Driesch (Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. ii., p. 358) has pointed out very clearly that "the mechanical theory of life is incompatible with morality," and that it is impossible to feel "morally" towards other individuals if one knows that they are machines and nothing more. Again, Professor Henslow (in Present Day Rationalism Critically Examined, p. 253) very pertinently asks those who discard all religious considerations and claim to rely for guidance on the lessons of Nature, "If you have no taste for virtue, why be virtuous at all, so long as you do not violate the laws of the land?"
Yet, in the face of these surely obvious facts, we find persons making such absurd claims as that made in a recent book by Rignano, an Italian writer (Essays in Scientific Synthesis, 1917). It is not often that one meets a book so full of philosophical fallacies as this. "We are certain of one fact," he says, "that the only organ actually brought into play to fight immorality is the organ of the collective conscience and not the religious organ." I suppose no more ludicrously inaccurate remark ever was set down in print; for, to begin with, the "collective conscience," whatever that may be, does not exist in Nature, teste the farmyard and the fowl-run; and again, whatever force is connoted by those words must have been set agoing—by what? By Nature? Oh, most emphatically No! Nature has no law against immorality; there is no Categorical Imperative in Nature commanding us to be chaste or kindly or considerate or even just. We must go elsewhere if we are to look for teaching in the virtues. That is the fact that we must keep clearly before our minds when endeavouring to estimate at their proper value the nostrums of writers such as those with whose works we have been dealing.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Two addresses were delivered in 1914—one in Melbourne, the other in Sydney. These will be referred to in this article as M. & S.
[2] Sir Oliver Lodge: Continuity, p. 90.
[3] Materials for the Study of Variation, London, 1894.
[4] The History and Theory of Vitalism, p. 140.