History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

Impending changes in the moral ideal

We have seen how the moral ideal of a people is modified by all the changing circumstances of their life and history. The moral ideal of the Chinese has undergone little modification for upward of two millenniums, such, for instance, as the ideal of the European peoples has undergone in a like period, because throughout this long term the influences acting upon the national life have been practically unchanged. There have been in Chinese history no such interminglings of races, revivals in learning, religious reformations, and political and industrial revolutions as mark the history of the Western nations, and responding to which the moral evolution of these peoples has gone on apace.

But now that the long-continued isolation of China has been broken, and she is being subjected to all the potent influences of the civilization of the West, it is certain that her social and mental life will be remolded and cast in new forms. Sooner or later constitutional government must supersede, has already superseded, the patriarchal government of the past; the whole social fabric must necessarily be reconstructed and the individual instead of the family or clan be made the social and ethical unit;[189] the science of the Western nations will displace, is already displacing, the obsolete learning of the Four Classics; Christianity will quicken the atrophied religious consciousness of the race; and in place of the isolation of the past there will be established those international relations and intellectual exchanges which perhaps more than all other agencies combined have been the motive force of European civilization and progress.

This new environment, these new influences molding afresh Chinese social, intellectual, and religious life and institutions, cannot fail to react powerfully upon the moral ideal of the nation. It too must inevitably undergo a great change. There will be a shifting in the standard of character of the different virtues, for the moral ideal of a simple patriarchal community cannot serve as the model for a complex modern society, and doubtless some of those virtues—as, for instance, reverence for the past—which now hold the highest rank in the code will exchange places with others at present held in little esteem. Changes in the feelings and beliefs of the people in regard to ancestor worship, which changes are inevitable, will effect important modifications in family ethics. The substitution of Western science for the lore of the classics will introduce evolutionary ethics and the philosophical virtues of the Western world; while the substitution of popular government for the patriarchal autocracy will necessarily bring in the ethics of democracy.

These certain changes in the form and content of the ancestral ideal of goodness will not only assimilate it to the ethical standard of the Western world, but, correcting some of its obvious shortcomings, will render it a still more effective force in the guidance and control of the moral life of a great and ancient people, whose day apparently is still in the future.[190]

CHAPTER VI
JAPANESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF LOYALTY

I. Formative and Modifying Influences

Introductory: a practically independent evolution in morals

In their moral evolution the Japanese people have developed a system of morals which, notwithstanding certain defects and limitations, is one of the noblest created by any of the great races. A study of this system is especially interesting and instructive for the reason that it shows how a very admirable moral ideal may be created by a people in comparative isolation and under influences wholly different from those which have shaped and molded our own ideal of moral goodness. This compels a recognition of the fact that the historian of morals can no longer overlook or ignore the moral phenomena of the Far East.

A second reason that a study of the Japanese code of morals is important and interesting is because this ideal of worthiness and duty has been indubitably a main factor in lifting the Japanese nation to the high place it holds to-day among the great nations of the earth.