Chapter XVIII The Moral Evolution Since the Incoming of Democracy: The New Social and International Conscience
I. Forces Determining the Trend of the Ethical Movement
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
( 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.
( 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
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.
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 humanity734—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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
( 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.
( 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.
( 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.”
The crusade of John Howard marks the real beginning of practical prison reform, which has “transformed prisons from hells into hospitals for recovery,” and revolutionized the entire theory and administration of judicial punishment.767 The aim and purpose of the modern penitentiary system is to develop self-respect and manhood.768 To this end the lock-step and striped clothing have been abolished in many prisons, and along with them all cruel and humiliating punishments. The establishment of reform schools, reformatories, and penitentiaries, the introduction of the indeterminate sentence, the proposed creation of courts of rehabilitation, and the founding of the juvenile court,769 mark the ethical advance which the last century has witnessed in this domain.770
6. International Ethics: The New International Conscience
The development of international morality foreshadowed by the earlier development of intranational morality
One of the most significant of phylogenetic laws is formulated by Haeckel in these words: “The short, quick history of an individual organism is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the species to which the organism belongs.” Now this law holds good for the history of the human species as well as for that of the lower tribes of life. And here it embraces not only the history of the bodily but also that of the psychical development. Consequently the law under which the moral evolution of man is going on may be stated in this way: The history of the development of conscience within a social group (clan, tribe, nation) is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the development of conscience in humanity at large, that is to say, between the groups composing the human race. And since law codes, private and public, are essentially embodiments of the growing and clarifying conscience, this mode of the ethical evolution may be expressed in strictly juristic terms as follows: “The development of international law follows step by step the earlier development of municipal law.”771
With this law in mind we may define moral progress in the international domain as the gradual assimilation of international to intranational ethics, or, in other words, the growing conformity of the standard of public morality to that of private morality.
The gradual moralizing of the relations of the advanced to the backward races: The White Man’s Burden
As thus defined, a special expression of progress in international morality is found in the growing recognition by governments that the obligations of the strong toward the weak are the same for nations as for individuals. A public conscience that is like the best private conscience is constantly becoming more and more a regulative force in the relations of the superior to the inferior races.772 Unhappily that exploitation of the weaker by the stronger races, which makes up so large a part of the history of the past ages, still goes on; but it is, in general, less grossly unethical than ever before, while with each succeeding generation the protest of the common conscience of the civilized world against all unfair and oppressive treatment of the backward by the more advanced races grows more earnest and insistent.
Good illustrations of this quickening of the public conscience are found in England’s dealings with India and China. In the year 1813 a resolution declaring that England’s first duty in legislating for India was to promote the interests of the people of India was proposed in Parliament, but was defeated. Twenty years later (in 1833) this principle was definitely embodied in a Government of India Act.773 In 1841–1842 England, at the end of what has been justly characterized as “one of the most dishonorable and detestable wars that ever stained her annals,” compelled China to keep her ports open to the iniquitous opium traffic. Two generations later (in 1906) the House of Commons by resolution unanimously declared the Indian opium trade with China to be “morally indefensible,” and requested the Government to bring it to a speedy end.774 Five years later England entered into an agreement with China, according to the terms of which the importation of Indian opium into China will cease on or before 1917. This is a notable triumph of the new international conscience.
Our dealings with the island of Cuba since its liberation—opinions may differ in regard to the rightness of our original act of intervention—affords another encouraging illustration of the progress the world has made in international morality. And the same is true of our dealings with the Filipinos, notwithstanding the utterly painful character of the earlier chapters of the story. There has been no responsible official utterance on this subject that has represented our task in our acquired dependency as other than a public trust, as a guardianship to be exercised solely in the interest of the Filipinos as the nation’s wards. The better moral feeling of the nation, intensified in many by deep compunction, has indignantly repudiated all those unofficial utterances which have cynically represented the islands as an inviting field for selfish exploitation by American capitalists, and has demanded that our government in the islands should be inspired and controlled by the spirit of unselfish service. And this ethical spirit has in general marked our administration of the affairs of the islanders. “I believe that I am speaking with historic accuracy and impartiality,” declares ex-President Roosevelt, “when I say that the American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense, marks a new and long stride forward in advance of all steps that have hitherto been taken along the path of wise and proper treatment of weaker by stronger races.” This ethical purpose is especially manifested in the sending out, in the early period of our rule, of five hundred young American teachers to carry to this deeply wronged people the best we have to give—a national act without a parallel in all the history of the past.
It inspires hope in the future to note how far this last step forward carries us away from the starting point on this line of ethical advance. At first the fate of the weaker race was extermination or slavery; then its fate was to be reduced to the condition of a tributary; still later, to be subjected to commercial and industrial exploitation by the conquering people; and lastly, to be made, in theory if not yet in actual practice, the beneficiaries of a benevolent self-sacrificing service, which finds lofty expression in Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden:
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted, the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than something already attained.
Progress in war ethics: Hugo Grotius
But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In no period of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have been lost.
This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound, a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius775—a work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever written not claiming divine inspiration.”776 The aim of Grotius was not to abolish war,—he did not think universal peace an attainable ideal,—but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities, to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding. The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.777 As the Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform of the laws of war.778
The influence of the work of Grotius was profound and widespread. From the time of its appearance dates a new departure in the humanization of war, and a fresh moral advance in international law.779 “His ideas,” says Dr. Andrew D. White, “found their way into current discussion, into systems of law, into treaties; and as generations rolled by, the world began to find itself, it hardly knew how, less and less cruel, until men looked back on war as practiced in his time as upon a hideous dream—doubtless much as men in future generations will look back upon the wars of our times.”780
The humane provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the establishment of the Red Cross Society, which on the field of battle cares without discrimination for the stricken, are inspiring illustrations of the growth of this new humanitarianism.
Movement for the abolition of war— a moral issue
Now this growing sensitiveness of the public conscience which has effected so many mitigations of the barbarities of war has resulted in a widespread and insistent demand that war between civilized nations shall not merely be humanized but that it shall be abolished, that disputes between nations shall be settled as disputes between individuals are settled—by courts of justice.
Without doubt many influences, political, social, and economic,781 have concurred in creating this great world-wide movement, and in calling into existence the Hague Conferences and the international and national peace congresses of the last decade or two; but among all these forces and motives the one of greatest potency is the awakened and instructed conscience of the world in regard to the criminality of war as an established and legalized method of settling controversies between civilized nations. It is this new conscience and not the new dreadnought to which we must look to abolish war and to keep it abolished. For, like the question of slavery two generations ago, this question of war has become a moral issue, and, like the slavery question, it will give the world no rest until settled in accordance with the demands of the new conscience.
War an abrogation of the ordinary moral code
Especially intolerable to the more sensitive conscience of to-day is the assumption that nations may at will suspend or abrogate the ordinary moral code. For, as Lord Morley truly says, “To declare war is to suspend not merely habeas corpus but the Ten Commandments, and some other good commandments besides.”782 That is to say, war is a suspension of a great part of those rules of morality which, slowly and painfully formulated by the growing moral consciousness of man, have become the guide and standard of ordinary conduct. In war the conscience of the commander is inhibited. “The commander who lost a battle through the activity of his moral nature,” once cynically declared United States Senator Ingalls, “would be the derision and jest of history.” And that is so. The world has not yet ceased to deride those Jews who lost their city to the Romans because their consciences forsooth would not let them fight on the Sabbath day. War cannot be conducted by the rules of ordinary morality.
With a great part of the ordinary moral code suspended, there is substituted for it a war code every maxim of which reveals its archaic, vestigial character, stamps it as a survival from an early savage stage of human development, as a legacy from a long-past age of the historical evolution when morality was as yet only an intratribal thing, that is, when men felt that they owed duties only to members of their own tribe or social group.783
Unfavorable reaction of the ethics of war upon the ethics of peace
In many ways, some obvious and others subtle and hidden, war works “moral damage” to society, but we here confine ourselves to emphasizing merely the moral loss and hurt resulting from the reaction of its low archaic code upon the more advanced peace code. For, as Professor J. Neville Figgis justly observes, “It is impossible to remove the very notion of morality from international affairs without in the long run undermining it in private life.”784 What is regarded as right and proper in war will come to be regarded as right and proper in peace. That is to say, the maintenance of a double standard in morals is just as impossible as the maintenance of a double standard in money. By a sort of Gresham’s Law the lower standard will drive out the higher or drag it down to its own low level.
This reaction of the war code upon the ordinary moral code is well illustrated by what takes place when society metes out to persons convicted of crime ferocious and barbarous punishments. In the medieval centuries in Europe when the penalties for offenses were often fiendishly cruel mutilations of the body, such as cutting off the ears, the hands, the lips, or the nose, this judicial procedure was imitated to such a degree by individuals seeking private vengeance that mayhem, that is, the mutilation of an enemy by depriving him of a member, became a crime of such frequent occurrence that it was necessary to make special and severe enactments against it.785 After society stopped mutilating the bodies of offenders against its laws, this offense of mayhem virtually dropped out of the calendar of private crimes.
In a similar way does the war ethics of the nations react disastrously upon private morality. The slow moral progress of European civilization during the last two or three centuries, compared with its wonderful intellectual and material progress, may with little hesitation be attributed in large part to the unfavorable influence of its war ethics upon its everyday moral code. The war code is applied to politics, to ordinary business, and to the relations of industrial classes. The politician as a politician does a hundred things he would not think of doing as a man, and justifies his acts by appealing to the adage, “Politics is war.” The business man, citing the like maxim, “Business is business,” which means that competition is a species of war and must be conducted on war principles, flings his Christian code to the winds and, pitilessly pushing his competitor to the wall, compasses his financial ruin. It is the same in the struggle between labor and capital. In this struggle acts of violence, like those of the McNamaras, are committed, and the persons who do these things absolve themselves in the forum of their own consciences on the plea that a state of war exists between capital and labor and that this justifies the adoption of war methods. Here doubtless we have the moral psychology of the suffragette movement in England. Indeed, the leaders of this startling propaganda tell us frankly that they are waging war, and that this justifies their suspension of the ordinary rules of conduct. In the light of this avowal the alleged inscrutability of their acts disappears. The movement is simply another illustration of the truth that so long as nations act under the illusion that they may without moral wrong employ violence to obtain justice, just so long will there be individuals who with good conscience will seek justice through violence.
At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war ethics, in all other domains and relationships—in the family, in the Church, and in social intercourse—act in accordance with the higher moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends of humanity for the service he has done in... showing that the whole sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the ideals accepted in public affairs.”786
Obsolescence of war as a school of morals: the war system an anachronism in modern civilization
The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true, as is assumed by Professor William James in his Moral Equivalent of War, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past stages of human development, the time is past when the war system can serve the highest ends of civilization. It is an anachronism in the modern world. It has become a drag upon the moral progress of the race. By an ethical necessity the day of its abolition approaches. At a time not remote, as history reckons time, the common conscience of the world will brand war between civilized nations as the greatest of crimes, and will regard the nation that assaults another with intent to commit general slaughter as a criminal nation—as a common enemy of the human race. In that coming and better age men will look with the same incredulous amazement upon our infernal engines and devices for wholesale man-killing that we of this age look upon “the iron virgin of Nuremberg” and the other medieval instruments of torture in the museums of Europe.
To many this optimistic forecast, in the face of the prevailing war spirit and the ever-growing armaments of the nations, may seem oversanguine and incredible. But to think despairingly of the future argues a failure to discern what is really most significant in the international situation to-day. The most significant thing in the ongoings of life at Rome on that memorable day of the year 404 of our era which saw the last gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was not that, four hundred years after the incoming of Christianity with its teachings of the sanctity of human life, gladiators fought on the arena to make a holiday for Rome; the significant thing was the protest made by the Christian monk Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death,787 for that announced the birth into the Roman world of a new conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity, meant the speedy abolition of “the human sacrifices of the amphitheater.”
And so to-day the significant thing is not that nineteen hundred years after the advent of a religion of peace and good will among men, gladiator nations still wet the earth with fratricidal blood; the significant thing is the constantly growing protest against it all, for that announces the birth into the modern world of a new international conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity like that which abolished forever the bloody sacrifices of the Colosseum, means the certain and speedy abolition of war as a crass negation of human solidarity and brotherhood, and a venturous denial of a moral order of the world and the sovereignty of conscience.
Footnotes
1 Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1891), vol. i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867.
2 For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, 2d ed.
3 Social Evolution (1894), p. 307.
4 Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 254.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Practical Reason; cited by Fisher, History of the Christian Church (1888), p. 623.
6 “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons.”—T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 361.
7 Prolegomena to the History of Israel, tr. Black and Menzies (1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
8 Wake, The Evolution of Morality (1878), vol. ii, p. 4; Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 237; George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 79.
9 T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 240.
10 “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality, which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly, “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man, as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore, the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history of mankind” (Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life, tr. Gulliver and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.
11 “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”—George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54.
12 “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole realm of ethics.”—Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1887), p. 201.
13 S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 354. The same thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral graveyard... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall spring.”
14 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.
15 “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the inner by the outer.”—G. Lowes Dickinson, “Ideals and Facts,” Hibbert Journal for January, 1911, p. 266.
16 “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”—Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development (1897), p. 397.
17 See Chapter XVIII. “The activity of a free people creates a great number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights; so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests and high faculties of our nature.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 10.
18 Principles of Economics, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilized nations.”—Lecky, The Map of Life (1900), pp. 53 f.
19 The Moral Ideal, new and revised edition, p. 19.
20 “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and purified by its religions.”—William Newton Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God (1909), p. 13.
21 “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an attainment” (Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 301).
22 Meditations, tr. Long, xi, 18.
23 “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”—James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 261.
24 Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 291.
25 After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours” (The Malay Archipelago, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings Millward in National Geographic Magazine for March, 1909, p. 287).
26 “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the clan.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 54.
27 The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2 Sam. v. 1.
28 Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”
29 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 267. See also Coulanges, The Ancient City, bk. ii, chap. ix.
30 Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a member of his own kindred or political community;... he may deceive, rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).
31 It should be carefully noted that this is very different from saying that his life is immoral. To pronounce it immoral would be like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason” (Physics and Politics (1873), p. 115).
32 “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral idea.”—Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 191.
33 See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.
34 Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks: “The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather than positive” (The Naturalist on the River Amazon). Cf. Edward Howard Griggs, The New Humanism, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.
35 For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of morality, see Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.
36 “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 149.
37 “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic hearth.”—Helen Bosanquet, The Family (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 171.
38 The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship group.
39 When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor, a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality now consists in obedience to the law.
40 Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.
41 “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), p. 37.
42 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 283.
43 The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a merely preventive measure—not as a measure of justice or punishment. But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.
44 “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons, because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without protection.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 90.
45 Gen. iv. 13, 14.
46 “Blood atonement... was one of the very earliest cases we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social obligation.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 506.
47 “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”—Wines, Punishment and Reformation (1895), p. 33.
48 On the Lex talionis consult Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the Lex talionis has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all peoples.
49 The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 267.
50 Seeck (Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (1901), Bd. i, S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as the slave of the winner.
51 The Truth about the Congo (1907), p. 29.
52 “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal, however, from a white employer... is no sin.”—Starr, The Truth about the Congo (1907), pp. 28 f.
53 See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
54 On this subject see Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”
55 Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks, Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest... was almost as great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 73).
56 Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to the stranger. See Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.
57 Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the Greenlander... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for which their language has no word” (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 334).
58 Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing slaves.
59 Quoted by Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. vi.
60 Often we find vestiges of the abandoned practice in what may be called celestial cannibalism (see W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 224). Thus the god of war of the Mexican Aztecs and the gods of many Polynesian tribes were cannibals, for human sacrifices must be regarded as a sort of celestial cannibalism, when the offering is made in the belief that the god actually repasts on the blood and the finer essences of the sacrificial victim. Where men have thus made their gods like unto themselves, and the practice of cannibalism has been consecrated by religion, the gods, because religion is always conservative, are certain to remain anthropophagi much longer than their worshipers. Consequently we find human sacrifices still lingering on as a kind of survival among peoples, as, for instance, the Mexicans, who have themselves left far behind the practice of eating human flesh.
61 Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. 185.
62 Od. i. 260.
63 Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 350.
64 Ibid. vol. i, pp. 355 f.
65 Ibid. vol. i, pp. 368, 398, 401.
66 Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 359 f.
67 Ibid. vol. i, p. 349.
68 For the influence of the war ethics of the modern nations upon their peace ethics, see VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
69 Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 65.
70 Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 176.
71 Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 250.
72 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 172.
73 This moralization of pure physical myths marks the advance of all races in culture and morality. As we shall see, Greek and Hebrew mythologies underwent just such an ethicalizing process.
74 Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), p. 73.
75 “It has long been recognized that the Egyptians had a much more highly organized conscience than that of most other nations of early times.”—Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 86.
76 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 193 f.
77 Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), pp. 62 f.
78 Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 64.
79 The same evolution is to be traced in China. “Imitations made of wood, clay, straw, paper, and of other material have been substituted for the real things.... Slaves and servants, wives and concubines are also burned, i.e., in paper imitations. They point back to the time when actual human sacrifices were the custom” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 71).
80 Primitive Culture (1874), vol. ii, p. 85.
81 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 187 ff.
82 Truthfulness was one of the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian ideal. The requirements here were very exact: “I have not altered a story in the telling of it; I have repeated what I have heard just as it was told to me,” are the words of one in the judgment hall of Osiris. Cf. Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), pp. 76 f.
83 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
84 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
85 Annihilation appears to have been the lot of the very wicked; but the texts are not perfectly clear on this point. Consult Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 55.
86 Here are six declarations of the confession which correspond almost exactly with six of the Ten Commandments: (1) I have not blasphemed; (2) I have not stolen; (3) I have not slain any one treacherously; (4) I have not slandered any one, or made false accusations; (5) I have not reviled the face of my father; (6) I have not eaten my heart through with envy. See Rawlinson, History of Ancient Egypt, 2d ed., vol. i, p. 142.
87 Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 135.
88 Ibid. p. 162.
89 “In this judgment the Egyptian introduced for the first time in the history of man the fully developed idea that the future destiny of the dead must be dependent entirely upon the ethical quality of the earthly life, the idea of future responsibility,—of which we found the first traces in the Old Kingdom” (Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 173). Professor Breasted suggests a connection between the growth of the ideal of an ethical ordeal in the hereafter with the discontinuance of the building of immense pyramids. He says: “It is impossible to contemplate the colossal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty, so well known as the pyramids of Gizeh, and to contrast them with the comparatively diminutive royal tombs which follow in the next two dynasties, without... discerning more than exclusively political causes behind this sudden and startling change.... The recognition of a judgment and the requirement of moral worthiness in the hereafter... marked a transition from reliance on agencies external to the personality of the dead to dependence on inner values. Immortality began to make its appeal as a thing achieved in a man’s own soul” (Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), pp. 178 f.).
90 Records of the Past, New Series, vol. iii. For extended comments on the maxims of Ptah-hotep, see Amélineau, Essai sur l’évolution historique et philosophique des idées morales dans l’Egypt ancienne (1895), pp. 93 ff.
91 Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (1899), p. ii.
92 For other documents of this age which embody the same spirit of social justice as the precepts of Ptah-hotep, see Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), lect. vii.
93 Amélineau, Essai, pp. 140 f.
94 Alongside slavery proper there existed the system of serfdom, the nature of which is revealed by the history of the Children of Israel in Lower Egypt. The status of the Egyptian serf appears to have been somewhat like that of the Helots of Laconia in Greece. If we rightly interpret the Biblical account of the servitude of the Children of Israel, the number of serfs, if their increase seemed dangerous, was kept down by enforced infanticide (Ex. i. 7–22).
95 Laurent, Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité, t. i, p. 321.
96 Amélineau, Essai, p. 344. The monotheist Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV), the reform Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it is true, pursued throughout his reign a peace policy, but this policy manifestly was dictated by temperament, or the king’s preoccupation with religious affairs, and not by moral scruples. His reform was essentially a religious and not a social or moral one. Not one of the historical documents of the age contains a word in condemnation of war as inherently wrong (see Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), vol. ii, pp. 382–419), though in these “the customary glorying in war has almost disappeared” (Petrie, A History of Egypt (1896), vol. ii, p. 218).
97 This, however, must not be regarded as wholly an act of wanton savagery. The killing of his prisoners by the king was probably a sort of sacrifice in honor of the god who had given him victory over his enemies. See Amélineau, Essai, p. 12.
98 Essai, p. ix; see also p. 252, n. 1.
99 For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see Amélineau, Essai, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. x; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387.
100 Petrie, Egypt and Israel (1911), p. 133.
101 Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest indifferently the good and the bad.
102 It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 297.
103 King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (1899), p. 220.
104 The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
105 Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:
O my god who art angry with me, accept my prayer;
May my sins be forgiven, my transgressions be wiped out.
May the ban be loosened, the chain broken,
May the seven winds carry off my sighs.
Let me tear away my iniquity, let the birds carry it to heaven;
May the beasts of the field take it away from me,
The flowing waters of the stream wash me clean.
Let me be pure like the sheen of gold.
Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 323.
106 Cf. above, p. 35.
107 The stele which bore this code of laws was discovered at Susa in 1901–1902. The reign of Hammurabi is placed at about the end of the third millennium B.C. There are translations of the code by C. H. W. Johns (1903) and Robert Francis Harper (1904).
108 “If a man owe a debt and Adad [god of storms] inundate his field and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall not pay the interest for that year.”—Code, sec. 48. [We have used throughout Harper’s translation.]
109 Code, secs. 196, 197, 200. Cf. similar provisions of the Mosaic code: Ex. xxi. 23–25; Deut. xix. 21.
110 Ibid. secs. 209, 210.
111 Ibid. secs. 229, 230.
112 The provisions read: “If a man aid a male or female slave of the palace, or a male or female slave of a freeman to escape from the city gate, he shall be put to death.”
“If a man harbor in his home a male or female slave who has fled from the palace or from a freeman, and do not bring him [the slave] forth at the call of the commandant, the owner of that house shall be put to death” (Code, secs. 15, 16).
113 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 744.
114 Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 41.
115 Records of the Past, New Series, vol. ii, pp. 143 ff.
116 “The white man has no doubt committed great barbarities upon the savage, but he does not like to speak of them, and when necessity compels a reference he has always something to say of manifest destiny, the advance of civilization and the duty of shouldering the white man’s burden in which he pays tribute to a higher ethical conscience” (Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 27). King Leopold may have been responsible for barbarities committed against the natives of the Kongo as atrocious as those of the Assyrians, but he paid tribute to the modern conscience by refraining from portraying them in imperishable marble at The Hague.
117 Cf. Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 226.
118 Though the people are shut out from participation in the state worship, they have set up for themselves a multitude of local shrines where they worship the spirits of almost every earthly thing, such as mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. “Men debarred from communion with the Great Spirit resorted more eagerly to inferior spirits, to spirits of the fathers, and to spirits generally.... The accredited worship of ancestors, with that of the departed great added to it, was not enough to satisfy the cravings of men’s minds.” (Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 176).
119 The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 274.
120 Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. ii, p. 239.
121 We do not mention Buddhism in this connection for the reason that it is not possible to trace any decisive influence, save in the promotion of toleration, that this system has exercised upon Chinese morality. Buddhism enjoins celibacy, and this, like Christian asceticism, is in radical opposition to the genius of Confucianism. For this reason, in conjunction with others,—among these its early degeneracy,—Buddhism has remained practically inert as an ethical force in Chinese society. What little influence it has exerted has been confined almost wholly to the monasteries.
122 “The dread of spirits is the nightmare of the Chinaman’s life.”—Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 197.
123 The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 34.
124 The Taoist doctrines are contained in the Tao-teh-king, supposed to have been written by Lao-tsze, a sage who lived in the fifth century B.C. The religion which grew out of his philosophy became in time degenerate, absorbed the worst elements of Buddhism, and is to-day a system of gross superstitions, magic, and sorcery, which has undeniably a blighting effect upon morality.
125 De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), pp. 139 ff.
126 Ibid. 138.
127 Legge, The Religions of China (1881), p. 229.
128 De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 143.
129 Nietzscheism is in essence at one with Taoism. Nietzsche insists that man should behave as Nature behaves; for instance, that the strong should prey upon the weak. The difference between Lao-tsze and Nietzsche lies in their different readings of the essential qualities of the universe. See below, p. 355.
130 Taoism is too lofty a doctrine for the multitude. They are enjoined to imitate the ancient sages, and as these imitated the way of heaven and earth, in imitating them they are really imitating the universe.
131 De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 143.
132 The imitation of the qualities of nature “have given existence to important state institutions, considered to be for the nation and rulers matters of life and death.” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 139).
133 The Works of Mencius (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. ii), bk. vi, pt. i, chap. ii, 2.
134 “This inference [that man is naturally good] comes into prominence in the classics as a dogma, and therefore has been the principal basis of all Taoistic and Confucian ethics to this day” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 137). Every schoolboy is taught this doctrine: “Man commences life with a virtuous nature” (Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 217).
135 The Works of Mencius, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. ii, 2. And so Confucius: “An accordance with this nature [man’s] is called the Path of Duty” (The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. i; The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i).
136 The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. i, chap. vii, 2, 3.
137 Confucian Analects (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i), bk. xvii, chap. ii. The student of biology will see in this view an anticipation of the latest teaching of modern science in respect to the relative importance of heredity and education in the determining of character.
138 “There is nothing in this world so dangerous for the national safety, public health and welfare as heterodoxy, which means acts, institutions, doctrines not based upon the classics.”—De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 48.
139 Confucius thus describes himself: “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients” (Confucian Analects, bk. vii, chap. i).
140 The Religions of China (1881), p. 255.
141 Chinese literature bears unique testimony to the high consideration in which the virtue of filial devotion and reverence is held. It abounds in anecdotes exalting this virtue, holding up great exemplars of it for imitation by the Chinese youth. See Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese.
142 The Hsiao King (Sacred Books of the East, vol. iii), chap. xviii.
143 Ibid. chap. xi.
144 Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese (1868), p. 103.
145 Ibid. p. 103.
146 China in Law and Commerce (1905), p. 34.
147 “The chief characteristic of Chinese society and the essence of Chinese morality is reverence for the past.”—Reinsch, World Politics (1900), p. 90.
148 The Great Learning (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i), chap. iii, 5.
149 Confucian Analects, bk. xi, chap. xv, 3.
150 It is interesting to compare the portraiture of The Princely Man, as depicted by the pagan Chinese moralist, with that of The Prince, as portrayed by Machiavelli.
151 “The standard of excellence [in The Princely Man] is placed so high as to be absolutely unattainable by unaided human nature; and though [the author] probably intended to elevate the character of his grandfather [Confucius] to this height, and thus hand him down to future ages as a shing jin, or ‘perfect and holy man,’ he has in the providence of God done his countrymen great service in setting before them such a character as is here given in the Chung Yung. By being made a text-book in the schools it has been constantly studied and memorized by generations of students to their great benefit.”—Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. i, pp. 655 f.
152 Confucian Analects, bk. viii, chap. xii.
153 The Great Learning (text), par. 5.
154 Quoted by Pfleiderer, Religions and Historic Faiths, p. 96.
155 The Great Learning, chap. x, 22.
156 The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xiii, 6.
157 The Great Learning, chap. ix, 8.
158 Confucian Analects, bk. xii, chap. xix.
159 The Great Learning, chap. x, 21.
160 Confucian Analects, bk. xiii, chap. xi.
161 Okakura-Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East (1905), p. 239.
162 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 265.
163 The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. viii, 8.
164 Ibid. bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. iv, 1.
165 Ibid. bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. ii, 1. While denouncing the essential wickedness of war, Mencius sanctioned rebellion against a tyrannical and wicked ruler.
166 The Great Learning, chap. vi, 2.
167 The Works of Mencius, bk. iv, pt. i, chap. xx.
168 Confucian Analects, bk. iii, chap. iv, 3.
169 Ibid. bk. iv, chap. xv, 2.
170 Ibid. bk. vi, chap. xvii.
171 Ibid. bk. ix, chap. xvii.
172 Ibid. bk. xv, chap. xxiii. The same precept is found in bk. xii, chap. ii, of the Analects, and also in The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xiii, 3.
173 The Works of Mencius, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xvii.
174 Ibid. bk. iv, pt. ii, chap. xii.
175 Ibid. bk. vi, pt. i, chap. x, 1.
176 Confucian Analects, bk. vii, chap. xv.
177 The Works of Mencius, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 2.
178 Ibid. bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 5.
179 Ibid. bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xviii, 1.
180 The Chinese pay worship, it is true, to the multitude of inferior gods of Buddhism, but there is little in these cults calculated to awaken and discipline the moral feelings.
181 The Religions of China (1881), p. 256.
182 See Colquhuon, China in Transformation (1898), p. 189.
183 Reinsch, World Politics (1900), p. 98. In their relations with foreigners the Chinese bankers have won an enviable reputation for integrity and the scrupulous observance of engagements. The word of a Chinaman in financial matters is his bond.
184 The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 214.
185 Froebel has an illuminating comment on the danger to true morality that lurks here: “A life whose ideal value has been perfectly established in experience never aims to serve as a model in its form, but only in its essence, in its spirit. It is the greatest mistake to suppose that spiritual, human perfection can serve as a model in its form. This accounts for the common experience that the taking of such external manifestations of perfection as examples, instead of elevating mankind, checks, nay, represses, its development” (The Education of Man, pt. i, sec. 10).
186 Etiquette has been well defined as “the formal expression of courtesy,” and courtesy as “morality in trifles.” In Japan, as Kikuchi informs us, etiquette forms a part of the moral instruction in the schools. See Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, vol. ii, p. 342.
187 Edward A. Ross (The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 193) says native authorities admit that from one tenth to one twentieth of the girl infants are abandoned or made away with.
188 “Female infanticide in some parts is openly confessed and divested of all disgrace and penalties everywhere” (Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1883), vol. i, p. 836). Jernigan, however, says, “When carried to the extreme there is a public sentiment in China which condemns it, and there are official proclamations against infanticide” (China in Law and Commerce (1905), p. 123).
189 The primitive kinship group is a characteristic feature of Chinese society. “Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively persons having the same surname and the same ancestors” (A. H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (1894), p. 226). “I have seen a town of 25,000 people, all belonging to the same clan and bearing the same family name” (Martin, The Lore of Cathay (1901), p. 272). Along with this clan constitution of society goes the principle of collective responsibility. The group is to a great degree held responsible for the conduct of each of its members. In case of serious crime, as, for instance, treason, all the male adult members of the criminal’s family are punished along with the offender (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 45). Recently the punishment of relatives of the offender has been abolished in certain cases.
190 The efforts of the Chinese government to put an end to the use of opium among its subjects—the anti-opium decree was issued in 1906—is the most noteworthy matter in the recent moral history of China. This movement is motived by moral feeling as truly as is the movement among ourselves for the suppression of the liquor traffic. It is, in the words of Professor Edward A. Ross, “the most extensive warfare on a vicious private habit that the world has ever known” (The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 146).
191 “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”—Japanese Constitution, art. iii.
192 The state in Japan occupies the place of the Church with us. “To look up to the state as a sacred institution has always been characteristic of the people, and from the great work of the recent reformation onward there has not been a single event of national consequence which has not originated in this peculiar turn of mind” (Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, p. 559).
193 Corresponding to the knights in European feudalism were the samurai, above them the daimios, and at the head of the system the Shogun.
194 Japanese boys and men, Dr. William Elliot Griffis affirms, are “more tender and careful with all living creatures than are those of Christendom” (The Religions of Japan (1895), p. 294). Buddhism caused in large measure the disuse of flesh for food.
195 This word means “the way of the warrior,” or “the rule of knighthood.”
196 Nitobé, Bushido: the Soul of Japan, p. 98. The edition cited throughout this chapter is that of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905. The Introduction is by William Elliot Griffis.
197 Nitobé, Bushido, p. 32.
198 Ibid. p. 30.
199 For the subject of the downfall of feudalism and the Restoration, see Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. i, chap. ii.
200 Nitobé, Bushido, p. 189.
201 Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 323.
202 Scherer, What is Japanese Morality? (1906), p. 10.
203 Nitobé, Bushido, p. vi.
204 The works of Molière, it is said, have been put under the ban of the censor in Japan and their circulation forbidden, for the reason that Molière ridicules old age, and constantly, like the comic supplement of the newspapers, “makes some father the butt of jokes and gross wit by his child or children.”
205 “Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”—Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East (1895), p. 89.
206 Okakura-Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (1904), p. 179. Romantic love is almost unknown in Japan. B. H. Chamberlain affirms that in a residence of twenty-eight years he heard of only one love match, and then the young people had been brought up in America.
207 Out of the East (1985), p. 80.
208 Five per cent of the men have concubines.
209 “The central idea in Japanese life is obedience to parents and reverence for ancestors. Should a Japanese father have misfortunes, his daughter would think it her filial duty to sell her body. She would not be regarded as fallen and disgraced, but as having done a right and noble deed, and might afterwards be restored to her place in society. But, though it is hard to explain, the Japanese woman is as chaste and pure and exalted in her ideas of womanhood as any woman on the globe.”—Sir Edwin Arnold (in an interview).
210 Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women (1891), p. 121.
211 Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 4th ed., p. 220. By “the ancient way” is meant hara-kiri, or disemboweling. The death by his own hand of General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, during the funeral of his departed sovereign Mutsuhito (September 13, 1912), reveals another motive for suicide which is wholly foreign to our modes of thought and feeling. “In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of jun-shi, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living Japanese retainers with their dead lord. The custom gradually died out, but voluntary suicide as a means of showing personal devotion or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries” (George Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” New York Outlook for October 5, 1912). It was this ancient custom that Count Nogi followed. “When all was over”—such is Mr. Kennan’s interpretation of his act—“he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan, but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral atmosphere of that time.”
212 Japanese feudalism began about the eleventh century. The year 1868 saw its final downfall.
213 Nitobé, Bushido, p. 99.
214 Okakura-Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (1904), p. 175. Count Okuma makes a similar assertion: “The humanitarian efforts which in the course of the recent war were so much in evidence, and which so much surprised Western nations, were not, as might have been thought, the products of the new civilization, but survivals of our ancient feudal chivalry” (Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. i, p. 124). By no people has the Red Cross movement been taken up with greater enthusiasm than by the Japanese.
215 Consult Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, pp. 566 f.
216 “The obloquy attached to the calling brought within its pale such as cared little for social repute” (Nitobé, Bushido, p. 66). “The trades-people,” writes Chamberlain, “stood at the very bottom of the scale. The hucksters or traders were a degraded class in old Japan, and degraded their business morals remain, which is the principal cause of the difficulties experienced by European merchants in dealing with them” (Things Japanese, 4th ed., p. 93).
217 Nitobé, Bushido, p. 67.
218 The statement has obtained wide currency that all the banks in Japan employ only Chinese as cashiers because they cannot find honest Japanese for these positions of trust. Chinese are sometimes employed in Japanese banks, but the true reason for their employment is not the one here assigned. One well qualified to speak authoritatively on this subject says:
Chinese bankers and cashiers are largely Shansi men, that is, men from the province of Shansi, where the profession of banking has become hereditary in a large number of families. They are all, or nearly all, members of the powerful organization known as the Bankers’ Guild, which has branches in every part of the Empire. The Bankers’ Guild has discovered that it is practically impossible to conduct large financial operations without honesty; and it therefore enforces honesty by means of a discipline that is as rigorous... as that of the New York Stock Exchange.... If a Chinese banker breaks faith, violates a contract, or betrays a trust, he is expelled from his guild and the doors of banks are closed against him for all time. In the first place, therefore, the Chinese cashier is honest because honesty is a condition of his business existence. He may not be honest in other respects,—often he is not,—but he is absolutely honest in the handling of money. In the second place, he is probably the most expert man living in the rapid calculation of exchanges. The monetary system of his country is the most confused, chaotic, and complicated system in the world. There are fifteen or twenty different kinds of taels, no one of which bears a fixed relation to any other, or to any established monetary standard.... The necessity of dealing in some way with this great mass of unstable and fluctuating currency and of earning a subsistence from it has made the Chinese cashier one of the most expert of living accountants. He will solve difficult monetary problems by short cuts of mental arithmetic, and he calculates exchanges to eight points of decimals. In the third place, the Chinese cashier counts and manipulates bank bills and coins with extraordinary skill and accuracy. I have had dealings with him in many parts of the Far East, but I cannot remember ever to have seen him count a sum of money twice, and I have never caught him in an error....
Now, when you get a man whose honesty is guaranteed by his guild, whose manipulation of money is phenomenally dexterous, and who can calculate exchanges to eight points of decimals, you have an ideal cashier; and if Japanese bankers employ him, it shows their good business sense rather than their distrust of their own people. But all Japanese bankers do not employ him. In some of the largest banks in Tokyo, Kioto, and Osaka there are no Chinese at all—or at least I have never seen any. This explanation would not be worth, perhaps, the space that I have given to it, if the story of the Chinese cashier had not been so widely circulated, and if it were not typical of a whole class of cases in which the Japanese are misjudged on the basis of a single incident or a solitary fact.—George Kennan, “Are the Japanese Honest?” the New York Outlook for August 31, 1912.
219 “If the descendants of the samurai can erect a standard of commercial integrity at all comparable to their fine record for courage and loyalty, we shall be their debtors, not they ours.”—The New York Nation for July 30, 1908, p. 90.
220 Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 343.
221 Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 331.
222 Ibid. vol. ii, p. 319.
223 Ibid. vol. ii, p. 230.
224 “I certainly consider that the courage and devotion of the Japanese soldiers during the late war was to a great extent the result of this systematic moral instruction and training in schools.”—Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 344.
225 Wedgwood (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 22) suggestively likens the reduction to unity of the various gods of polytheism to the correlation of the physical forces—light, heat, electricity, and magnetism. Just as all these are found to be merely different manifestations of a single force or energy, so are all the deified phenomena of nature at last discovered to be but different manifestations of a single primal power—the One, the Supreme, the Eternal. This correlation of the gods, this reduction of polytheism to monotheism, holds the same place in the records of the religious and moral evolution of the race that the correlation of the physical forces holds in the records of the progress of science.
226 There may be some philosophers and scientists who profess materialism, and who make an infinite and eternal unconscious energy the primal cause of all things. But this is a philosophy of the universe which has never secured a wide acceptance in the West.
227 Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 59.
228 Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 356.
229 This was the work of the Brahmans, who, to secure the ascendancy of their own class, falsified and misinterpreted the sacred books.
230 Laws of Manu (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv), i. 31, 87.
231 Cf. Hearn, Kokora, chap. xii.
232 Laws of Manu, vi. 63.
233 Ibid. xii. 9, 53–58. The germs out of which this system was developed by the Brahmans formed a part of the animistic conception of the world held by the conquered natives. By the sixth century B.C. the system had been fully elaborated. See Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), pp. 16 f.
234 The theory was also undoubtedly in part the creation of the same ethical necessity that called into existence the purgatory of the medieval Church. The reincarnations have for aim and purpose not merely retribution, but expiation and purification.
235 The reader of Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of Ages, wherein the author attempts to explain the inequalities of earthly life by the theory of preëxistence, will be able to appreciate this effort of Indian philosophers to solve the same problem.
236 Indian pessimism is doubtless to be attributed in part to the hot, depressing climate, but more largely to the burdensome caste system and an oppressive government, which made free and joyous life impossible to the masses, shutting them up, without hope, to an existence of ache and pain and wretchedness. “Politics and society, in our opinion,” says Dr. Hopkins, “had more to do with altering the religion of India than had a higher temperature and miasma” (The Religions of India (1895), p. 199). But cf. Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda (1908), pp. 263 ff.
237 Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 149.
238 Ibid. p. 187.
239 This Brahmanic notion of sacrifice, that the gods need food, is the underlying notion in all religions of which sacrifices form a part. “That the purpose of sacrifice was simply to feed the gods was admitted on all sides in the controversy which accompanied the diffusion of Christianity in the ancient world.... The altar, in the words of Dean Spenser, was merely the table on which food and drink were set before the languishing deity” (Payne, History of the New World called America (1892), vol. i, pp. xi f.). “It is on precisely the same principle that the Mexicans kept their great war-gods... alive and vigorous by the blood of young human victims selected from their tributaries, and the Peruvians maintained the Creator, Sun, Moon, and Thunder, on whose favor their crops depended, in youth and vigor by the continual smoke of burnt llamas” (Ibid. vol. i, p. 484). Consult also Frazer, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. All these were divinities of vegetation, which were believed to die and to come to life again, as with the revolution of the seasons vegetation died and was renewed. Along with this belief went the notion that by magical ceremonies the worshipers of the gods could aid them in recovering their wasted energies.
240 Laws of Manu, i. 88–91.
241 Ibid. i. 93.
242 Ibid. ii. 32, 35.
243 The Gentoo Code (1776), xvi. 1.
244 Laws of Manu, iv. 80, 81.
245 Ibid. viii. 379.
246 Ibid. viii. 380.
247 Ibid. viii. 381.
248 Ibid. iv. 147.
249 Laws of Manu, xi. 247.
250 Ibid. iv. 148.
251 Even the sudra is not shut out from this hope. If he be pure, the faithful servant of his betters, gentle in his speech and free from pride, he will at death be reborn into a higher caste (Laws of Manu, ix. 335).
252 Laws of Manu, xi. 60, 69, 71, 72, 132–138, 140–142, 144. Especially severe is the penance imposed for killing a cow. See Ibid. xi. 109–117.
253 Ibid. vi. 68.
254 Ibid. vi. 69.
255 It is better, however, to abstain wholly from the use of meat, since this can be obtained only through pain to sentient beings (Laws of Manu, v. 48). There is no sin in eating meat, “but abstention brings great rewards” (Ibid. v. 56).
256 Laws of Manu, v. 40.
257 Ibid. v. 45.
258 Ibid. vii. 101.
259 Ibid. vii. 103.
260 Laws of Manu, vii. 90–93, 104.
261 Ibid. viii. 84.
262 Ibid. v. 106.
263 Ibid. xi. 231.
264 Ibid. vi. 48.
265 Ibid. viii. 312.
266 Laws of Manu, viii. 313.
267 Gautama or Buddha, “The Enlightened,” the founder of Buddhism, died about B.C. 480. Long before he began his teachings moral reform was in the air in India. Many reforming sects came into existence. The most important of these was the sect of the Jains. The central teaching of Jainism is the sacredness of all life, and its first and chief commandment, Do no harm to any living thing. Its spirit of universal benevolence left a deep impress not only upon Buddhism but also upon later Hinduism.
268 Dhammapada (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. x), xiv. 190, 191. Cf. Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 209.
269 Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 286.
270 Cf. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 21; Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), pp. 316 f.
271 Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 220.
272 Dhammapada, xx. 283. This doctrine that peace and contentment of mind come through suppression of desire was also the teaching of the Greek Cynics.
273 “No sentient being can tell in what state the karma that he possesses will appoint his next birth, though he may be now, and continue to be until death, one of the most meritorious of men. In that karma may be the crime of murder, committed many ages ago, but not yet expiated; and in the next existence its punishment may have to be endured. There will ultimately be a reward for that which is good, but it may be long delayed. It acts like an hereditary disease.”—Hardy, Manual of Buddhism (1880), p. 411.
274 “The difficulties attendant upon this peculiar dogma [karma] may be seen in the fact that it is almost universally repudiated.... In historical composition, in narrative, and in conversation, the common idea of transmigration is continually presented” (Hardy, Manual of Buddhism (1880), p. 412). By 250 B.C. “in the North and also in the South the old heresy of the soul-theory had crept back by side issue into the doctrine from which it had been categorically and explicitly excluded by Gautama and his earlier followers” (Rhys Davids, Buddhism (1896), p. 198).
275 Hibbert Lectures (1881), pp. 31, 206. Cf. Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 321.
276 But this, as we have just seen, is not the Buddhism of the Buddhist world in general. The masses in Buddhist lands have never accepted the doctrine of Nirvana in the sense of extinction of existence. The following conversation between Moncure Conway and a Singhalese priest discloses the meaning of the term to an orthodox Buddhist of Ceylon: “I asked, ‘Have those who are in Nirvana any consciousness?’ I was then informed that there is no Singhalese word for consciousness. Sumangala said, ‘To reach Nirvana is to be no more.’ I pointed to a stone step and said, ‘One is there only as that stone is here?’ ‘Not so much,’ answered the priest; ‘for the stone is actually here, but in Nirvana there is no existence at all’” (My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), p. 134).
277 These eight requirements are often condensed into four, and then the formula is called the fourfold path to deliverance.
278 Cf. Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 211; Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 305.
279 There is in this teaching respecting desirelessness an apparent inconsistency, for with all other desires suppressed, there remains the desire for Nirvana. But the difficulty here is only apparent. A Buddhist priest, questioned respecting this, replied as follows: “The desire for Nirvana escapes from the mesh that entangles all other desires, because it is not desire for any object at all” (Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), p. 134). But all other desires aside from this desire for Nirvana are in a sense sins of covetousness. And this is the cardinal sin in the view of the true Buddhist, for covetousness “is a strong desire for something, and all desire is a hindrance in one’s way to Nirvana.”
280 This teaching that mental illumination comes through contemplation is the doctrine in general of the religious and moral teachers of the East, and of all mystics. It differs fundamentally from the scientific view, which makes observation and study the means of enlightenment.
281 Buddhism limits transmigration to the animal creation; Brahmanism, it will be recalled, supposes the soul to transmigrate into vegetable as well as into animal forms.
282 “To be a true Buddhist, one must renounce, as lust, all desire of evil, which brings evil; and must live without other hope than that of extinguishing all desire and passion, believing that in so doing he will at death be annihilated.”—Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 564.
283 Dhammapada, vii. 90–99.
284 But—and differing in this from Dr. Hopkins—Professor Rhys Davids makes this perfection which results in annihilation to consist not in the extinction of every desire, but only of craving desire and evil passions.
285 The Religions of India (1895), p. 322.
286 Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 317. Stoicism indeed approaches Buddhism in this respect; but its attitude toward the doctrine of a future life was in general merely agnostic—it made no positive denial of immortality.
287 Cf. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 123.
288 Zeller represents Pythagoreanism as springing from an effort to give an ethical content to life. “We may consider it proved,” he says, “that the school of Pythagoras, believing in the almighty favor of the gods, and in future retribution, enforced purity of life, moderation and justice, minute self-examination and discretion in all actions, and especially discouraged self-conceit” (History of Philosophy (1881), vol. i, p. 496). Oldenberg (Ancient India (1896), p. 87) conceives Pythagoreanism—together with the Orphic worship—as “a bit of Buddhism in the midst of Greek civilization.”
289 Gautama’s attitude toward ascetic practices is shown by the following: “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires” (Dhammapada, x. 141).
290 Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 366.
291 This is well illustrated in the following incident related by Moncure Conway. In the island of Ceylon he was visited by an aged Buddhist priest, who came in a sedan borne by men. Asked why he did not use a carriage drawn by horses, the priest replied that “he was afraid a horse might be vitally injured by carrying him.” “But,” said Mr. Conway, “might it not be the same with one of those men while he is carrying you?” After a moment’s silence the priest answered, “But a man can tell me if he is suffering” (My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906), pp. 116 f.).
292 Thousands of rats were formerly kept at public expense in a hospital at the Indian town of Kutel.
293 Toleration is not even recognized as a virtue in the moral codes of ancient Judaism, dogmatic Christianity, and Islam.
294 Hibbert Lectures (1881), p. 231.
295 Under Asoka, it is true, Buddhism, like Christianity under Constantine the Great, became militant. But Asoka was a gentle warrior and made war gently. He neither killed his prisoners nor tortured them, a common practice with Oriental conquerors, nor did he sell them as slaves.
296 “Les paisibles sujets du Grand-Lama thibetain ont cessé d’aimer la guerre et presque de la faire” (Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. 213).
297 Edward A. Ross, The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 29.
298 See above, p. 79.
299 Mozoomdar, a leader of the Brahmo-Somaj.
300 Buddhism, like Christianity, teaches that hatred must be overcome by love: “Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good” (Dhammapada, xvii. 223). “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule” (Ibid. i. 5).
301 For the influence of Buddhism on the Japanese character, see Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, chap. iv, “Japanese Religious Beliefs: Buddhism.”
302 Laws, tr. Jowett, x. 896. And the thought is near even in the latest philosophy: “But it feels like a real fight,” says Professor William James, “as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to reform.”
303 Is. xlv. 7.
304 This dualistic world philosophy is regarded by some students of the Zend-Avesta as being in the nature of a protest against “the inert asceticism of Buddhism and the ethical indifference of Brahmanism” (Darmesteter, “Introduction,” Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv, p. lxviii). Ranke views it as the product of environment: “If we keep well in view the contrasts between the various districts and nations included within the limits of Persia and her provinces, the incessant struggle between the settled populations and the inhabitants of the steppes, between the cultivated regions and the desolation of the desert, thrust back, indeed, yet ever resuming its encroachments, the ideas of the Zend-Avesta will appear to us natural and, as we may term it, autochthonic” (Universal History, vol. i (1885), p. 105).
305 The way in which such a conception acts upon the moral life is well illustrated in the history of English Puritanism. The ethical strenuousness of the Puritan was the outcome of his deeply felt consciousness of the ineradicable antagonism between good and evil. It is all brought vividly before us in Bunyan’s Holy War, in the struggle between Immanuel and Diabolus—of which the myth of Ahura and Ahriman was the prototype.
306 Mihir Yasht (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii), vii. 26.
307 See Jackson, Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran.
308 See above, p. 115.
309 Zoroastrian ethics, as Wedgwood says, is best understood when viewed as a protest against the Hindu conception of the universe and life. “The injunction to industry, the elaborate provisions for agriculture, the constant stimulus to exertion of every kind, are most intelligible when we see in them a recoil from the faith which appeared to this active race [the Iranian] a confusion of good and evil” (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 59).
310 Vendîdâd (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv), Farg. iv. 47.
311 Ibid. Farg. iii. 33.
312 Ibid. Farg. iv. 49.
313 “Aryan morality came down from the heavens in a ray of light” (Selected Essays of James Darmesteter, ed. Morris Jastrow, p. 304).
314 Vendîdâd, Farg. ii. 29.
315 Ibid. Farg. iv. 49 (bis)-55.
316 Mihir Yasht, i. 2.
317 Ibid. xxix. 116, 117.
318 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., pp. 71 ff. It is significant that the sacred standard of the early Persians was the apron of a blacksmith.
319 Vendîdâd, Farg. iii. 31.
320 Ibid. Farg. iii. 4.
321 Laws of Manu, x. 84.
322 Vendîdâd, Farg. iii. 38, 39.
323 The king who reigned in Persia at the time of Nero, going from Asia to Italy, traveled by land along the shore instead of going by ship, “because the Magi are forbidden to defile the sea” (James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv, p. xl). But the anxious observance by the Persians of the requirements of the code is best disclosed in the disposition which they made of their dead. Since corpses could neither be burned nor buried nor thrown into the water without defiling a sacred element, they were exposed on the summits of mountains or on the top of low towers (dakhmas), the so-called “Towers of Silence,” that the flesh might be eaten by birds of prey.
324 Zend-Avesta, pt. ii, Yasht xxii (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii, pp. 314 ff.).
325 Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi, “Introduction,” p. xx.
326 “Their [the servitors of Mithra] dualistic system was particularly adapted to fostering individual effort and to developing human energy.”—Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (1903), p. 141.
327 Herod. i. 139. We quote Rawlinson’s version.
328 Herod. i. 136.
329 Rawlinson’s Herodotus, vol. i, p. 214, n. 10. We omit the references.
330 Cf. Herod. ix. 109.
331 Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies (1871), vol. iii, p. 170. The exception was the case of the Barcæans. Cf. Herod. iv. 201.
332 The modern Persians, who have exchanged the truth-impelling creed of Zoroaster for that of Mohammed, seem to have lost this ancestral virtue. It is noteworthy, however, that the Indian Parsees, the inheritors and preservers of the faith of ancient Persia, are noted for their uprightness and veracity.
333 “They [the Parsees] form one of the most esteemed, wealthy, and philanthropic communities on the west coast of India, notably in the city of Bombay.”—Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda (1908), p. 15.
334 “The whole history of the religion of Israel is a history of the development of the moral consciousness, and consequently of the deepening and widening of the opposition between that which ought to be and that which is.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), vol. ii, p. 92.
335 It may be urged that the moral character given to Yahweh was the creation of the moral consciousness of his worshipers; but even so, this conception of deity once formed would inevitably react upon the moral sense to deepen and purify the feelings that gave it birth.
336 Geschichte des Volkes Israel (1889), Bd. i, S. 429.
337 Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile (1899), pp. 35 ff.; Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 307; W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), pp. 75 ff.
338 W. Robertson Smith urges that sacrifice among the Hebrews had its origin in the sacramental communal idea. According to this belief the clansmen and their god are of the same stock, and the bond of kinship is renewed and strengthened through the human and the divine members of the community partaking together of the flesh and blood of an animal slain.
339 Job iii. 19.
340 Eccl. ix. 5; and so ix. 10: “For there is no work, nor desire, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol, whither thou goeth.”
341 Is. xxxviii. 18.
342 See below, pp. 165 f.
343 Cf. Chapter II.
344 The oldest form of the Decalogue is found in Ex. xxxiv; cf. Ex. xxxiii.
345 If we compare the morality of this Hebrew Decalogue with that of the Egyptian Negative Confession, we shall find it to belong to about the same stage of ethical development.
346 In the Book of Judges are preserved some traditions which are illustrative of the moral state of society at this time; for though all the details of these stories may not be historical, still they doubtless reflect the general condition of things during this period. There is a striking similarity between these traditions of gross and incredible crimes and the traditions of the atrocious immoralities of the Merovingian Age in European history.
347 The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian power 722 B.C.; the kingdom of Judah fell before Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, 586 B.C.
348 Cf. Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel.
349 The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel (1877), p. 344.
350 Cf. 1 Kings xxi—the story of Naboth’s vineyard.
351 “The life-work of Elijah was a turning-point in the history of the religion of Israel, similar in its consequences to those which followed the appearance of Zarathustra in Iran.... It was the ethical idea of God matured in the soul of the prophet by the need of his time which broke through with irresistible power to the demand for a final choice between Jehovah, the holy God, and the unholy nature gods of the heathen.”—Pfleiderer, Religions and Historic Faiths (1907), pp. 225 f.
352 History of the People of Israel (1892), vol. ii, p. 275.
353 Calamities were at this time befalling Israel. “The national distress served to awaken Israel’s conscience. The obligation covenanted at Sinai knocked again at the door of their hearts” (Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile (1899), p. 93).
354 Amos iii. 10.
355 Ibid. v. 11, 12.
356 Ibid. viii. 5, 6.
357 Ibid. v. 21.
358 Ibid. v. 22.
359 Ibid. v. 24.
360 Hosea vi. 6.
361 To Amos and Hosea, Yahweh is simply the supreme god, the suzerain of all other gods.
362 Is. ii. 3, 4; cf. Micah iv. 1–3. See Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1897), p. 229, for the opinion of different commentators on the possible exilic or postexilic date of these passages.
363 Is. i. 11–17.
364 Micah vi. 6–8.
365 Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885), p. 414.
366 This festival was probably of Babylonian origin. It was associated with astronomical phenomena—with the seven planets of ancient astronomy and with the phases of the moon.
367 The feast of Purim is another transformed festival; “Babylonian in origin, it was given a Jewish dress and became incorporated into the system of Jewish observances” (David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907), p. 3).
368 Thus the festival of Dionysus, which “in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits, is transmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art” (Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 14).
369 Deut. vi. 14.
370 Montefiori, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1892), p. 197.
371 Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885), p. 402. Renan speaks of Deuteronomy in the same strain: “This Thora was the worst enemy of the universal religion which the prophets of the eighth century had in their dreams” (History of the People of Israel (1891), vol. iii, p. 175).
372 Cf. Chapter XVI. The persecutions of the medieval Church were largely the outcome of this legislation which made the extermination of God’s enemies, that is, idolators and misbelievers, a pious duty. “The terrible Directorium Inquisitorum of Nicholas Eymeric follows Deuteronomy word for word” (Renan, History of the people of Israel (1891), vol. iii, p. 179).
373 Deut. xx. 16.
374 Ibid. vii. 2.
375 Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), p. 45. The teachings of this same intolerant monolatry has, down to the present day, exerted a retarding influence upon the development of international morality, especially upon the war ethics of the Christian nations.
376 We meet with the same phenomenon in medieval times. The Christian Church, which was so harsh in its dealings with misbelievers, was a tender mother toward the poor and the afflicted of the faith.
377 The origin of these cities may date from a much earlier time than the reform under King Josiah. The code may simply register changes already effected in the customary law. See Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 61.
378 Deut. iv. 41, 42; xix. 1–13.
379 Deut. xv. 7, 8.
380 Ibid. xxiv. 6.
381 Ibid. xxiv. 12, 13.
382 Ibid. xxiv. 17.
383 Ibid. xxiv. 14, 15.
384 Ibid. xxiii. 19, 20. Cf. Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 760. The poor in these early times were, in all the lands advancing in civilization, literally devoured by the money lenders.
385 Deut. xxiv. 19.
386 Ruth ii. 4–17.
387 Deut. v. 14, 15.
388 Ibid. xv. 12.
389 Ibid. xv. 13, 14.
390 All these regulations respecting slaves, however, lack universalism. It is compassion for the slave not as a man, but as a Hebrew, that moves the legislator. The laws are in general for the benefit of Hebrew slaves alone. Gentiles or foreigners are not included in these humane provisions. See Lev. xxv and Ex. xxi. 2.
391 See Is. xl-lxvi.
392 “Deutero-Isaiah was the first to emphasize and make use of this plenary and unconditional monotheism.”—Montefiori, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1892), p. 269.
393 Is. xliii. 10.
394 Ibid. xliv. 6.
395 Ibid. xliv. 24.
396 Ibid. xlv. 5.
397 Ibid. xlvi. 9.
398 There is a repetition of this in the Koran, where the Prophet of Arabia speaks as one to whom the idea of the unity of deity had come as a new thought.
399 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 81.
400 See above, pp. 18–20.
401 “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”—Deut. v. 9.
402 Ezek. xviii. 2.
403 Ibid. xviii. 3.
404 Ezek. xviii. 20. The entire chapter is devoted to this single subject. This truer view had dawned upon the compilers of the Deuteronomic code. Cf. Deut. xxiv. 16 and Jer. xxxi. 29, 30.
405 See below, p. 364.
406 See lii. 13-liii. 12.
407 Cf. Bennett, The Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets (1907), pp. 326 ff.
408 In the year 539 B.C. Cyrus, king of Persia, having captured Babylon, issued a decree giving the Jewish exiles in Babylonia permission to return to their own land and to rebuild the Temple destroyed fifty years before by Nebuchadnezzar. A band returned and set themselves to the task of restoring their houses and rebuilding the Temple. After many interruptions and long delay the building was finished and dedicated anew to the worship of Yahweh (516 B.C.).
409 “The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law, after Ezra’s reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth in post-Reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of salvation, and particularly the tendency to formalize and almost to deify the literal inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.”—Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 95.
410 For life under the law consult Schürer, History of the Jewish People, division ii, vol. ii, pp. 90 ff.
411 Matt. xxiii. 23.
412 Ibid. xv. 11, 20. “The identification of morality with ritual in his [Jesus’] day had confused the issue before human life much as that issue is now confused by the identification of morality with opinion” (Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 62).
413 Ps. cxxxvii. 9; see Ps. cix.
414 On this subject see Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), pp. 246 ff.
415 “The people had learned to draw nigh to God without the aid of sacrifice.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 215.
416 Cf. Mark i. 21; vi. 2.
417 Renan, History of the People of Israel (1895), vol. iv, p. 195.
418 Consult on this subject Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life (1898–1899).
419 See above, pp. 139 f.
420 See Cheyne, Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), p. 229; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), pp. 378, 386.
421 Ps. xvi. 10, Rev. Ver.
422 “I know without me God cannot a moment live;
If I to death should go, He, too, would death receive.”
Quoted by Blow, A Study of Dante (1887), p. 102.
423 Cf. above, p. 44; see also Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387; Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 216.
424 The Pharisees; cf. Acts xxiii. 6–8.
425 We see a repetition of all this in what is going on to-day among the Jews in the great cities of the New World. Liberal Judaism is largely the outcome of just such influences as brought forth Christianity out of the narrow ritual Judaism of the Alexandrian Age. See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907), chap. xii.
426 “Those psalms into which a sense of something like the brotherhood of nations begins to penetrate are for various reasons later than 382 B.C.... Not till the coming of the Macedonian reconciler of East and West could there be a presentiment of the truth of the divine education, not only of Israel, but of the human race.”—Cheyne, Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), pp. 134 f.
427 To Hillel is credited the maxim, “What thou wouldst not have another do to thee, do not thou to another.”
428 The teaching of the Orphic sects that there are two elements, one good and another bad, in man’s nature, was an esoteric doctrine which had no influence on the popular mind and conscience. Cf. G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, 6th ed., pp. 31 f.
429 There are, it is true, gods of the lower world unfriendly to man, but there is nothing in the Greek world-view corresponding to the Egyptian conception of the struggle between the good Osiris and the wicked Set, or of the Persian idea of the conflict between the beneficent Ahura Mazda and the evil-working Ahriman. Nor was there anything in this view like the Babylonian or Persian notion of malicious spirits.
430 The Dionysian cult fostered art, but not directly morality. In so far as the Attic drama was an elevating moral influence, the cult may be said to have indirectly promoted morals. But the foreign orgiastic god had to be thoroughly converted before he could strengthen others.
431 The pre-Hellenic Oriental cult of Aphrodite had undoubtedly an unfavorable influence on morality. “Some part of this evil character [was] transplanted into Greek legend, but very little into Greek worship.... What we know is that until the declining period of Greek history the cult of Aphrodite, so far as it appears in written or monumental record, was as pure and austere as that of Zeus and Athena” (Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. ii, pp. 657, 663).
432 Cf. Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 165.
433 Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 74, quoting Charondas, the Sicilian legislator.
434 Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. iv, pp. 177 ff.
435 Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 2d ed., p. 292.
436 History of Greece (1900), pp. 320 f.
437 Thucyd. i. 70.
438 For an illuminating comparison of the Greek virtues of fortitude and temperance with the corresponding Christian virtues, see T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., pp. 304 ff.
439 Ethics, iii. 10.
440 “But let [each man] know,” says Plato, “how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as in him lies, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of happiness” (Republic, tr. Jowett, x. 619).
441 Socrates, it is true, taught that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, but he was here far in advance of the common Greek conscience.
442 Quoted by Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 247.
443 Christian Ethics (1873), vol. i, p. 63.
444 The Greek View of Life (1909), p. 205.
445 If we contrast the Greek conception of man’s nature with that of certain systems of Christian theology, we shall better understand the ethical value of such ideas and beliefs. On the occasion of a college commencement one of the speakers, a stout upholder of the doctrines of the fall of man, original sin, and the utter depravity of the natural man, roundly denounced this injunction of Pindar’s. He said to the young people who had chosen as their class motto, “Be what you are,” that that was just what they ought not to be. He then went on to show them that their nature was wholly corrupt, that all their natural inclinations were toward evil continually, and that if they ever hoped for salvation they must become what they were not.
446 “Aristotle may be almost said to have made the difference between Greek and barbarian the basis of his moral code.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 200.
447 Politics, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 14, sec. 21.
448 For the ethics of Greek slavery consult Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 203–219.
449 Thebes, but not from moral scruples seemingly, prohibited under the penalty of death the destruction of healthy infants.
450 The reader of Plato will recall how Socrates uses this practice of the exposition of infants to illustrate his art of bringing to birth true and false ideas (“lies and shadows”) in the minds of his pupils, and exposing to die those that are vain shadows. See his Dialogues, tr. Jowett, vol. iii, pp. 350 f.
451 The practice of the exposition of female infants in the Hellenistic Age, when luxury increased and children became a burden, seems to have been more common than in earlier times.
452 Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 120.
453 Politics, vi. 4, sec. 12. This contempt for tradesmen and laborers, generally speaking, continued through all periods of Greek history. In some states, however, particularly in Athens, it underwent modification. “The later Athenians began to consider trade an honorable road to riches, and aristocrats like Nicias were known as careful trade masters.” In Rhodes, also, trade became honorable.
454 Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly, p. 62 n.
455 Laws, tr. Jowett, xi. 919.
456 They were charged with adulteration of foods, cheating in measure, etc. Demosthenes declares that a man honest in commercial transactions was a prodigy. Cf. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 419.
457 See above, p. 89.
458 This ethical feeling is to be reckoned with in dealing with Asiatics—until there is a change in their ideal of manliness. The overlooking of an injury is apt to be regarded by them as an indication of weakness and cowardice.
459 Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 312.
460 Herod. vi. 24. The Delphian oracle tried to cure this defect in the national character. See the story of Glaucus, Herod. vi. 86.
461 Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 413.
462 Ethics, tr. Welldon, i. 4.
463 Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 95.
464 Od. xix. 396–398.
465 Thucyd. i. 5.
466 Il. xxii. 485–499.
467 See Xen. Mem. ii. 1, 21, for the parable, by the Sophist Prodicus, of the choice of Heracles at the parting of the ways.
468 The Republic, iii. 386–392.
469 See above, p. 35.
470 “The blessed islands of the West were indeed even then [in the Homeric Age] a home for the dead, but they had not yet been opened to moral worth, as in the days of Pindar.”—Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 26.
471 See Zeller, History of Philosophy (1881), vol. i, p. 125, and Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 99. “Strictly speaking,” says Professor Seymour, “Homer knows of no instance of rewards, and of only one case of punishment after death” (Life in the Homeric Age (1908), p. 469).
472 For the Greek view of the underworld, and the incoming of the idea of rewards and punishments in the after life, see Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 97 ff., and Rhode, Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeits Glaube der Griechen, 4te Auflage, Bd. i, S. 301–319.
473 This moralization of Hades is carried still further by Vergil. It is instructive to compare his vision of Hades with Homer’s.
474 Republic, x. 614–616; see also Gorgias, 523–527.
475 Herod. i. 30–32. But Nemesis appears later in the story, and Crœsus is represented as being punished for the crime of an ancestor.
476 Ibid. vii. 10. The views which the historian here attributes to the Persian Artabanus were of course a reflection of Greek belief. For further instances in Greek literature of the conception of the envy of the gods, consult Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. i, S. 78–84.
477 Thucyd. vii. 77.
478 Pericles (1890), p. 312.
479 “The very event [the Persian war] which determined the sudden splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction to the already existing morality.”—Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1880), vol. ii, p. 17.
480 Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 129. After the tale had been moralized by Æschylus, Phidias carved the story on the great Zeus throne at Olympia, using it to give emphasis to the conception of the god as the guardian of the moral order of the world.
481 Thucyd. v. 84–116.
482 The attitude of the later philosophers toward the notion that the gods are envious is fairly represented by Plato’s protest: “He [the Creator] is good, and no goodness can have any jealousy of anything” (Timæus, tr. Jowett, 29).
483 “The dispensation which takes the aspect of divine envy to mortals might, it seems, from a higher point of view, be discerned as the very opposite; human vicissitude is the result of a divine love anxious to share the true blessedness which comes in the form of sorrow.”—Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 112.
484 Taylor, Ancient Ideals (1896), vol. i, p. 227.
485 Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1891), vol. i, p. 129.
486 Republic, tr. Jowett, x. 613.
487 See James Adam, The Vitality of Platonism (1911), chap. v, “Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil.”
488 When we contrast with this Sophocles’ treatment of the same theme in Antigone we realize how great an advance during the interval the Greeks had made in humanitarian feeling.
489 See Thucyd. iii. 53–59.
490 The Spartan admiral Callicratides (the successor of Lysander, 406 B.C.) refused to sell his Greek prisoners of war as slaves, but he stood almost or quite alone in this. See Xen. Hellen. i. 6, 14.
491 Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 235.
492 The war brought into fearful exaggeration the salient weakness of Greek morality. The most reprehensible moral faults of the Greeks were the outgrowth of political factions and cabals, of party jealousies and rivalries in the close quarters of city walls. These faults were lifted into the most savage passions by the war. Thucydides in a memorable passage (iii. 82) draws a striking picture of the disastrous moral effects of the prolonged quarrel.
493 See above, p. 180.
494 Republic, v. 469–471.
495 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 267; see also A. Ræder, L’Arbitrage international chez les Hellenes (1912).
496 Études sur l’histoire de humanité (1880), t. ii, p. 105. Because of its long exemption from the ravages of war, Elis was more populous and wealthy than any other district of the Peloponnesus (Polyb. iv. 73, 74). The contrast presented by Greece in general constituted an impressive commentary on the fatal consequences for Greek civilization of the war system. Speaking of the depopulation which incessant wars had caused over almost all the world he knew, Plutarch says of Greece, a land once “strong in cities,” that the whole country could raise barely three thousand men, the same number that the single city of Megara sent to Platæa at the time of the Persian war (Philosophical Essays, “On the Cessation of Oracles,” sec. viii).
497 See above, p. 18.
498 “Really to see the good and to know it as such, yet not to love and pursue it, is impossible; the vision carries with it its own persuasion and authority.”—Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 74. “Mere school and word knowledge, of course, is powerless, but real knowledge, knowledge that represents real personal conviction, cannot fail to influence life.”—Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 62.
499 “There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war; there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association—resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparities or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account; there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct this ancient mental compound, and who has not been driven to it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial Elenchus no longer stands in the market place to lend him help and stimulus.”—Grote, History of Greece (1888), vol. vii, pp. 168 f.
500 Quoted by Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 396.
501 “His [Socrates’] significancy for moral philosophy lies in his calling attention to rational knowledge as the source of the moral.”—Wuttke, Christian Ethics (1873), vol. i, p. 69.
502 Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, pp. 125 f.
503 Cf. Gorgias, 478, 479.
504 Laws, tr. Jowett, xi. 913. Plato saw what the socialist-philosopher Lloyd saw when he wrote, “More searching... than the Golden Rule is that which commands us to inquire if what we desire for ourselves and others is a right desire” (Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 147).
505 In the Republic Plato reaches the conception of a Greek brotherhood, but beyond this he never advanced.
506 Xen. Mem. ii. 6, 35.
507 Politics, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 2, sec. 15; 14, sec. 21.
508 Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 228.
509 “A moral ideal which was not coextensive with the whole spiritual nature of man was taken by the schoolmen from the Aristotelian ethics, and then the so-called religious virtues were more or less cumbrously and precariously built upon it. Supernaturalism in morals was added to the classic naturalism as a divine appendix to ethics.”—Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 133.
510 The downfall of the institutions of the free city state was to Greek morality what the downfall of the papal Church would have been to the morality of the medieval ages.
511 Philopœman and Aratus.
512 This ascetic tendency in Stoicism is doubtless to be attributed to the influence of the Orient upon Greek life and thought.
513 Consistently so, since only through self-control and the avoidance of all excesses of passion, appetite, and desires can one maintain that tranquillity of mind which is the condition precedent of happiness.
514 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 228.
515 Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, p. 264. The author contrasts this humaneness of the laws of the Athenian democracy four centuries before Christ with the atrocious cruelty of the criminal laws of Christian Europe down almost to the nineteenth century.
516 Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 269.
517 Ibid. p. 554.
518 The Apostle Paul at Athens, seeking common ground with his hearers for the doctrine he preached that God hath made of one blood all nations of men, finds it in the familiar line of the Stoic Cleanthes—“We are the offspring of God.”
519 Plutarch died about 40 A.D.
520 “From contact with the Greeks, therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that an ideal long known to the Western world, the Stoic ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the preaching of the Apostles was in this respect not out of harmony with the wants and aspirations of the higher and better minds of the age.”—Mahaffy, Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire (1905), p. 146.
521 “The essential oneness of human moral experience has shown itself in the ethical results achieved by these various peoples.”—Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 337.
522 Coulanges, The Ancient City, ii, 9.
523 The authority of the father over each and every member of the family was legally absolute, extending to life and death. Not until late in the Empire did the law forbid fathers to kill their grown-up children or to sell them as slaves. Cf. McKenzie, Studies in Roman Law, 6th ed., p. 141; and Sohm, Institutes (1901), p. 53.
524 Inge, Society in Rome under the Cæsars (1888), p. 8.
525 This Roman virtue of obedience to the state has been just such an enduring force in the moral life of the Christian world as has the Jewish virtue of obedience to a revealed law (see Chapter IX). Historically regarded, the Protestant Church, which makes obedience to a written revealed law a necessary virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical feeling and conviction of ancient Israel; while the Roman Catholic Church, which makes submission to ecclesiastical authority an indispensable virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical tradition and spirit of ancient Rome. See H. M. Gwatkin (co-author), Early Ideals of Righteousness (1910), pp. 71 ff.
526 Tacitus, Annals, iii. 16, 17.
527 This legal subjection of the son to the father, while it developed and strengthened the virtue of obedience, seemed to deaden filial affection. “Of all the forms of virtue,” says Lecky, “filial affection is perhaps that which appears most rarely in Roman history” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 299).
528 De Off. i. 17.
529 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 177 f.
530 See p. 245, on the ethics of persecution.
531 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 148.
532 Cf. Chapter XVIII.
533 The citizen army, which had been the seed plot of those heroic virtues that cast such a halo around the earlier history of Rome, had been replaced by a mercenary force in which only the coarser military virtues could find sphere for exercise.
534 “The unchecked power of the master... produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 12.
535 Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms (1888), Bd. i, S. 479–481; English ed., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, vol. i, pp. 243 f.
536 “The senator was forbidden down to the last age of the empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 102.
537 De Off. i. 42.
538 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 271.
539 Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms (1889), Bd. ii, S. 414; English ed., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, vol. ii, p. 77.
540 “The unusual enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 238.
541 In an eloquent passage Lecky thus sums up the demoralizing effects of the spectacles: “Those hateful games, which made the spectacle of human suffering and death the delight of all classes, had spread their brutalising influence wherever the Roman name was known, had rendered millions absolutely indifferent to the sight of human suffering, had produced in many, in the very centre of an advanced civilization, a relish and a passion for torture, a rapture and an exultation in watching the spasms of extreme agony, such as an African or an American savage alone can equal”. (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 467).
542 The period which witnessed the greatest inequality of fortunes was the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire.
543 It should be borne in mind that the clients of this period were wholly different from the clients of the earlier times. The relations of the early clients to their patrons were those of clansmen to their chief; the relations of these later clients to their patrons were the degrading relations of idle, needy dependents to newly rich men without family traditions and socially and morally wholly unfit for their elevation.
544 The History of Rome (1888), vol. ii, p. 524.
545 “The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and subject.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 29.
546 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 204.
547 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 332 ff.
548 Ibid. 3d ed., vol. i, p. 227.
549 “Men ceased to be adventurous, patriotic, just, magnanimous; but in exchange they became chaste, tender-hearted, loyal, religious, and capable of infinite endurance in a good cause.”—Seeley, Roman Imperialism (1889), p. 33.
550 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 187.
551 About 40–120 A.D.
552 Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 64.
553 Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, pp. 231 f.
554 Cf. Ibid. p. 232.
555 Stoicism is second only to Christianity as a moral force in European civilization. “One of the most important expressions of the moral sense for all time,” affirms Professor Clifford, “is that of the Stoic philosophy, especially after its reception among the Romans” (Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 108). Mahaffy declares that the Stoic philosophy, “above all the human influences we know, purified and ennobled the world” (The Silver Age (1906), p. 103). Denis thinks that it was through Stoicism that Rome did most for civilization (Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. ii, p. 5).
556 Taken from Menander.
557 “One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant assertions of the duty of charity to the human race occurs in the treatise of Cicero upon duties.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 240.
558 De Off. iii. 5.
559 Ibid. iii. xi.
560 Ibid. i. 16.
561 De Finibus, v. 23.
562 Meditations, vi. 44. This and the following citations are from Long’s translation, 2d ed.
563 Ibid. iv. 23. The moral element in the conception of the universal city must not be overlooked. There was implied in it the idea of universal brotherhood, of the ethical oneness of mankind. The creation and promulgation of this conception was one of the great services which Stoicism rendered to civilization.
564 Ibid. iii. 4.
565 Ibid. viii. 59.
566 This subject is dealt with by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 295 ff.; Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, vol. ii, essay xi, “The Law of Nature.”
567 Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 143.
568 Sophocles, Antigone.
569 Commenting on the consequences of the inspiration of Roman law by this doctrine of Stoicism, Lecky says: “To the Stoics and the Roman lawyers is mainly due the clear recognition of the existence of a law of nature above and beyond all human enactments, which has been the basis of the best moral and of the most influential, though most chimerical, political speculations of later ages, and the renewed study of Roman law was an important element in the revival that preceded the Reformation” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 297).
570 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 129. Lecky instances (vol. i, p. 292) three ways in which Stoicism worked for good in the Empire: (1) it raised up good emperors; (2) it led men to engage in the public service; and (3) it rendered the law more catholic and humane.
571 Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 376.
572 “In the Stoic emperors... we find probably the earliest example of great moral principles applied to legislation on a large scale.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays, vol. ii, p. 108.
573 Public feeling in regard to the exercise of the patria potestas had been slowly changing during the centuries. Seneca relates (De Clem. i. 14) how within his memory the people furiously assaulted in the Forum a certain knight because he had whipped his son to death.
574 “The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of the Greek view.”—Mommsen, Roman Provinces (1887), vol. i, p. 296.
575 “The majority of the free population had probably either themselves been slaves, or were descended from slaves.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 237.
576 Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 3.
577 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 312.
578 De Clem. i. 18.
579 Tacitus, Annals, xiv. 42–45.
580 Manumissions were frequent even in Seneca’s time. Pliny the Elder was a kind master, regarded his slaves as “humble friends,” and manumitted many of them.
581 The client class of the imperial period was made up almost wholly of freedmen.
582 It is surprising that while in the Stoic and other schools there was, during these centuries, great advance in theoretical ethics in various domains, in that of war there was no essential modification of the views and feelings of the teachers and leaders of moral reforms. In the whole range of Roman literature and philosophy there are to be found scarcely any expressions of disapproval of war. The attitude of the Roman moralists in this matter appears to have been altogether like that of the Greek philosophers. The right to wage war for empire and for glory was taught even by Cicero, only such wars, he insisted, should be waged more gently than wars to recover property, to punish insult, or to avenge a wrong (De Off. i. 12).
583 For the ethics of Christian persecution, see below, p. 324.
584 See on this subject Fiske, Excursions of an Evolutionist (1883), pp. 238 ff.; Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894), p. 17; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 147.
585 Besides this main motive of the persecutions there were these minor ones: (1) The teachings and practices of the new sect offended the prevailing spirit of luxury and sensuality; (2) families were divided; (3) the business of many, as that of the silversmiths of Ephesus, was threatened (Acts xix. 24–41); and (4) fear on the part of the government of the danger from the growth of such a strong semi-secret organization as the Church was becoming within the Empire (Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894), p. 165).
586 “Upon the approach of Christianity humanity took a consciousness more alert and sensitive, and during the first three centuries of our era all the ideas, all the sentiments which constitute morality developed on parallel lines and with remarkable force in the growing Church and in expiring paganism.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. ii, p. 145.
587 De Off. i. 25.
588 Meditations, xi. 18.
589 Ibid. vii. 36.
590 Ibid. ix. 9; cf. vi. 47.
591 Ibid. vi. 6.
592 Fragments, tr. Long, lxviii; cf. lxvii.
593 Meditations, iii. 4.
594 De Prov. i. 1.
595 Meditations, x. 21.
596 Ibid. ii. 11.
597 Ibid. xii. 5.
598 Ibid. ii. 17.
599 Arrian, Epict. ii. 14; quoted by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 246.
600 Meditations, vii. 31.
601 Ethical Essays, v, “On those who are punished by the Deity late.”
602 De Off. ii. 14.
603 Ibid. ii. 5.
604 Ibid. i. 7.
605 Ibid. iii. 6.
606 Ibid. iii. 4. Compare this expression of the ancient Greek and Roman moral consciousness with that of the modern Japanese (see p. 86).
607 Ibid. ii. 12.
608 De Clem. ii. 6. The trouble with this philosophy, as has been said, is that if one does not feel pity for the sufferings of others he will not be likely to help them.
609 Cicero, however, denied the right of self-destruction, and Vergil mildly censured the act. See Æneid, vi. 434.
610 Discourses, i. 9.
611 Meditations, v. 29.
612 Ep. lxx; quoted by Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 218.
613 De Prov. i. 2.
614 Zeno, the founder of the school, and Cato, its exemplifier in active life, both committed suicide.
615 Compare the views on this subject of the ancient classical peoples with those of the modern Japanese (see p. 85 and p. 86 n. 1.).
616 Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 3d ed. (1909), p. 67.
617 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 324.
618 Paulsen, A System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), pp. 111 f.
619 The cult of Isis when introduced into the Western lands favored illicit love, but by the second century of our era it had, in its new environment, become so far transformed as to be a true moral force in society. “Sacrament and mystery lent their aid to fortify the worshiper [of Isis] in the face of death, but, to derive their full virtue, he must exercise himself in temperance, abjure the pleasures of the senses, and purify himself for the vision of God” (Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 583).
620 On this subject see Franz Cumont, Les Mystères de Mithra (1892); English ed., The Mysteries of Mithra, tr. McCormack.
621 “It [Mithraism] is perhaps the highest and most striking example of the last efforts of paganism to reconcile itself to the great moral and spiritual movement which was settling steadily, and with growing momentum, toward purer conceptions of God, of man’s relations to Him, and of the life to come.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 585.
622 “On peut dire que, si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été Mithriaste.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5me ed., p. 579.
623 “Isis and Serapis and Mithra were preparing the Western world for the religion which was to approve the long travail of humanity by a more perfect vision of the divine.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 574.
624 Acts xvii. 29.
625 New to the multitude. Some of the Stoic philosophers, as we have seen, held and taught this doctrine.
626 The Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, and some Oriental cults, particularly that of Mithra, imported into the Roman Empire, made the participation in a blessed life beyond the grave dependent upon moral purity of life on earth and through this doctrine exercised a favorable influence upon morality (see p. 254).
627 This thought and conviction of the immortality of the individual was, it is possible, in part the outcome of the decay of the ancient city, whose fancied eternity had satisfied for a time the instinct of immortality. But when some centuries had passed, the “Romans sailed round the Mediterranean and recognized that the cities of the past were not eternal, and with the same waft of conviction came a compensating belief that eternity was the heritage of every son of man. Immortality arose on the horizon of the man, as its last glow faded from the city” (Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 341). It was the same in Judea; as immortality faded from the political horizon of Israel, it arose on that of the individual soul.
628 Though the account of the fall of man forms the prelude of the Hebrew Scriptures, the conception never influenced to an appreciable degree pre-Christian ethics.
629 See Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 322.
630 “L’humanité cherche l’idéal; mais elle veut que l’idéal soit une personne; elle n’aime pas une abstraction.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5me ed., p. 582.
631 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 8.
632 On this subject consult Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), lect. xii, “The Transformation of the Basis of Christian Union: Doctrine in the Place of Conduct.”
633 “After the middle of the third century,... Christianity may be just as truly called a Hellenic religion as an Oriental.”—Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, pp. 393 f.
634 The change of emphasis from moral life to correct doctrine took place during the last half of the second and the first half of the third century. “Under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the word faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions, propositions in abstract metaphysics” (Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), p. 310).
635 The Athanasian Creed, which by the end of the ninth century was in use in the churches of the West as an authoritative symbol and exposition of the Roman Catholic faith, says, “Whosoever will be saved, before all things, it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith, which faith, except every one who do keep entire and unviolated, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Philip Schaff, Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis, vol. ii, p. 66).
636 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 68.
637 “The virtues of the intellect, freedom and boldness of thought and the power to doubt, the vital principle of scientific research, are, in the eyes of primitive Christianity, worthless and dangerous.”—Paulsen, A System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 68.
638 Cf. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, chap. v, “The Religion of Authority and Reason.”
639 See Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), bk. i, chap. iii.
640 The ascetic movement was a reaction not only against the moral dissoluteness of pagan society, but also against the moral degeneracy which, before the end of the third century, had set in within the Christian community itself. The Church had become to a lamentable degree conformed unto the world, and had lost much of that moral fervor which characterized it during the first two centuries.
641 Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints (the Fathers, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints, compiled from monuments and other authentic sources), 12 vols. (1854). Orig. ed. pub. 1754–1760.
642 “If you do any good beyond what is commanded by God, you will gain for yourself more abundant glory, and will be more honored by God than you would otherwise be,” was the teaching of the Church respecting the meritoriousness of ascetic practices. Cf. Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 313.
643 The “Dialogue” is of course a purely literary creation of some monk. Oisin was not a contemporary of St. Patrick.
644 J. H. Simpson, Poems of Oisin (1857), pp. 42 ff. We have reproduced only a small part of the poem.
645 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 34.
646 Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 252.
647 Cf. Dante, Inf. xiii.
648 See above, pp. 175, 215.
649 Ireland was foremost in this missionary movement because she was so given over to the monastic spirit. See Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. ii, p. 397.
650 According to Westermarck (The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 565–569) charity took the place of sacrifice in the primitive cults, and for this reason became such a prominent religious duty in all the higher faiths.
651 Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. i, pp. 397 f.
652 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, pp. 86 ff.
653 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 369.
654 See above, p. 245.
655 “The suppression of all religions but one by Theodosius, the murder of Hypatia by the monks of Cyril, and the closing by Justinian of the schools of Athens, are the three events which mark the decisive overthrow of intellectual freedom.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 428.
656 See above, p. 6.
657 Physics and Politics (1873), pp. 70 f.
658 “One may find... the chief characteristic of the period of the migrations in a complete uprooting of public morality, a universal overturning of inherited conceptions of right and wrong.”—Francke, Social Forces in German Literature, 2d ed., p. 12.
659 Parliament of Religions (1893), vol. i, pp. 574 f.; consult also Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 237.
660 Qur’ân, tr. Palmer (Sacred Books of the East, vols. vi, ix), suras ii. 184–189, 212–215; iv. 90; viii. 40; ix. 5–14, 29; xlvii. 4, and many others.
661 Ibid. suras ii. 149; iii. 151; ix. 113.
662 Sura xxiv. 33. The New Testament nowhere inculcates the manumission of slaves, but the spirit of its teachings is opposed to slavery, and the early Fathers of the Church encouraged the emancipation of slaves.
663 Sura iv. 3.
664 Suras vi. 138, 141, 152; xvii. 33.
665 Suras ii. 216; v. 93.
666 R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), p. 204.
667 Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 283.
668 According to the principles of the Koran, though no Moslem captive might be reduced to servitude, all non-Moslem prisoners could, as spoils of war, be enslaved: “We make lawful for ye... what thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the booty God has granted thee” (sura xxxiii. 49).
669 “The recognition of the slave traffic by Mohammedanism has been, and is to this day, a curse to Africa and a source of disturbance to the world’s politics.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 307.
670 In an address. Cf. R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), pp. 59 ff.
671 Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 328. The author maintains that Mohammed himself did not intend that his rules should be binding for all time.
672 This teaching is one which does not show itself as a generally recognized principle in the pre-Christian centuries, as does the principle of love, or self-devotion to the common good, or universal benevolence. “Christianity at its inception did not take over this moral principle, ready-made, from any of the older cults or cultures from which the Christian movement was in a position to draw. It is not found, at least in appreciable force, in the received Judaism; nor can it be derived from the classical (Greco-Roman) cultures, which had none of it” (Thorstein B. Veblen, “Christian Morals and the Competitive System,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1910).
673 “Christian mores in the Western Empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are inconsistent.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 116.
674 For opinions of early Christian writers and the attitude of the Church on the soldier’s profession and the rightfulness of war, see Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, tr. Whewell, pp. 49 ff.
675 Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. ii, p. 205.
676 See above, p. 277.
677 Throughout the medieval ages and down almost to our own day these Old Testament records, misread, were used to justify many of the cruelties of war, and other atrocities:
Plunder and pillage were supported by reference to the divinely approved “spoiling of the Egyptians” by the Israelites. The right to massacre unresisting enemies was based upon the command of the Almighty to the Jews in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. The indiscriminate slaughter of whole populations was justified by a reference to the divine command to slaughter the nations round about Israel. Torture and mutilation of enemies was sanctioned by the conduct of Samuel against Agag, of King David against the Philistines, of the men of Judah against Adonibezek. Even the slaughter of babes in arms was supported by a passage from the Psalms, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Treachery and assassination were supported by a reference to the divinely approved Phinehas, Ehud, Judith, and Jael; and murdering the ministers of unapproved religions, by Elijah’s slaughter of the priests of Baal.—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 85 f.
678 Lecky believes this to have been the main cause of the transformation in the Church. “The transition,” he says, “from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades was due chiefly... to the terror and the example of Mohammedanism” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 252). But, as we have seen, the transition was already nearly complete before the rise of Islam.
679 In a portrayal of the character of the Scandinavians, the Church historian Schaff observes: “Their only enthusiasm was the feeling of duty; but the direction which had been given to this feeling was so absolutely opposed to that pointed out by the Christian morality, that no reconciliation was possible” (History of the Christian Church, vol. iv, p. 110). Yet in the important domain of ethics which we are here examining this is exactly what did happen.
680 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 253.
681 Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908).
682 “So great, it is said, was the knights’ respect for an oath, a promise, or a vow, that when they lay under any of these restrictions, they appeared everywhere with little chains attached to their arms or habits to show all the world they were slaves to their word; nor were these chains taken off till their promise had been performed, which sometimes extended to a term of four or five years. It cannot be expected, of course, that reality should have always come up to the ideal.”—Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 102.
683 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 272.
684 First printed in 1873, from MSS. compiled probably as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is an English translation by Charles Swan (1877).
685 “There can be little doubt,” says Lecky, “that the Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 367). And so Professor Nathaniel Schmidt: “The chivalry of the medieval knight from which our modern treatment of woman so largely is derived cannot be regarded as solely a product of Christianity, for it has a deep root in the dreamy reverence for woman characteristic of our pagan ancestors. Yet it would not have become what it was but for the veneration accorded to the Virgin Mary” (The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 324).
686 See Curtis M. Geer, The Beginning of the Peace Movement (1912).
687 Kluckhohn, Geschichte des Gottesfriedens (1857), p. 38.
688 This part of the week was chosen because these days had been consecrated by Christ’s passion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.
689 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 314.
690 The last instance of an arrangement for ransom of prisoners was an agreement between England and France in 1780. See Hall, International Law, 5th ed., p. 414, n. 1.
691 One center of these reform movements was the celebrated French monastery of Cluny. The influences which radiated from the cloisters of this convent had a profound effect for centuries upon the moral life of Christendom.
692 See Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi.
693 History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, p. 266.
694 “There was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations.... The value of such an ideal on an age hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated” (Lea, History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, pp. 260 f.). See also Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 325.
695 See above, p. 262.
696 “Ethics on the basis of authority becomes a mere legal casuistry.”—Hall, The History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), pp. 296, 326.
697 “But meanwhile by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule.”—Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 143.
698 It must be borne in mind that the spirit of the Renaissance was at work long before the Renaissance.
699 In this there is substantial agreement among historians of the Inquisition: consult Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, pp. 236 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 98, 395 f.; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), essay vi, “The Theory of Persecution”; Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, article on “Inquisition.”
700 “The case for theological persecution is unanswerable if we admit the fundamental supposition that one faith is known to be true and necessary for salvation.”—Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 155.
701 Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition.”
702 Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and predisposed men to inflict suffering” (Rationalism in Europe, new ed. (1890), vol. i, p. 347).
703 Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, p. 234. “The representatives of the Church were children of their own age.... Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest, stood by the code of their day and sought to explain and justify it” (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition”).
704 “It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began.”—Gerald Stanley Lee, “Business, Goodness, and Imagination,” Hibbert Journal for April, 1912, p. 651.
705 On Machiavellism see The Prince, and introductions to different editions by Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Henry Morley; Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), pp. 81–107; John Morley, Machiavelli (Romanes Lecture for 1897).
706 It should be borne in mind that in Machiavelli’s age politics had been secularized, that is, divorced from theology, and this with the approval of most men. Machiavelli would now go farther and separate politics and morality. This is Lord Morley’s interpretation of The Prince. He thinks we shall best understand Machiavelli, yet without for a moment approving his teaching, “if we take him as following up the divorce of politics from theology, by a divorce from ethics also. He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art; the end of that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the fundamental principle from which he silently started, without shadow of doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application of moral standards to this business is as little to the point as it would be in the navigation of a ship. The effect was fatal even for his own purpose, for what he put aside, whether for the sake of argument or because he thought them in substance irrelevant, were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong” (Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture for 1897).
707 “Catherine de Medici, Philip II, Alva, Des Adrets, Tilly, Wallenstein were simply incarnations of the Machiavellian theories which ruled this period.”—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 86 f.
708 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1903), p. 22.
709 Ibid. p. 25.
710 Special emphasis was laid upon this virtue of courtesy in the ideal of courtliness. And rightly so, for, as has been well said, “To be courteous is just as much a duty as to be honest, for rudeness rouses more hatred and bitterness than good honest cheating.”
711 In many lives of this period there was a combination of the ideal of the courtier and that of the monk. There is a fine portrayal of such a character in Shorthouse’s John Inglesant.
712 See above, p. 276.
713 The best authority on this subject is Lea, Superstition and Force, 4th ed., pp. 101–247.
714 See above, p. 304.
715 The last judicial duel in England was fought in 1492, but the practice was not abrogated in Russia till 1649.
716 Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 34. And so Thomas Cuming Hall: “The glory of Protestant ethics as founded by Luther and developed by Kant is the autonomous, democratic, unpriestly character stamped upon it” (History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 527).
717 Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 145.
718 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 370.
719 See below, p. 362.
720 On this subject see Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), chapter on Thomasius.
721 S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 391.
722 History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. ii, p. 220.
723 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 126.
724 The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 84.
725 Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics (1909), p. 232.
726 An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, tr. Voltaire (1793), p. 157.
727 See Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 341.
728 “It won’t do any longer to lay the blame for poverty wholly upon its victims. These cruel theories cannot face a growing suspicion that poverty is somehow involved in the ethics of distribution.”—Louis F. Post, in address; see The Public for June 21, 1912, p. 593.
729 Lloyd, Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 135.
730 The most practicable proposal for the undoing of this ancient and ever-augmenting wrong of private monopoly in land is that presented with singular force and clarity by Henry George in his epochal work, Progress and Poverty. His proposal is to exempt from taxation industry and all forms of property save land, and to lay upon land values, or, in other words, upon actual or potential ground rents, a tax that would reclaim practically the whole of these for society, and secure to the public all future increments in land values created by communal growth and enterprise. Since this tax is to take the place of all other forms of taxation it has become known as “the single tax.” Such a change in the tax system would inevitably create a hardship in a few cases, but a hardship almost infinitesimal as compared with that now inflicted upon the many by the preëmption of the earth by a class. The reform would undoubtedly, as claimed by its advocates, destroy private monopoly in land, the root which nourishes most other monopolies, and secure to all equal right of access to the earth and its resources.
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).
741 When in 1654 matches for cockfighting were forbidden in England the reason for the prohibition was not that it was cruel to the birds, but for the reason that the matches were “commonly accompanied with gaming, drinking, swearing, quarreling, and other dissolute practices” (Pike, A History of Crime in England (1873), vol. ii, p. 186). Consult further, Lecky, Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. i, pp. 307 f.
742 Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898), p. 18. Darwinism has without doubt also aided the vegetarians in their crusade against the use of animal flesh for food, and in conjunction with the influence of Eastern ideas and convictions may cause ultimately a great change in the ethical feelings of the Western peoples respecting this practice. They may come to regard it with the same deep moral reprobation as is now felt by Eastern moralists. “For my part,” says the Japanese writer Nitobé, “the surprising thing is that European ethics can be so atavistic as to stoop to a sort of cannibalism” (Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, p. 462).
743 See Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality (1903), 2 vols.; Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man (1909); James H. Hyslop, Enigmas of Psychical Research (1906); W. F. Barrett, Psychical Research (1912).
744 The Survival of Man (1909), p. 341.
745 George William Knox, “Religion and Ethics,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1902.
746 George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 392.
747 Christian Ethics (1892), p. 11. Lecky makes a similar observation: “Generation after generation the power of the moral faculty becomes more absolute, the doctrines that oppose it wane and vanish, and the various elements of theology are absorbed and recast by its influence” (History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. i, pp. 351 f.).
748 “It is because the ethical ideals of Christendom have become so wonderfully enlarged and perfected within the last half century that the character of God has taken on such new and glorious forms. The God whom Christian people generally believe in and worship is a very different being from the one they were thinking about and praying to when I began my ministry.”—Washington Gladden (in report of address).
749 See above, pp. 35, 164 and 187.
750 Cf. Borden Parker Bowne, The Essence of Religion (1910), chap. iv, “Righteousness the Essence of Religion.”
751 Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. i, p. 72.
752 See above, p. 18.
753 “Along with the gloomy record of the two hundred fifty years of negro slavery we find the history of its abolition; perhaps the most impressive history on record of the origin and completion of a purification of the moral consciousness of peoples.”—Caldecott, English Colonization and Empire (1891), p. 196.
754 “In Elizabeth’s time Sir John Hawkins initiated the slave trade, and in commemoration of the achievement was allowed to put in his coat of arms ‘a demi-moor, proper bound with a cord’; the honorableness of his action being thus assumed by himself and recognized by Queen and public.”—Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 468.
755 By a provision of the Peace of Utrecht (1714) England secured the contract known as the Assiento, which gave English subjects the sole right for thirty years of shipping annually 4800 African slaves to the Spanish colonies in America.
756 In the Southern colonies the opposition to the further importation of negroes sprang in general from the fear of the insurrection of the slaves, should they become too numerous. The little opposition that existed in some of the Middle States was based almost wholly on economic grounds.
757 The first abolition paper was established in 1821, but the movement it represented soon died out. The movement started anew with the appearance of The Liberator in 1831. See Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), pp. 173 ff.
758 “When Garrison began his work, he thought nothing was more like the spirit of Christ... than to bring a whole race of people out of sin and debasement,... but he soon found that neither minister nor church anywhere in the lower South continued to protest against slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him, and that many northern divines entered the lists against abolition, especially Moses Stuart, Professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary, who justified slavery from the New Testament; President Lord of Dartmouth College, who held that slavery was an institution of God, according to natural law; and Hopkins, Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who came forward as a thick and thin defender of slavery. The positive opposition of churches soon followed” (Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), p. 211). In 1832 took place the secession of students from Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, because the trustees and Dr. Lyman Beecher had forbidden them to discuss the slavery question. Four fifths of the student body withdrew.
759 Cf. Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents (1893); Zebulon R. Brockway, Fifty Years of Prison Service (1912).
760 The New York Nation of March 19, 1908, p. 254.
761 The Century Magazine for September, 1912, p. 886.
762 Pike, A History of Crime in England (1876), vol. i, p. 50.
763 Wines, Punishment and Reformation, 6th ed., p. 103.
764 Pike, A History of Crime in England (1876), vol. ii, p. 287.
765 His Essay on Crimes and Punishments appeared in 1764 and produced a profound impression. It did much to abolish torture in judicial proceedings.
766 “In proportion as punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, as a fluid rises to the same height with that which surrounds it, grow hardened and insensible.”—Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1793), p. 95.
767 Wines, Punishment and Reformation, 6th ed., pp. 122 ff.
768 The penitentiary system was inaugurated in 1704 by Pope Clement XI, who in that year established the Hospital of St. Michael at Rome. For the history of the penitentiary movement see Wines, Punishment and Reformation.
769 “The whole conception and method of these courts suggests the religious spirit and almost startles us with its indication of the spiritualizing of the civil power.”—Edward O. Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 344.
770 The progressive purification of the social conscience may be traced further in the changed feeling in regard to dueling, lotteries, gambling, and the use of intoxicating liquors. Less than a century ago dueling was common among all the European peoples. To-day in all Anglo-Saxon lands the duel is condemned by the common conscience and prohibited by law. During the last few decades in the United States lotteries have been transferred “from the class of respectable to a class of criminal enterprises.” So too is it the growing moral disapproval of the use of alcoholic drinks that has caused drunkenness both in England and in our country to become much less common among the reputable members of society than it was only two or three generations ago.
771 Thus formulated by the distinguished jurist James Brown Scott. Cf. Report of the Seventeenth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference (1911), pp. 35 ff. Professor Scott here shows how the growth of juridical institutions between nations is similar to that within nations, only later and slower. The stages of this growth are self-redress, arbitration, courts of justice.
772 See Sir Charles Bruce, “The Modern Conscience in Relation to the Treatment of Dependent Peoples and Communities,” Papers on Inter-Racial Problems (1911), pp. 279 ff.
773 Papers on Inter-Racial Problems (1911), ed. G. Spiller, p. 286.
774 For this subject viewed from a Chinese standpoint, see Edward Alsworth Ross, The Changing Chinese (1911), p. 170.
775 Grotius (Hugo de Groot), The Rights of War and Peace, tr. Campbell (1901–1903). On Grotius see Hill, History of Diplomacy (1905–1906), vol. ii, pp. 569 ff.; Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 55 ff.; Dunning, A History of Political Theories (1905), vol. ii, chap. v.
776 Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), p. 79.
777 See above, p. 240.
778 James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 167.
779 Hill, History of Diplomacy (1905–1906), vol. ii, p. 573.
780 Seven Great Statesmen (1910), p. 73.
781 We cannot concur with the author, Norman Angell, of The Great Illusion in his contention that there will be no change in the practice of nations regarding war and preparations for war till there is a change in ideas respecting the economic advantage to be derived from successful war. Moral idealism, finding expression in revolutions and reforms, is constantly giving denial to the validity of the economic or materialistic interpretation of history when the economic motive is thus made the dominant motive in human action. War will become a thing of the past only when men can no longer fight with a good conscience.
782 Machiavelli (The Romanes Lecture for 1897).
783 This archaic nature of the code is shown especially in its retention as a survival of the principle of collective responsibility, which, long outgrown by ordinary morality, still forms the very basis of the war system. Again, the true nature of the war code as a heritage from the low level of savagery is shown in its retention of the primitive rule that the one suffering an injury shall be the judge of his own cause and the avenger of his wrong, a principle of self-redress long since discarded by the private law of all civilized peoples.
784 Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), p. 94.
785 Pike, A History of Crime in England (1873), vol. i, p. 211; vol. ii, p. 414.
786 Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), p. 96.
787 Telemachus was an Asiatic monk who journeyed to Rome for the purpose of making a protest against the bloody spectacles. “The Romans were provoked by the interruption of their pleasures; and the rash monk, who had descended into the arena to separate the gladiators, was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. But the madness of the people soon subsided; they respected the memory of Telemachus, who had deserved the honors of martyrdom; and they submitted without a murmur to the laws of Honorius, which abolished forever the human sacrifices of the amphitheatre” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxx).