Chapter XVIII (1)

THE MORAL EVOLUTION SINCE THE INCOMING OF DEMOCRACY: THE NEW SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENCE

I. FORCES DETERMINING THE TREND OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT

[Sidenote: The incoming of democracy]

Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion, none has exerted a greater influence than modern democracy. This is so because in its essential spirit democracy is at one with Christianity. It is merely “a principle which continues ... over a wider range of institutions the same principle as Christianity introduced.”[721] It extends the Christian principle of equality from the spiritual to the political, the social, and the economic domain. It makes all men equal before Cæsar as well as before God.

And like Christianity, democracy extends the range of persons who are brothers until not only all classes within the same state but all peoples and races are included. “In the democratic union of nations,” in the words of Lecky, “we find the last and highest expression of the Christian ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”[722]

It is this identity of the essential spirit of democracy with the essential spirit of Christianity which makes the incoming of democracy a revolution of such supreme importance in the moral history of the world. To truly democratize society, as to truly christianize it, is to moralize it.

[Sidenote: Modern inventions and the new industrialism]

“The causes,” observes Lecky, “which most disturbed or accelerated the moral progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great men; in modern times they have been the appearance of great inventions.”[723]

In no department of morals, save the international, have modern inventions exerted a greater influence than in the department of industrial ethics. In this sphere these inventions have reacted on morals in two ways: first, they have changed fundamentally for the masses in all civilized lands the economic conditions of life, which conditions, as we have seen, are the great molders of morals; and second, through the changes they have wrought in the processes of production, and through the immense development they have given to the whole industrial system, they have caused principles and institutions once just and beneficent in their outworkings to become instruments of inequity and oppression, and have thus awakened new moral judgments respecting these maxims and conventions. The growth of these new ethical feelings and convictions constitute an important part, perhaps _the_ most important part, of the moral history of recent times. They are the motive force in several of the most significant moral movements of to-day in the industrial world. Preëminently true is this of the present-day labor movement. “Its form,” as Professor Peabody says, “is economic, but its motives are moral. It is an effort--often blind and groping, sometimes pitifully misdirected, yet none the less proceeding from the conscience of the time--to shape economic life into an instrument of social justice and peace.”[724] Socialism, too, with all its ethical aspirations and enthusiasms, is in large part a product of the new industrialism.

[Sidenote: The doctrine of evolution]

Not less disturbing to morals than the political and industrial revolutions has been the revolution in scientific thought effected by the doctrine of evolution. This theory has been not only a powerful dissolvent of a large part of the body of medieval theology and hence of that part of morality dependent upon this system of thought, but, through the dominant place which this interpretation of the cosmic process assigns to the self-regarding motives, it has exercised in wide circles of society an unfavorable influence upon morals by seeming to give nature’s sanction to self-assertive, antisocial conduct. There are drifts in both the public and the private morality of the last half century which, as we shall see, find their explanation in the disturbance of ethical values created by the general acceptance of the Darwinian theory of progress through “the survival of the fittest.” But we shall also see this same theory, better interpreted in its profoundest intimations, giving strong support to the best ethical instincts of humanity and supplying new incentives and encouragement to humanitarian endeavor.

[Sidenote: General intellectual progress]

The moral history of the Western world since the Renaissance affords a striking illustration of the dependence of progress in morals upon progress in general intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that, fostered by a free press, by the public-school system, and by various other agencies, the average of intelligence in the modern democratic state is higher than it was in any of the states--save possibly in some of the small city states of Greece--of ancient or medieval times. This new intellectual life, speaking broadly, has reacted favorably upon the moral life. It has dispelled superstition, destroyed prejudices, widened the outlook of men, and broadened their moral sympathies. In a word, the seeing of life and things as they really are has tended to clarify the moral sense and to render clearer and truer the vision of the ethical ideal.

[Sidenote: The decline of dogmatic theology]

The body of hereditary ethical convictions and judgments upon which modern influences have been especially at work was, as has been seen, shaped and molded largely by theology. Hence nothing has influenced more positively the moral evolution in recent times than the profound modification which, during the period, has taken place in men’s religious beliefs. Under the influence of advancing intelligence, of evolutionary science, of ever closer relations between the different races and nations, and the resulting contact and comparison of different religions, there has gone on a rapid disintegration of old creeds. The effect of this upon many has been the elimination from their moral code of all purely theological elements, the erection of a new standard of moral values, and the adoption of an ideal of character which may best be described as being in the main a composite of Greek and gospel ethics.

[Sidenote: Growing intimacy of international relations]

The dependence of moral progress in modern times upon inventions, as Lecky observes, is shown perhaps even more strikingly in the domain of international than in that of industrial ethics. As in antiquity it was the world-wide extension of the Roman rule through conquest which broke the primal isolation of the Mediterranean peoples and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which arose the ethical universalism characterizing the cultured circles of Roman society in the later centuries of the Empire, so in this modern age it is the great inventions of the steamship, the steam railway, the electric telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and the rest, which have broken the isolation of the nations, bound them together by a thousand commercial, social, and intellectual ties, and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which have naturally sprung those ethical feelings and convictions which form the growing international conscience of to-day.

Thus it is that inventions, whose aims were primarily to promote civilization on its material side, have become the most efficient agencies in creating a sense of ethical oneness among the nations, and thus in opening a new epoch in the moral evolution of mankind.

II. EXPRESSIONS OF THE NEW MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS OF LIFE AND THOUGHT

_1. The Ethics of Democracy_

[Sidenote: The democratic revolution a moral movement]

The great history-making upheavals and readjustments in human society are moral in their causes as well as in their effects. They arise from a divergence between what _is_ and what _ought to be_. The democratic revolution which began in France in 1789 affirms with emphasis the correctness of this ethical interpretation of the great passages of human history. What superficially viewed appears to have been primarily a political or economic revolution was in truth, in its deepest motives and impulses, a moral revolution. “It was moral enthusiasm for the rights of man ... and not the breakdown of an economic system, which created modern democracy.”[725] The watchwords of the Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--are all words of moral import. They are tremulous with righteous wrath at age-long oppression, contempt, and abuse; and they are instinct with the living forces of a noble moral ideal. They express the essential spirit of the Revolution, which each day, where it has free course, finds fuller embodiment in political, social, and moral reforms, in humanitarian institutions and altruistic effort.

[Sidenote: The ethics of democracy rejects class morality]

Democracy tends in various ways to purify and ennoble morality, but especially by destroying all invidious class distinctions, and thereby destroying that class morality which through all periods of history has hampered the moral progress of the race. All the civilizations known to history before the incoming of modern democracy had their superior class, including only the few, who alone were regarded as possessing capacity for the highest virtues; and their inferior classes, embracing the many,--sudras, slaves, or serfs,--persons regarded as created for the use of others and capable of nothing more than a qualified or servile morality.

Now democracy, recognizing “human capacities in all and not merely in a few,” throws down the partition walls between classes and puts all on the same level of opportunity and privilege. It thus establishes the conditions of a common moral life and of a progressive moral evolution; for if history teaches any truth, it teaches that a civilization dominated by a privileged class that uses the masses selfishly or thoughtlessly for the enhancement of its own interests and pleasures is foredoomed to moral stagnation and decadence--so true is it that society is an organic body and that if one member suffers the whole body suffers with it.

[Sidenote: The ethical import of education by the state]

Again, democracy has deep significance for morality on account of its relation to education. Despotic bureaucratic monarchy is indifferent or positively opposed to the education of the masses because the safest basis of such a government is sodden ignorance. On the other hand, general intelligence is the very breath of life of a democracy. Hence the education of the masses is the foremost task of the modern free state. The public-school system of the modern world is the outcome of this imperious demand of democracy.

Now this relation of the democratic state to popular education has immense importance for the moral life, first, for the reason that advance in general intelligence means a better maintenance of the moral standard. To increase the number of schools in a community is to lessen the need of prisons and reformatories. More than a century ago Beccaria previsioned this relation of popular education to crime. “The most certain method of preventing crime,” he maintained, “is to perfect the system of education.”[726]

And second, education in the modern democratic state has special significance for the moral development going on in Western civilization, for the reason that it means not merely a better maintenance of the moral standard, but also an essential modification of the moral type itself. For in the establishment of its system of education the state has assumed what formerly was one of the chief functions of the Church. This transference of the business of education from the Church to the state has rightly been pronounced “one of the most important movements in the history of education since the Dark Ages.” What renders it of such importance in the view of the historian of morals is that, in the hands of the state, education has become or is becoming wholly secularized. In some countries even the reading of the Bible in the schools or the giving of any religious instruction whatsoever is prohibited.

Now this secularization of education results inevitably in the secularization of morality. That portion of the moral code which derives its sanction from theological or special religious doctrines is neglected. Thus one outcome of the transfer of the function of education from the Church to the state has been the imparting of a fresh impulse to that naturalistic movement in morals whose point of departure was the classical revival of the fifteenth century. And thus the three dominant movements in modern European civilization--the Renaissance, the Reformation (in its ultimate effects), and the democratic revolution--have all worked together in determining the general trend of the moral evolution in the Western world.

[Sidenote: The democratic state assumes the social-ethical functions of the Church]

The ethical import of the incoming of democracy is shown again in the assumption by the democratic state of the philanthropic work of society. Throughout the Middle Ages the Church was the almoner of society, the builder of hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses. Since the advent of democracy much of this humanitarian work has, like education, been taken over by the state. This assumption by the state of these former functions of the Church is one of the most noteworthy ethical movements in modern history.[727] What makes it significant is, first, the fact that the work is undertaken by modern governments largely from purely philanthropic motives. This means that with the coming to political power of the people a new spirit has entered into government, which means, further, that those altruistic sentiments which it has been a chief function of religion to foster have come to inspire society at large.

And second, this assumption by the state of the philanthropic functions of the Church is significant because of what has made its undertaking of these tasks necessary. This necessity has arisen not merely by reason of the possession by the state of the taxing power and hence of the means needed for carrying on this humanitarian work, but also because of its relation to modern science. Much of this work of rescue and cure is dependent for its successful administration upon scientific knowledge and skill. It is largely because the state is in closer alliance than the Church with modern science, and therefore is the more efficient agent for carrying on this humanitarian work, that society makes it, instead of the Church, its chief almoner and trustee.

_2. The Ethics of Industrialism_

[Sidenote: The alliance of modern industry and science]

A distinctive characteristic of modern industry is its alliance with science. This union dates from the French Revolution. One aim of the revolutionists was to put exact knowledge at the service of the industrial arts, and, by thus increasing the productive forces of society, to create an abundance for all, banish poverty from the earth, and advance civilization to a higher point than ever before reached.

And this alliance of industry and science has, in so far as mere production is concerned, more than met every expectation. Through the application of inventions and scientific knowledge to the various industrial processes, society’s powers of production have been increased threefold, tenfold, fifty-fold, in some arts even a thousandfold. Surely now all will be fed and clothed and sheltered.

But this vision of a millennium of well-being for all as the result of the union of science and industry has not come true. The great mass of the world’s toilers are underfed, ill-clad, and improperly housed. From the slums, from the dark and noisome tenements of our great cities, arises the bitter cry of children, ragged, wan, and hungry, robbed through the parents’ poverty of every delight and right of childhood. “The poverty of the workers,” cries Henry Demarest Lloyd in passionate protest, “is the sin of our age.”[728]

[Sidenote: The divorce of modern industry and ethics: economic Machiavellism]

The causes of this pitiful failure of the new industrialism, notwithstanding its capacity for enormous production, to provide for the wants of all is not far to seek. Our age, while uniting science and business, has divorced ethics and business, just as in the time of the Renaissance in Italy there was effected a divorce of ethics and politics. Political economists have taught that ethics has nothing to do with economics. And this economic Machiavellism of the schools has not been merely an academic thing; it has probably exerted as sinister an influence upon the modern industrial order as the political doctrines of Machiavelli exerted upon the diplomacy and governmental policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dominated by this philosophy our business life has become frankly unmoral--large sections of it grossly immoral.

[Sidenote: The breakdown of the system]

But economics and ethics can no more be divorced than politics and ethics. Machiavellism has succeeded no better in economics than in politics. “The system based on [this philosophy] is breaking down all over, in strikes, riots, panics, gluts, unemployed idleness, and class murder. It is breaking down not because the task of getting plenty for the body--and the soul--for every one out of the fruitful earth and the fellowship of man is an impossible task, but because the task is an impossible one of accomplishment--that or anything else in human affairs--by the devil’s code of selfishness instead of love, of solitary advantage instead of the good of all. By such a philosophy there could be no government, no family; and if it continues, there will ere long be no business. But it cannot continue.”[729]

[Sidenote: Reforms whose aims are the moralization of the industrial order: (_a_) socialization of the unearned increment in land values]

It cannot continue because there is a fast-growing conviction of the falsity of the philosophy of economic Machiavellism--an ever-growing recognition of the truth that the relationships of men in business, like all other human relationships, are conditioned by the moral law of human brotherhood. There are profound changes taking place in the moral feelings and judgments of men respecting many of the customs, principles, and institutions of the modern industrial order. There is a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very embodiment of unreason and injustice.

Among the economic institutions respecting which there is taking place such a change in moral judgment is that of absolute private property in land. Although this is an institution unknown to primitive peoples, in all the great civilizations of the past we find society based upon it. That the system, since it inevitably results in private monopoly, has contributed largely to the creation of that gross inequality in wealth which has characterized every advanced civilization known to history, and which has helped to prepare its downfall, does not admit of reasonable doubt. The monopolization of land by a class has been one source, and probably a main source, of the phenomenon in modern society of deepening poverty in the midst of growing wealth, of dehumanizing want for the many along with demoralizing luxury for the few. That in countries of large and thickening population a private monopoly in the arable land is the embodiment of a colossal and cruel wrong is incontrovertible. That a single class should be allowed to become the absolute owners of the soil and thereby acquire the legal right to exclude all others from it save on the condition that practically all that can be got from it by the hardest toil, save just enough for the bare subsistence of the laborer, shall be given over as rent to the holder of the land, is as great a moral wrong as to take directly from the worker the product of his toil by reducing him to bodily slavery. It is this gross inequity which has made the history of many countries, like much of the history of Ireland, a harrowing tragedy. The wrong, if not greater, is at least more obvious when the land thus monopolized is the site of a great city where the enormous ground values have been created not by any labor or expenditure on the part of the owners, but by the growth and enterprise of the community as a whole.

Just as the world has got a new conscience in regard to the wrong of slavery, so is it getting a new conscience in regard to this “great iniquity,” as Tolstoy calls it, of private monopoly in land. This growing ethical conviction will ultimately destroy the illusion that the earth and its resources may, without moral wrong, be monopolized by a fortunate or favored few and the great masses be dispossessed.[730] The new conscience will decree that all of nature’s gifts in land and all increments in its value created by society shall belong to society and shall be the common heritage of the successive generations of men.

[Sidenote: (_b_) Limitation of inheritance]

Another of the conventions of our industrial system in which the moral sense of mankind is beginning to recognize an element of inequity is the right of unlimited inheritance. So long as land remains the common property of the community, or so long as there exists substantial equality in wealth among the members or families of a social group, the injustice of this is not apparent. But after great extremes of poverty and wealth have appeared, as in present-day civilization, then the essential injustice of the institution is disclosed; for there is thus created an idle class living on the labor of others. When a single child through the accident of birth becomes the heir of millions, while hundreds of other children come into the world absolutely portionless and at the same time shut out from the use of any bit of the earth even as standing room, then the system becomes a crass denial of human solidarity and brotherhood. And there is in this law of unlimited bequest a double wrong. The child of over-great wealth is wronged as well as the child of poverty. One is born to a life of luxurious leisure, and the other to a life of unremitting toil. Now, as Professor Dewey observes, there is moral value in work and there is moral value in leisure, but “it is beginning to be seen that their values cannot be divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other enjoy the freedom.”[731]

Therefore the ethical demand for the modification of our laws of inheritance in such a way that they shall recognize the social as well as the individual element in wealth must be heeded as much out of regard for the children of the overrich as out of regard for the children of the very poor.

[Sidenote: (_c_) Socialism: the democratization of industry]

Still another institution of modern industrialism which has come or is coming under the reprobation of the present-day conscience of a rapidly growing number is private capitalism, that is, private ownership of the instruments of production, together with competition and the wage system, the necessary concomitants of this capitalistic régime. These new ethical feelings and convictions form the real motive force in the propaganda of modern socialism. The presupposition of socialism is that not merely ground rents but all returns (interest, dividends, profits) on every form of private capital embody an unearned increment, and that this element should determine the ownership and control of capital. Hence socialists demand that all the material instruments of production now owned by individuals or by a class shall be held in common; that there shall be common, democratic management of production; that competition, as inherently unethical,[732] shall be replaced by coöperation; and that the wage system shall be replaced by a system of distribution by public authority which shall give the manual workers of the world a more equitable share of the products of industry.

Socialism embodies one of the largest funds of ethical feeling that have become active in Western civilization since the incoming of Christianity. In truth, in its real essence and purified form it is the spirit of primitive Christianity at work in the industrial domain. It is a recognition of human fraternity. It is an effort to unite economics and ethics, to make business life a realization of the moral ideal. The aim of true socialists is to make the benefits of science, invention, and civilization a common heritage. They recognize that society can continuously progress only as these benefits become the possession not merely of a few but of all. In the disregard of this immutable law of human progress they discern the main cause of the retrogression, decay, and failure of every great civilization of the past; in its solicitous fulfillment they find the only ground of hope for the constant improvement of human society as a whole and the uninterrupted moral progress of the world.

_3. The Ethics of Modern Science_

[Sidenote: Science and the virtue of intellectual sincerity]

We have already referred to the influence of modern science upon morals. This influence has been felt in the fostering of specific virtues and in the creation of a certain attitude of mind toward life and its ethical problems.

Among the particular virtues which science has fostered is philosophical veracity or love of truth. This virtue of intellectual sincerity is to the scientist what the virtue of faith or belief is to the churchman. Without it there is no salvation in the world of science. The man of science must be a truth-lover, a truth-seeker, and a truth-teller. He must take every pains to find out what is the exact fact, and then make a scrupulously veracious report of what he has found. He must be loyal to the truth at all hazards.

This reverent regard for the truth, this intellectual sincerity, which is the cardinal virtue of the man of science, is fostered in him partly by the recognition of the supreme importance of exactness when it comes to the application of scientific knowledge to the arts of life. The least departure here from the truth of the matter means dire disaster and loss. Then also the veraciousness of nature reacts upon the student of her laws. Nature is not only infinitely exact in all her movements, but punctual in the fulfillment of all her engagements. She keeps her word with us, as Emerson says. She is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The careless, unveracious man can enter into no partnership with her.

Open-mindedness and impartiality are elements of this virtue of intellectual veracity. The wide divergence between philosophical and theological morality is here impressed upon the student of moral ideals and standards. In the ethics of theology doubt, even sincere doubt, is reckoned as an unfortunate infirmity, or often as positive and fatal sin. Science, on the other hand, reckons it a cardinal duty. Hardening oneself in belief when there are circumstances calculated to awaken doubt, even the slightest conceivable doubt, is justly regarded by the man of science as treachery to truth and an unpardonable sin.

It is in the creation of this scientific conscience, which pronounces the habit of accuracy, open-mindedness, impartiality of judgment, love of truth for truth’s sake a supreme virtue, that science has rendered one of its greatest services to morality.

[Sidenote: Egotistic tendencies of the doctrine of evolution: the philosophy of Nietzsche]

The scientific doctrine of evolution, which teaches that life has advanced from lower to higher forms through struggle and competition, resulting in the survival of the fittest, has exercised a profound influence upon all the sciences relating to man, but upon none has it left a deeper impress than upon the science of ethics.[733] Nor have its effects here been confined to ethical speculation; it has largely shaped and molded actual conduct.

In some respects this influence has been harmful to both ethical theory and practice. In the domain of philosophy it may best be traced in the teachings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche insists that man must follow the lead of nature; that the struggle for existence must be kept up on the human plane just as it goes on in the lower realms of life; that the strong should use for their own advancement the weak; that the nurture and care of the defective and weak is a crime against humanity[734]--for “the hope of the future lies in perfecting the strong, not in strengthening the weak”; that only through the struggle for existence has nature produced her highest type, man, and that it is only through obedience to this great cosmic law, in accordance with which the higher prey upon the lower, that “the superman,” the highest possible type of mankind, can be brought into existence.

This teaching tends to steel the heart against human sympathy and to blunt all the finer sensibilities. It seems to justify and excuse all kinds of antisocial action. And, indeed, the doctrine has been used as a justification and excuse not only of individual self-assertion and egotism but of national and race self-assertion and egotism as well. Modern imperialism has sought to justify aggression upon weaker and so-called “inferior races” by an appeal to this law of evolution as it works on the lower levels of life. Thus the doctrine has in a certain measure fostered national egotism, and has stood right in the way of the development of a true international morality.

[Sidenote: Altruism _versus_ egotism in the cosmic process]

But these drifts toward egotism in modern philosophy and life induced by evolutionary science are more than compensated by opposing movements of ethical thought created by a truer interpretation of the facts of evolution and a deeper insight into the cosmic process.[735]

The philosophy of Nietzsche is a strange misreading of nature. To say that self-sacrifice is “in open defiance of nature,” is to overlook the dominant fact in evolution, namely, maternity; for maternity, motherhood, is only another name for self-sacrifice. And it is further to overlook the fact that the principle of coöperation is even more dominant and controlling in the cosmic process than the principle of competition. Social animals, those in which the altruistic instincts are most strongly developed, greatly outnumber the unsocial, solitary animals.[736] The Carnivora, those animals that live by preying upon others, are becoming extinct. On the plane of human life this principle of coöperation, of mutual helpfulness, has supplanted, or is gradually supplanting, the lower principle of competition. In the struggle for existence between tribes and peoples those groups have gained supremacy that have developed the strongest social instincts; that is, those within which the principle of coöperation and the virtue of the self-devotion of the individual to the welfare of the whole have been dominant forces in the life of the community. From these facts we are justified in assuming that it is the altruistic and not the egoistic instincts and motives that nature aims to make the permanent and controlling factors in the cosmic evolution.

Again, that nature is ethical in her aim is disclosed by the fact that she has brought forth such a being as man. Her preferences are shown in the preferences of the being she has produced.[737] Man prefers good to evil; he loves justice and hates injustice; he reveres the truth and detests falsehood; he recognizes that self-sacrifice is nobler than selfishness; he divines the final triumph of his ethical ideals. In man--at his best--nature reveals her preferences. Man is the answer to the question, “Is Nature good?”[738]

Viewed thus from a higher standpoint the cosmic process of evolution has reënforced faith in a moral order of the universe and has been an inspiration and an incentive to humanitarian effort.[739]

[Sidenote: Evolution and animal ethics[740]]

In Brahmanic India and in all Buddhist lands religious beliefs have, as we have seen, placed the whole animal creation under the protection of the moral feelings. In ancient Persia it was religious ideas which caused one half of the lower animal world to be regarded as sacred and thus to be brought within the protective pale of morals.

Dogmatic Christianity, falling far short of the ethics of Judaism in this domain, created a vast rift in the organic world between man and the lower animals. The dumb creatures were declared to be made solely for man’s use and enjoyment. Psychical relationship between them and man was denied, though the ancient world had very generally assumed this. Indeed, this attitude of the Christian dogmatists toward the animal creation was made a matter of reproach by their pagan critics.

These teachings were not without their influence on practice. Humanity to animals became a less prominent virtue than it had been in pre-Christian times. The closeness to nature of the lives of the medieval hermits and monks often caused, it is true, a feeling of tenderness to be awakened in them for their “brothers,” the birds and animals, which found expression in many beautiful legends. But in general the attitude of the Christian world toward the lower animals has been unsympathetic.

The doctrine of evolution, however, teaching the kinship of all life, has bridged the gulf between man and the lower animal world, and has brought all dumb creatures more positively than ever before in the Western world under the protection of the moral sentiment. Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals have sprung up and increased in number as in no other epoch of the Christian era. The new moral feeling condemns all inhumanity to dumb creatures, and looks with disapproval upon such sports as cockfighting, bear baiting, and bullfights, which were favorite amusements only a few generations ago.[741] Hunting for pastime is also coming under the condemnation of this growing moral sentiment. Thus “through the portals of spiritual kinship,” in the words of Professor Evans, ... “our elder brothers enter into the temple of justice, and enjoy the privilege of sanctuary against the wanton or unwitting cruelty hitherto authorized by the assumptions and usurpations of man.”[742]

[Sidenote: Import for morals of psychical research]

It is undeniable that the earlier tendency of modern science was agnostic and materialistic. It caused in many minds an attenuation or an absolute destruction of the belief in a supersensuous world and a life after death. The practical effect of this fading from the eyes of men of the vision of another world was, upon certain temperaments, a loss of faith in the ethical character of the cosmic process and a consequent lessening of moral enthusiasm.

This attitude of mind, which is still that of a large class, can be changed only by the reaffirmation by science of the assumptions and teachings of all the great world religions respecting the existence of a supersensuous world and a future life. It is therefore a matter of immeasurable import to morality that these assumptions of religion are coming to be regarded by an ever-growing number of scientists as well founded in reality. Psychical research has given a new trend to large sections of scientific speculation.[743] It is no longer crassly materialistic. It even assumes the existence of a supersensuous world. Thus at the conclusion of a careful survey of the evidence of man’s survival gathered by the English Society for Psychical Research, the distinguished physicist Sir Oliver Lodge writes: “The boundary between the two states--the known and the unknown--is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.”[744]

Incontrovertible proof of man’s survival after bodily death would mark the opening of a new era in the moral life of humanity; for, in the minds of many, “ethics can be rendered ethical only on the assumption that there is a reality deeper than the phenomenal world of sense, truer than the world we know and better.”[745] It was doubtless a conviction that the future of both religion and morality is in large measure dependent upon a firm belief in a future life which led William Ewart Gladstone to say of psychical research that it is “the most important work which is being done in the world--by far the most important.” Indisputably, the reaction of another world lying clear and distinct in the light of science beyond the frontiers of earth would give new meaning to life and a fresh impulse to the moral progress of the race. The effect upon the moral life of the modern world would be not less profound than that produced upon the moral life of the ancient world by the incoming of Christianity with its glad affirmation of a life beyond the tomb.

_4. The Ethics of Theology_

[Sidenote: The progressive moralization of the idea of God]

In an admirable chapter entitled “Ethics and Theology” the author of _Moral Evolution_, after noting how religious ideas and beliefs exert an influence on moral ideas and conduct, remarks: “Now we are to observe that moral ideals have, in their turn, modified and clarified doctrine, or, in other words, that there has been an ethical development of theology, and that contempt of creed is really the substitution of a moral for an immoral or a nonmoral theology.”[746] The same truth is expressed by Newman Smyth in these words: “Reformations have grown out of the ethical protest of the Christian mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in the vitalizing influence of ethics.”[747]

As a result of the growth and refinement of the moral feelings, there has been going on in wide circles in Western Christendom just such a change in men’s conception of the character of God as marked the best Hebrew thought during the later centuries of the history of the people of Israel. The idea of God inherited by the modern from the medieval age was an incongruous blending of ideas derived from three different sources. There was, first, the crude archaic notion of deity derived from the Old Testament records of what conduct in his chosen people Yahweh approved; second, the dogmas of Augustinian theology respecting imputed sin, election, everlasting punishment, and other supposed principles of the divine government; and third, conceptions wholly inconsistent with these drawn from the New Testament narratives of the life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.

Gradually, through the growth of the moral feelings, this conception of the divine character has been purged of its grosser, archaic, and immoral elements. The early Hebrew ideas have been rejected as the immature and unworthy notions of deity of a race still on a low plane of religious development; the Calvinistic idea of God has become “the supreme incredibility”; while the Gospel teaching of deity has been received by the instructed reason and conscience as the only credible ideal of the divine.[748]

Since, as we have repeatedly had brought to our attention, religious ideas exert a profound influence on moral ideas and on conduct, this moralization of the conception of the divine character has deep significance for the progressive purification and refinement of the moral life of man.

[Sidenote: The moralization of the conception of future punishment]

Closely connected with these changes in men’s idea of God, indeed forming a part of that conception, are the changes which have taken place in their ideas of the divine government in the hereafter.

At different stages of our study we have noted how the classifications and arrangements of the invisible world are the work of the moral faculty, and how the developing moral feelings of the historic peoples have, with the lapse of time, ever modified anew the topography and moralized afresh the government of the world of spirits.[749]

Now one of the most important modifications ever effected in man’s conceptions of the other world was brought about by the Protestant Reformation. The reformers abolished purgatory, and thus left only two separate realms, heaven and hell, in the world of souls. But in abolishing purgatory and thereby making all suffering in the hereafter punitive and eternal, and in failing to recognize gradations of guilt in human sin by consigning all evildoers, unbelievers, and misbelievers to the same awful and everlasting torments, the reformers made still more unethical the government which the popular medieval imagination had created for the unseen world.

The gradual clarification and growing sensitiveness of the moral feelings could not long leave unchallenged such a grossly immoral notion of the divine government. During the last two generations a notable change has passed over men’s conceptions of the netherworld of spirits. The hell of the reformers’ imagination has become, like much else in the Augustinian theology, “the supreme incredibility.” The blurring of that awful vision is one of the most significant changes which, during the Christian era, have passed over that world which is at once the creation and the creator of human morality.

[Sidenote: Exchange in rank of the theological and the natural Gospel virtues]

The advance in religious ethics during the last few decades is registered again in the exchange in rank of the theological and the natural gospel virtues in the moral ideal of Protestant Christendom. During this period there has taken place here a genuine “transvaluation of moral values.” Many representative religious teachers have come to assign a dominant place in the ethical standard to the natural social virtues, and have relegated to a lower place the purely theological virtues, such as right religious belief and ritual observances. In the case of many the rejection of that part of the moral code resting upon theological dogmas is as complete as was the rejection by Christianity of the morality based on the ceremonial laws of the Jews. With these the saving virtue is no longer acceptance of a prescribed creed, but loving, self-denying service of humanity.[750]

This transvaluation of moral values within the Church itself is one of the most important movements going on in the moral life of the modern world.

[Sidenote: Extension to theological ethics of the principle of individual responsibility]

Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility to the domain of religion.[751] It will be recalled how completely the law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive peoples.[752] With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual responsibility comes to be established.

This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle as the embodiment of a gross inequity. The doctrine that all the generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience as incredible, untrue, and immoral.

This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history.

_5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience_

[Sidenote: (_a_) As manifested in the history of the African slave trade]

By the phrase “social conscience,” as we shall use it here, we mean those ethical feelings and judgments which cover the relations of master and slave and the relations of society to its unfortunate and erring members.

In the entire history of the moral evolution of humanity there is no chapter which reveals so plainly the upward trend of the ethical movement in civilization as that which tells the story of the beginnings and the final suppression of the African slave trade, and of the rise and fall of the institution of negro slavery among Christian peoples.[753] Restricting our survey for the moment to the slave trade as distinct from slavery, the amazing fact which meets us here at the outset is that until late in the modern period the peoples of Western Christendom had practically no conscience whatsoever in regard to the African slave trade, and this notwithstanding that the conscience of the age was in many other matters true and sensitive. The whole subject lay practically outside the realm of morals. The slave trade was looked upon as a perfectly legitimate business.[754] Practically no one thought it wrong to go to Africa, kidnap or purchase a shipload of the natives, bring them in stifling holds--where sometimes half the unhappy victims died on the passage--to the West Indies or to the Spanish and English mainland of the Americas and sell them as slaves.[755] What little opposition to the traffic existed, arose in general from other than feelings of moral disapproval.[756]

The movement for the abolition of the trade constitutes an important phase of the social and moral life, particularly of England and of the English colonies in America, during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth. In England the wave of humanitarian feeling which swept away the obstacles set in the way of the abolition of the traffic by selfish interests was raised by the great religious revival led by Whitefield and the Wesleys. The leaders of the reform were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. After twenty years of agitation a bill was passed abolishing the trade (1807). This marked as great a moral victory as ever was won in the English Parliament, for it was the aroused moral sentiment of the nation which was the main force that carried the reform measure through the Houses.

In America there had arisen among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, even before the Revolution, a protest against the trade on purely moral grounds. By the time the Federal Convention met in 1787 sufficient sentiment had been developed in the matter to secure the adoption of a provision in the Constitution to the effect that the importation of slaves should cease in 1808. From that year on, the slave trade, as distinct from slavery, was under the ban both of the law and of the public conscience; but it continued to be carried on clandestinely until the Civil War.

[Sidenote: (_b_) As manifested in the antislavery movement]

Even before the consummation of the movement for the suppression of the negro slave trade there had sprung up an agitation for the suppression of the negro-slave system itself. England abolished slavery in her colonies in 1833, paying £20,000,000 for the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in her West India possessions. In the United States there was very little antislavery feeling prior to 1830.[757] At that time the great majority of the peoples of the Northern as well as of the Southern states, if they did not look upon negro slavery as wholly proper and right, at least regarded as reprehensible any interference with the institution where established. Even the Church in general denounced the abolitionists as infidels and pronounced their conduct fanatical and wicked.[758] But notwithstanding this opposition the abolition movement and the movement for the restriction of slavery to the states where already established gained impetus steadily, and the heated debate led up quickly to the Civil War.

The most significant thing in that passage of our history is not the revolt of the South, but the revolt of the conscience of the North. Had there been no moral revolt in the North, there would have been no slaveholders’ revolt in the South.

The development of moral feeling respecting the wrongfulness of slavery did not cease with the emancipation of the slaves as a result of the Civil War. Indeed, with the reform an accomplished fact, the clarification of the moral sense of the people has gone on uninterruptedly until a gulf has come to separate the present-day conscience of the great majority of the instructed and thinking classes in both sections of the Union from the conscience of the same classes one or two generations ago.

[Sidenote: (_c_) As manifested in society’s treatment of its unfortunate and delinquent members]

The record of society’s treatment of its dependent and erring members forms another inspiring chapter in the history of the growth of the new social conscience. In a little over one hundred years the Christian world has advanced from harsh vagrant laws to associated charities; from the burning of witches to asylums for the insane; from noisome dungeons to penitentiaries and institutions of rescue and correction.[759] The numerous and costly private and public institutions established and maintained by the new humanitarian sentiment is one of the most distinctive characteristics, ethically viewed, of modern civilization. So multiform are the expressions of this new spirit that it is impossible in so brief a survey as the present to exhibit in more than barest outline this phase of the ethical evolution.

The recent history of charity, taken in the sense of relief given to the poor, is a record of change both in motive and method. There has always been a great deal of almsgiving in the world, since this has been a duty especially enjoined by religion. But because charity has had this religious motive, it has often been sullied by self-love, alms being given not so much for the sake of the poor as for the benefit of the soul of the donor. In recent times this religious motive has become less operative, but the amount of almsgiving has undoubtedly increased, and we are justified in the conclusion that it is motived as never before by genuine altruistic feeling. It is probably true, however, that there is less indiscriminate, emotional almsgiving now than formerly. But there is greater “social compunction,” a deeper sense of society’s responsibility for the existence of poverty, and an earnest inquiry respecting the primary social causes of it. Hence effort is directed not merely to the immediate relief of want and misery through organized charity, but to the cure of poverty through the removal of the causes of destitution. At this point the investigations and labors of the philanthropist merge with those of the sociologist, the economist, and the statesman.

In society’s treatment of the defective and the insane, as compared with its treatment of these same classes scarcely more than a century ago, is registered an ethical progress truly remarkable. A hundred years or less ago in England and in all the European countries the idiot and the oddly formed human prodigy were exhibited to afford amusement to the people. The growth in humanitarian feeling has rendered all this a thing of the past. “The passing of the freak is not a casual incident in the history of the circus, but a striking illustration of the tendency which has been in progress for centuries toward the humanizing of our amusements.... To spend a merry afternoon at the madhouse watching the antics of the maniacs in their chains seemed natural and reasonable to civilized Englishmen not so many generations ago. It has become absolutely unthinkable.”[760] The history of the stage offers like testimony. “Not so very long ago,” writes David Belasco, in giving advice to the amateur playwright, “the entrance of a cripple or a hunchback was sufficient to get a laugh from the audience. In these humanitarian times there is no fun to be made out of physical deformity.”[761]

But it is in society’s treatment of the criminal class that there is to be traced the greatest progress in humanitarianism. In the pre-Norman period in England the punishments for crime were characterized by a barbarity incredibly callous. “Men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl.... The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lips were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive.”[762]

What was true of English law was true of the laws of every other European country. And there was little or no essential amelioration of these savage law systems before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Seventy thousand executions took place in England during the reign of Henry VIII.[763] “In the reign of William III there does not appear to have been any consciousness that the penal laws were, in many respects, disgraceful to any community but a tribe of savages.”[764]

If a definite point of departure of the movement for the humanizing of the criminal laws of Europe and the putting of the treatment of criminals on an ethical basis be sought, it will be found in the life and writings of the Italian jurist Beccaria,[765] who maintained that the effect of cruel punishments is to increase crime by indurating the sensibilities of the people.[766]

A great impulse to the humanitarian movement initiated by Beccaria was given by the devoted labors of the great philanthropist John Howard (1726–1790), who, with his eyes opened to the awful conditions of prison life through official connection with Bedford jail, where Bunyan dreamed, spent his life in visiting all lands inspecting prisons and jails and dungeons and lazar houses, and “taking the gauge and dimension of misery, depression, and contempt.”