibbert Journal for July, 1909.
[738] “‘Ye have compassion on one another’: this struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,—how had it been then? This is a great direct thought, a glance at first hand into the very fact of things” (Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, “The Hero as Prophet”). The Gâthas have the same thought: “Who, O Great Creator! is the inspirer of the good thoughts (within our souls)? Who ... hath made the son revering the father?” (Yasna xliv. 4, 7, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi).
[739] “In the new way of looking at things, which came to the world from Darwin, there is hope and cheer, if we but take the matter aright. Only consider what his doctrine of the shaping power of environment is leading us to do in bettering the conditions of the poor, the defective, the prone to crime. His demonstration that circumstances may make or break a man, is a clarion call to humanitarian zeal. And his teaching of the infinite variability of species, and of the indefinite progress which man may make in the cultivation of humane and moral qualities, is one that looks distinctly to the perfectibility of the race.”—The New York Nation for January 7, 1909, p. 7.
[740] On this subject see Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898).