Little Blue Book No 1061
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
[HTML by Cliff Walker]

The Human Origin of Morals
Joseph McCabe
Haldeman-Julius Company
Girard, Kansas
Copyright, 1926,
Haldeman-Julius Company
Printed in The United States of America

The Human Origin of Morals


The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter I
Theories of Moral Law



















First of them was the mystic Pythagoras. He is said to have been influenced by Buddhism. We can only say that it is a great pity that he did not introduce into Europe the Agnostic and purely humanitarian ethic of Buddha. Instead of that he discovered -- I am quoting a high authority on him -- that "the essence of justice is a square number." Nice motto to put up in church or a law-court! Or is that why we speak of a "square deal?"










The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter II
Evolution and Morals

The reader who is inclined to smile at the philosophers, or to wonder how the deepest thinkers of the race could wander so far astray, must face the problem as it confronted them.

Unquestionably there was in the mind of practically all men an imperious sense of moral law. Men might defy it, but they did not deny it. And it did not come from revelation, since it was just as strong amongst civilized peoples beyond the range of Christianity, or before the Christian Era. It was a great reality, and it had to be explained.

But until the idea of evolution arose again, there was no possibility of explaining it, at least fully. Some of the Greeks and the Deists could see how closely this law was related to the social interests of man. Justice, truthfulness, and self-control are obviously desirable social qualities. But there were parts of the law, like sexual purity, that seemed to have no social significance; and it was not at all clear how even the law of justice, however useful it was, came into existence. So the law was taken as a great fact, existing in the scheme of things apart from man, and "intued" by him through a special faculty which he called his "conscience."

The entire situation was changed when the truth of evolution was proved. Some writers are fond of saying that evolution describes processes, but does not explain anything. You have here a good illustration of the foolishness of that gibe at science.

Evolution said that the human race had been evolving, from the savage to the civilized level, during at least some hundreds of thousands of years. This meant two things, as far as the great problem of the origin of moral law was concerned. It meant, first, that the law may have arisen amongst, or been formulated by, human beings themselves long before the historic civilizations arose. This would explain how the ancient civilizations simply found themselves in possession of the moral code, and could therefore not suppose that it was drawn up by men. If they themselves had not formulated it, who had?

We quite understand their difficulty. But the difficulty would have disappeared ages ago if the theory of evolution sketched by the first Greek scientists had been retained and developed. Then the Greeks might have learned how all their religious and moral and political ideals had been gradually forged in the workshop of experience, by a long line of developing ancestors. Evolution lit up the whole problem, and nearly every other problem.

Secondly, evolution said that the lower races of men in the world today represent the, various phases of evolution through which the race has passed. Take a simple illustration from the roses on a bush. The rose in full bloom or decay certainly passed through the stages of bud and half-opened flower which you see on the bush. So the race passed at one time through the successive stages represented by the Veddah, the Australian, the Bantu, the Polynesian, and so on. Circumstances drove one branch of the race onward and kept other branches behind, at various stages of development.

If this is true, we ought to find every stage in the evolution of moral ideas and conscience in the innumerable "savage" tribes scattered over the earth.

Here again, you see, the philosophers were at a great disadvantage. They had not the slightest reason to suppose that savages could throw any light on the difficult problem they were examining. Not even the wisest of them could be expected to look in that direction. In fact, very little was known about savage tribes, still less about their ideas. Books were in circulation among the learned Greeks describing how the entrance, to the lower regions was about the Rhine valley of today, and how dog-headed men and all sorts of monstrosities lived where we now find tribes whose ideas are of the greatest value to us.

So we do not smile at the older philosophers and their "theories of morality." We may be pardoned, however, for smiling at some of their modern successors, who repeat the old mysticism as if science had not altered the whole situation.

Take Professor Eucken, of Jena University, whose works on morality and religion have a large circulation in England and America. Professor Osborn in one of his works mentions Eucken as one of the German scientists who have returned to a religious view of life! Eucken knows nothing whatever about science. He is a professor of philosophy. He is one of the most popular writers of the advanced or Modernist religious school.

Now, Eucken's teachings about morality -- I translated two of his books, and so I am familiar with his views -- show very clearly why many philosophers and their religious readers cling to the old mystic theory, and reject the evolutionary theory, of morality.

Let us first glance at two earlier thinkers, both so famous as moralists that we can hardly omit them from a book on morality. One was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant. He was tremendously impressed with the imperiousness of conscience. It does not, he says, tell you to do this or avoid that if certain consequences follow your act. It dictates absolutely or "categorically." He therefore, invented the famous phrase "the categorical imperative." God must be behind it, Kant said. And the answer is that there are no "ifs" about the moral impulse simply because men had, largely under the influence of religion, actually forgotten that it was their own race which laid down the law, and why it laid down the law! It had become a peremptory command, enforced by education.

The second moralist is Emerson who, though he does not see a personal God behind the moral law -- these "inner senses" never tell two men the same thing -- thinks it quite as categorical as Kant did. It is an eternal and commanding law, and so on. That is the chief weakness of Emerson's fine writings. Carlyle has the same weakness. There is no such categorical and eternal law. There are simply rules of conduct, obviously of a social significance, which society impresses upon every child, man, and woman; and there is a good deal of uncertainty about them.

Rudolph Euchen makes the same mistake. He starts, he says, from "the facts of the moral life." You soon see that he means only the facts of his own very strict moral life and delicate conscience. Of the phenomena of moral consciousness in the race at large he knows nothing. Of the revolt of sincere modern thinkers against moral codes he can give no sensible explanation. He lives in a hot-house, and then thinks he can tell us the normal temperature in which the rest of us live. And this applies to the Felix Adlers and other ethical philosophers who tell America what to think about moral law. I ought to add that the English philosopher, Professor Carveth Read, has written a much more sensible book (Natural and Social Morals) on the lines of Evolution.

Evolution has made all this mysticism superfluous; and it is the only explanation of moral law in which you can put any confidence, because it is the only theory which takes into account all the facts of the moral life.

Since the days of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer our knowledge of savage ideas has grown enormously. In such a work as Professor E.A. Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (2 vols.), which is the greatest recent scientific study of ethics, you have the moral ideas and practices of all the, backward fragments of the human race. I am going to differ a little from Professor Westermarck's theory, as I told him, but the way in which he brings together all the facts about men's moral ideas is the only way to get a sound theory of morality.

All the fine theories of the philosophers break down before this vast collection of facts. There is no intuition whatever of an august and eternal law; and the less God is brought into connection with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the moral sense the better. What we see is just man's mind in possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law, and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and changing with his environment and the interests of his priests.

The philosophers do not even explain, or candidly confront, all the facts of the moral life of civilized people. One of the most striking features of normal moral ideas is that the approval or censure of an act is overwhelmingly proportionate to the social value or social injury of the act. Wherever religion or superstition has perverted the conscience, you get very extraordinary notions of sin: amongst the different castes of Hindus, for instance, and amongst savages. You get mortally serious rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, excreting, wearing hats, and so on. But in proportion as men rise toward a rational order -- an order prescribed by rational consideration only, not by blind subservience to tradition -- the ideas of the moral and immoral come to coincide more and more with human and social interests.

Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. And so on. It would be a remarkable coincidence if this mystic law of the philosophers and the theologians, existing before man existed, and surviving when he disappears, just happened to agree so well with the social interests of the observers of the law themselves!

We shall see this more fully later, but I may give here an interesting and little known illustration. Dante's famous poem The Divine Comedy is always described as the most intensely Christian work ever written. In point of fact, the first (and technically best) part of it, "Hell," is frightfully pagan and heterodox. I do not mean that any pagan ever dreamed of lakes of burning sulphur and drafts of molten lead; but the classification of sinners, or of the respective gravities of their sins, was largely borrowed by Dante from pagan moralists like Cicero.

People who imagine that Rationalism is just a passing phase of our time are strangely ignorant. It arose in every civilization, when the height of mental development wag reached; and it was bludgeoned into silence by new priesthoods when the reaction came. It began again early in the Middle Ages. Dante was at first one of a large group of Rationalists at Florence, and in the first part of his Comedy he has not quite shaken off their beneficent influence. He ignores the church-classification of sins. Sex-sinners and proud men have not the worst torments in his horrible charnel-house. Sinners against the social body are the most unfortunate.

But all this will become clearer. For the moment I am only pressing the social nature of moral law because it is essential to the evolutionary theory of it.

Strange human groups have arisen throughout the ages. 'There is almost no conceivable vagary that has pot at some time broken upon the imagination of man and been carried out in his life. We shall not at all expect the steady evolution of social law in harmony with social interests as we know them today. Moreover, superstitions, tabus, fetishisms, religions, and all kinds of uncouth ideas of what is sacred have naturally invaded and perverted man's conceptions of moral law. But through the whole confusion, chronicled in literature or embodied in the backward tribes of today, we plainly trace the faltering rise of that human rule of conduct which philosophers, never looking back upon its humble origins, have mistaken for an eternal and superhuman reality.

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter III
The Dawn of Conscience

The scientific method of studying an idea or an institution is to examine earlier phases of it which are available; just as the scientific method of studying a star is to examine the earlier stages in the formation of a star which we find in the heavens. If you want to know how a man grows up, you do not guess. You study the babe, the boy, the adolescent. In the same way we understand the grown race, the adult civilization.

The earlier stages are, as I have said, seen in the ideas and institutions of savage and barbaric peoples. No educated person now supposes that their lowly character means that they have degenerated from a higher level: that some primitive curse laid on the race blighted its early promise and powers, and these fragments of it have not risen once more. These lower people are companies or regiments thrown off the human army, at one or other stage, as it marched through the ages toward the ideal civilization.

I fully explain this in The Origin of Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1008), and these booklets are so easily obtained, and the space in each so limited, that I desire to avoid overlapping and to assume that the other volumes of the series have been, or will be, read. Briefly, we look to the lowest peoples -- they are not yet tribes -- for the earliest phase of moral ideas. We next take tribes at a slightly higher level of culture (using every test of culture), then tribes at a still higher level, and so on.

I would almost claim a modest merit as a pioneer in this obvious scientific procedure, as I first systematically applied it in my Growth of Religion: the main conclusions of which are given in The Origin of Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1008). The general practice had been to string together a long list of "savage tribes" and their peculiar ways without paying attention to their great differences in culture. I at once reached a conclusion as to the origin of religion which differed entirely from the accepted view at the moment; but that view was founded only on speculation, helped out by references to tribes without noticing their stage of culture. I here apply the same indisputable method to the origin and growth of moral ideas.

On an earlier page I said that the great work of my friend Professor Westermarck -- a Finn by origin, but one of the most learned sociologists in England -- was the classic authority on the subject. It is the first large attempt to trace the origin of morality by studying savage peoples. But I differ to some extent from the conclusions of Professor Westermarck, and I am emboldened to oppose my opinion to that of so high an authority because he has followed the customary and erroneous practice which I have just noted. He makes no discrimination between the savage tribes he quotes according to their culture. It is quite easy to do so, and my friend Professor Haddon, one of our first ethnographers, confirmed me in my attempt.

The first sentence of Professor Westermarck's book is: "That the moral concepts are ultimately based on emotions either of indignation or approval is a fact which certain thinkers have in vain attempted to deny." This is a challenge, not merely to the philosophers and theologians, but to the Utilitarians. Morality is founded on emotions, not on a perception of utility, he says. Acts are deemed "good" or "bad" for the same reason that the sunshine is said to be hot and ice, cold. They excite certain emotions. Our moral ideas are therefore "generalizations of tendencies in certain phenomena (human acts) to call forth moral emotions." Fundamentally, it is sympathy and resentment that express themselves in these emotions.

But a moment's reflection will show that it is only a question of laying stress on a different syllable. Professor Westermarck says that it shows "confusion" on the part of Utilitarians that they look for the reasons why acts cause sympathy or resentment. Surely not. We want to know why an act causes resentment, and so is deemed bad. That seems to be of the very essence of the problem of the origin of morality. And Professor Westermarck, when he answers that question, does not differ in the least from me. He repeatedly says that the resentment of the savage who calls an act "bad" is a reaction "toward a cause of inflicted pain." From the first therefore the moral sentiment approves acts which give pleasure or service, and resents those which inflict pain or injury; and it is a truism to say that the fact of the action rendering service or inflicting pain must be perceived before the emotion can arise. When Professor Westermarck says that the recognition of different degrees (or "quantities") of badness by a savage proves his emotional theory, one is surprised. It shows only that the savage perceives some acts to be more injurious than others.

But we may to some extent reconcile the theories by admitting that in the mind of the lowest peoples there is no conscious recognition that certain classes of acts are good or bad. That is, in fact, a material part of my theory. Man is moral before he has morality. He resents an individual "bad" act before he has moral rules. He does not generalize. He does not make rules.


In estimating the significance of these I have, fortunately, the invaluable support of Professor Haddon, who says, in his genial way, of the whole group: "They do not recognize virtue, but they do not practice vice." They have no moral laws or codes, but their social conduct is generally excellent. They are almost entirely strict monogamists, yet know nothing of "chastity." A Khond chief from. the hills of India was taken to Ceylon and asked to admire how a Veddah was faithful to his one wife. "Pooh," he said, in disgust, "that is how the monkeys live." In point of fact, most of the apes are monogamous, and -- in spite of a constant statement to the contrary of sociologists (except Westermarck) -- it is highly probable that monogamy was man's first "institution," except that it was not instituted, but grew up at the animal level as a mere custom.

As to the Yahgans, I have, in The Origin of Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1008), quoted the missionary Bridges saying that they know "neither God nor good nor evil." A more scientific student, Yhades, is quoted by Professor Westermarck, and I may translate the passage:


The Tasmanians are said by Professor Westermarck to have been "without any moral views. or impressions," and the Aetas and other peoples of this group had none. A writer on the Andamanese says of them:


Considering that Andaman Islands are on the way of the ships in the Indian Ocean, and have long been in contact with higher races, this is feeble enough. But when the same writer attributes to them a belief in a supreme being, who will judge them after death, we see clearly that he has not allowed for the influence of missionaries.

In short, these peoples at the lowest level have no moral rules or ideas, yet they rarely steal, lie, or murder. They are kindly to the widow and aged. They live peacefully. They observe the decalogue better than more advanced tribes, but they have no decalogue.

It may be difficult for the reader to imagine such a state of things, but he must remember that we are dealing here with men at the mental level of the early Old Stone Age. In most cases they are incapable of abstract ideas, and therefore they cannot draw up rules. They have good customs, as many species of social animals have, but they are incapable of saying to themselves: "That is the custom" or "That is a good custom." They think only of individual acts.

My theory of their condition, which the reader may or may not accept, is that their good habits or social ways of behavior were, as amongst social animals (beavers, apes, baboons, etc.), developed by natural selection, just like good teeth. At all events, these men no more reflect on their ways and the utility of them than apes do. They are unconsciously moral, if you like; but moral law is a conscious law. They have no consciences: no consciousness of law.

And the next step in man's onward march would obviously be for him to perceive, as his mind developed, that his customs were good, and set them up as standards of conduct. "Morals" is from the Roman words for customs or ways. "Ethics" is from the Greek word for the same. It is a clue; and the next higher peoples in the human scale correspond to it.

The Australian tribes are at the next level. But there are many different tribes in that vast continent, and many of them have been for a long time influenced by the ideas of white settlers and missionaries. Some travelers will tell you how a tribe believes in a supreme being who punishes and rewards after death. Benjil, the "All-Father" of one tribe, "very frequently sent his sons to destroy bad men and bad women," they said. Daramulum, the "Father" of another tribe, was said to be "very angry when they do things they ought not to do." Boorala, another name for him, had a very drastic hell and a very nice heaven.

Westermarck and all others rightly see in these statements a confused repetition of the sermons of missionaries. Eyre, who knew the Australians well, said that they had "no moral sense of what is just and equitable in the abstract." Spencer and Gillen, the highest living authorities on them, say (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 491) that they "have not the vaguest idea of a personal individual other than an actual living member of the tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far as anything like what we call morality is concerned." Yet the same authorities say of other tribes of Central Australia that they have a "code" and their conduct is "governed" by it. These are comparatively untainted" tribes.

Now all this is not confusing. It is instructive. The Australians generally behave well, and they have a code. During one of my visits to Australia a policeman was conveying a black murderer across country to be tried. A swollen river washed the policeman off his horse, and the black could have escaped. Instead, he took the policeman's clothing in his teeth -- he was swimming with hands tied -- and saved him.

Compare the story in Westermarck of an Australian youth, forbidden to eat certain meat during his initiation period, and asked if he would eat it if nobody saw him. "I could not do that," he said, "it would not be right." By "right" he meant, he said, against the custom.

That is the root of the matter. The bad act is against custom. Westermarck goes on to show that custom is the lawgiver, the tyrant, of primitive peoples. I do not follow him altogether, because his quotations confuse tribes at all levels: Bantu, Eskimo, Bedouins, Indians, and Maoris. But the quotations from lower tribes are consistent. "How can I tell?" says a Kafir asked why he behaves in a certain way: "It has always been done." "The old Inuits did it," says the Eskimo. "The Alcheringa [legendary ancestors] order it," says the Australian.

It is the dawn of conscience: of an inner voice, put into the individual by education, by the social group. Man has perceived the utility of his customs. They are now rules; though the idea is still so vague that many observers deny that they have morality. That is just what we expect. The sun is not up, but the light has dawned. There is no "morality" in one sense, and there is in another. Is it day or night at dawn? It is neither. It is transition: and evolution means transitions.

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter IV
Religion and Morals

For a hundred years, ever since men of science began to take an interest in the curious tales of travelers, it has been disputed whether such and such tribes have any moral or religious ideas. The uncertainty was due in part to unskilfulness in the observer. Very often he made no allowance for possible influences of missionaries, who are apt to put their creed in the black man's childish language and he reproduces bits of it in his legends. Often, again, the observer of the tribes, especially if he is a missionary, asks the natives if they are conscious of "sin" and "duty" and "remorse" and "God"; and, since they have not even words for such things, he bluntly says that they have no religion and no morals.

The whole literature upon which we draw for our knowledge of the religious and moral ideas of lower races is full of these contradictions. We saw it of the Veddahs, Adamanese, Australians, and others. A very long list could be added. Lord Avebury (Origin of Civilization -- one of the first works on these lines) concluded generally that savages have "no moral feeling"; and his "savages" were, as usual, a medley of tribes at all levels of culture. One writer says: "The Reashin has no moral sense whatever; whereas it is well known that the Indian's code was high. The Hottentots in particular, and blacks in general, are said to have "no, moral sense"; but a high authority tells us that "the strictness and celerity of Hottentot justice are things in which they outshine all Christians," and another says that "one of the most marked characteristics of black people is their keen perception of justice."

One authority says that the Tonga Islanders (a high race) have "no words essentially expressive of ... vice, injustice, and cruelty"; and another says that they "firmly believe that the gods approve of virtue and are displeased with vice." I could extend the list indefinitely.

But the man who studies morality in the light of evolution is not troubled by these verbal contradictions. They are just what he expects to find. Ask three travelers to a certain region whether the natives have government, shops, churches, or art. One will say "no," one "yes," and the third "a sort of government," etc. We more advanced peoples attach meanings to our words which do not apply to the corresponding culture of the natives. It is entirely in harmony with evolution. In Australia the highest authorities on the natives have assured me that they have "no religion and no morals"; and they have then assured me that the natives have an elaborate belief in spirits, especially the spirits of certain remote and very powerful ancestors, and a relatively high code of character.

It is religion and morals in the making. It is from first to last, a massive testimony to evolution. Everything in the world testifies to it. Everything in the world is illumined by it.

Hence we cannot expect to put our finger on a point in the history of the race and say: Here religion begins, there morality begins. They rise gradually, with a long dawn. Peoples who do not even believe in spirits -- and there are some -- clearly have no religion; but at what precise point the belief in the shadow becomes religion no sensible man will try to say.

It is the same with morality. The lowest peoples have nothing corresponding to conscience or a conscious code of conduct, but they more or less automatically follow a code. At a higher level of intelligence they are conscious of a code, but it is merely "custom." At a still higher level the spirits of the dead are said to be just as interested as the living community in the observance of this code. Religion and morality enter into combination.

That they arose independently, from quite different roots, we have now abundantly shown. No modern authority questions it. And they remained independent for some time. Of the Bambala of the Congo an authority says: "There is no belief that the gods or spirits punish wrong-doing." Sir E.F. Im Thurn, the great authority on the Indians of Guiana, says that they have an "admirable" code of conduct and an elaborate Animistic religion, but there is "absolutely no connection" between the two. An authority says of the Comanche Indians: "No individual action is considered a crime, but every man acts for himself according to his own judgment, unless some superior power should exercise authority over him." Another says of the American Indian generally: "In his conception of a god the idea of moral good has no part."

Such quotations will be found by the score in Westermarck's book, from which (unless a reference is given) I borrow them. But if we are equipped with the evolutionary theory, we shall look carefully for the germ of the higher growth even at the lower level; and we shall always find it. Morality and religion gradually, and in large part naturally, blend.

It is seen even in Australia. The boy is taught a code, as we saw, and he holds strongly to it. The elders have told him of powerful spirits (or what corresponds to our spirits) who are interested in that code; just as they frighten the women away from their secret ceremonies by talk of these spirits. But when the boy is initiated to the tribe, he is laughingly told that it was all a fiction, like the "bogy" or the policeman-round-the-corner with which silly nurses frighten naughty children. Nevertheless these Australians do believe intensely in spirits, and they have a profound reverence for certain great mythical ancestors.

Take, again, the natives of the Slave and Gold Coasts in Africa, from which so many of the American negroes were brought. We have an exceptionally fine series of monographs on these natives, by Major Ellis, and they give us an admirable illustration of the separate evolution of religion and morals. Major Ellis says: "Religion at the stage of growth at which we find it among these three groups of tribes has no connection with morals and the relations of men to one another." Murder and theft are offenses against a man. The gods are not interested. At the same time these natives firmly believe that all evil comes from the invisible spirits, and so they are well on the way to a belief in avenging gods.

In other cases we get the usual contradictions, for the usual reason. Amongst the hill-tribes of India, we are told, there is no connection of religion and morals. One authority says even that the idea of a God demanding righteous conduct of men is beyond the capacity of the fully civilized Hindu of the plains! His gods, like those of Greece and Rome, like amorous adventures themselves. It is clear that this writer is thinking only of one line of the moral code, chastity. Another authority says that the hill-tribes, which are pre-Aryan, have no ideas of "moral qualities" originally, but they have words for them derived from the Hindu.

All this apparent tangle of testimonies is, as I said, what we should expect. Writers who take strict account of borrowed ideas (from missionaries or travelers) and who do not look for advanced ideas like "sin" and "virtue" and "God," tell a consistent story. The particular circumstances of tribes in all their utterly different environments give their ideas different shades and shapes, but the general evolution is the same. Custom is at first followed automatically. Custom then enters the consciousness of the tribe and becomes its tyrant. But "custom" is the English word for mos (the Latin root of "morals") and ethos (the Greek root of "ethics"). Morality is evolving.

And, as it evolves, it approaches religion quite naturally. Custom is, after all, something set up by ancestors. As the savage rises in intelligence, he sees this. But he believes that these ancestors still live, and in very many, if not most, parts of the earth he believes that they are exacting, malicious, and vindictive. All his evils and misfortunes come from them. It is an obvious development that he will come to think that the spirits punish him for violating "custom": the "god" will punish his "sins."

Westermarck quotes this stage amongst the Maoris, Tahitians, Fijians, American Indians, Eskimo, and Hindu. All these are much higher peoples than the Australians and Africans. It is a later stage.

Further, all these peoples have priests or rudimentary priests. These begin to interpret the will of the gods or spirits to ordinary mortals. And for various reasons, some of which I have given earlier, they soon represent the gods as interested in a man's conduct. For instance, rain or health very frequently does not follow their sacrifices. They have to invent reasons. A good reason is that the man has offended the spirits by his conduct, or has been "immoral." I would not call this the "dawn" of the sense of sin. It is the beginning of its manufacture.

All this, again, comes gradually. Amongst the natives of the Society Islands, for instance, and many others, "the only crimes that were visited by the displeasure of their deities were the neglect of some rite or ceremony." That was the main thing from the priests' point of view. In fact, old custom is (or was) almost the one thing in the world that could beat even priests and kings. Scores of quotations could be given to show this; but the way in which even Christianity had to yield over and over again to local custom is well known. So priests had to go cautiously in encroaching upon the field of customs, which included morals.

The second element of the evolution of religion, the deification of the more striking parts of nature, which gave religion its great gods, was much slower in blending with morality. These big spirits did wonderful things, and were admired at a distance. But there was always a tendency in some of them to become moral deities, because they could do so much harm or withhold so much good. The moon, a very popular early god or goddess, did no particular good or harm. But the sun was a terrible tyrant in the tropics. The sky might cause a drought by refusing rain or might send thunder and lightning. The water-god might cause floods. The fire-god burned houses. The wind-god sent destructive hurricanes. And so on.

Chiefly, however, it was the deified ancestors, not the nature-gods, who were concerned with the observance of custom. They had made the customs. They took an interest in them. And, although Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen were wrong in thinking that ancestor-worship was almost the only source of the making of gods, very many were made that way. Even great gods of the historic religion, like the Osiris of the Egyptians, are believed to have been ancestors. The Romans deified their Emperors. The Christians deified Christ, and the later Buddhists made a god of Buddha.

Now in the blending of tribes into kingdoms, when it was necessary for the rival priesthoods to adjust their deities, ancestor-gods were often fused with old nature-gods. Osiris was blended with an old sun-god. These wise deified old ancestors were particularly interested in proper conduct, and Osiris became in time the judge of the dead. The wicked were seen to flourish in this life. Very well, said the priests, they will get it in the next: which happens to be a good deal longer. So we find nature-gods turning ethical. Even Jupiter and Zeus were guardians of justice. They were the sky-gods, the dispensers of rain and sunshine, the fathers of all men.

Yet Zeus-Jupiter-Dyans-Thor (the old sky-god of the Aryans) was believed to have had not the slightest regard for sex-rules; and there we come to a new and interesting chapter in the evolution of morals. Many of the nature-gods had, as I said, a natural tendency to become ethical. They sent rain or sunshine or fertility: they caused drought, fires, storms, and floods. One had to gratify them by observing the rules. And one of the most important of all, when men learned agriculture, was the goddess (in a few places god) of fertility. The spirit of mother-earth was even more important than that of father-sky.

But, quite naturally, the fertility of the earth became closely connected with a woman's fertility. At first human beings copulated like cattle, not even knowing -- the Australians did not know it -- that the man begot the child. In time love and fertility became one of the mightiest facts of life in the mind of men. The most tremendous force, the most beneficent thing, in the world was the spirit of sex-pleasure. This gave a twist to the primitive moral rules; and, as the spirit of war just as naturally became deified at the same time, another grave perversion of the humanitarian code of conduct, as we understand it, occurred in moral evolution. These and other eccentricities we will now show to. be a normal part of the evolution of conscience,

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter V
Moral Eccentricities

Preachers still shudderingly refer to one of the "abominations" of ancient Babylon. They tell how the women had to go to the temple and have commerce with a man before they could marry; how little crowds of the less pretty women might be seen at the door soliciting the interest of casual sailors and other men of little taste and much feeling. As Frazer strangely repeats this in his Golden Bough, there is some excuse for the preacher. But, as we see in Morals in Ancient Babylon (No. 1076) we now know that it is an entire falsification of life in the city of Babylon. There were, however, temples (and probably an old one in Babylonia) where this was done, and where there were sacred prostitutes.

From the last part of the last chapter the reader will now begin to have an idea of the meaning of this strange perversion of religion and ethics. These were relies of the middle stage of man's religious evolution. The spirit of generation, in man and in nature, was just as likely to he deified as the sun and moon. The act of generation then became in a sense a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition.

Moreover, it was socially a very desirable thing. The army wanted men: the men wanted wives and slaves. Disease and war wrought terrible havoc, and population was urgently needed. The development of polygamy, which is not a primitive institution, was scarcely enough. Concubines were allowed. It suited the masculine nature.

On the other hand, it came to be believed that human copulation could influence the fertility of the earth, by a sort of sympathetic magic. When scientific men find drawings of deer in a prehistoric cavern, they tell the whole world. It was magic. The artist believed he could bring the animals nearer and have a profitable hunt. When the same scientific men find a drawing of a male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of a bit of mammoth's tusk, they say, "How naughty," and shut it away. Why not the same magic?

At all events it is certain -- the belief and practices based upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages -- that men came to believe that by human generation they prompted the fertility of mother earth. This easily led to what we call license or promiscuity. The great nature-festivals were marked by orgies of sex-pleasure; especially as there was prodigious eating and drinking. Priests of the goddess discovered, to their advantage, that it was particularly fortunate for women to have commerce with them. Priestesses were not likely to avoid the act of which their goddess was the presiding genius. Large carvings of the sex-organs stood unblushingly in the temples: until Englishmen and Americans came along in the nineteenth century.

All this is a very long and fascinating story -- so much so that it has been given a special Little Blue Book, Phallic Elements in Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1079) -- and we shall find startling traces of it even in the Old Testament. Here I can only show in a general way that the eccentricities of conscience in this connection are part of a quite natural development.

Just as natural and intelligible-that is to say, from the evolutionary point of view, and no other -- is another very large category of perversions of conscience which, perhaps, are the greatest causes of people's contempt of their lowly relatives. In science "savage" means a being at a low stage of intellect and culture. To the general public it means a blood-thirsty, cruel, scalp-seeking or head-hunting monster.

Savagery in this sense is not a primitive quality of man. Those lowest fragments of the human race to which I have often referred are not at all "savage." The Tasmanians, it is true, were so wicked as to fight for their land when Europeans wanted it. The Maoris, Red Indians, and others were equally wicked. But at the most primitive level man is peaceful and honest. We saw that.

At that level man is neither a hunter (except in a very small way) nor an agriculturist. He has no "tribes." And, to cut a long story short -- a process to which I am becoming sadly resigned in these little books -- (I wish they were three times as long) -- the development of hunting gave man a taste for blood, and the crystallizing of human groups into distinct tribes, with rival hunting grounds, gave men a great taste for each other's blood. The peaceful Yahgan type was succeeded by the less peaceful (but not bad) Australian type, and this by the fierce South American Indian, the Dyak head-hunter, the Fiji cannibal, the terrible Zulu, and so on.

Under this heading I must not quote. The list would be endless. But you see the principle. Tribal organization and hunting involve conflicts about encroachments on each other's grounds or areas. Conflicts lead to wars. "Savagery" becomes a social quality. The tribe, in self-defense, wants fierce and ruthless warriors. Spies and prisoners must be tortured and killed. The world begins to run with blood. And since conscience is the interpreter of custom, of the interests of the tribe, it sanctions everything.

The growth of society while man is still so imperfect helps this. Men accumulate "property," and other men steal it. A prettily carved stick or a deadly spear tempts a neighbor. With the growth of Animism, these things are believed to have "medicine" or "manu" or some supernatural force. A man can't make that. He steals it. And, as justice is still slow and imperfect, the victim retaliates. Murder is more common, and murder leads to blood-feuds, all over the earth. Revenge becomes a terrible and legitimate passion (as there is no electric chair).

Here religion or superstition enters, and makes things worse. One great root of these moral eccentricities is that the spirit of the murdered man has to be appeased. It may, otherwise, make itself very unpleasant. The murderer must die, if he can be found; if not, somebody belonging to him must die. In fact, the Loucheux Indians used to lacerate themselves after a funeral, to appease the spirit of the dead man. Some of the California Indians would kill the murderer's best friend, not the murderer, on the idea that it inflicted more pain. The Maoris, Aetas, and others would, after a murder, go out and kill the first man they met. Others would kill the first animal they met. Thousands of such aberrations of conscience are easily understood.

But graver evil is done, and worse eccentricities arise, by the transfer of the care of law from living society to the spirits. I do not envy the man who some day will try to answer the question: Has religion done more good or harm to the race? Believe me, it will require a ledger as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Let me give here one illustration out of hundreds.

The spirits or gods, who are gradually credited with concern for conduct, are the counterparts of living men. Heaven is always a feeble reflection of earth: of the hunting grounds of the Indian, the harem of the Asiatic, or the dull intellectual world of the Christian philosopher. In the early stages the active, spirits or demi-gods are even worse than men. They are generally devils. At the best, they follow the character of living humanity, and we saw how this develops. Man smites the offender or, if he cannot find him, smites his wife, children, and relatives. Then he smites the family and relatives as well as the man. He visits the sins of the father on the children and on all his kin.

He comes to believe that this is just; and the priests approve it everywhere. In early Chinese law all male relatives of an offender were responsible. The Catholic Inquisition wrought terrible harm to the families of heretics: and for sordid reasons, as we see in another book. Mexican law enslaved the children of a traitor to the fourth generation. Athenian law -- law generally, in fact -- banished the family with the father. Plato and Confucius were the first to condemn this principle.

It was a ghastly stage in the evolution of thought when this was transferred to the gods. Very early it led to human sacrifices. "Off with his head" was the refrain constantly on the lips of kings; and the spiritual kings were believed to be just as bloodthirsty. Somebody had to die to appease them. The larger the number of victims, the more the gods would smile. Thousands of victims in a day were sometimes ripped open in Mexico. In ancient Europe and nearly all over the earth the gods' altars stank with human blood.

The advance of humanity -- the reform never came from the priests -- led to some curious modifications of this. In Peru, where the priests wanted the blood of children for the sacrament, they were in the end only permitted to punch the children's noses. In ancient Rome dolls were strung on little trees at mid-winter instead of the old human sacrifices. In China paper images of men were burned. Generally, animals were substituted for men; but there was a peculiar development in the "scapegoat."

Sin began to be treated as a sort of unpleasant commodity that you could unload on some other person; Just as an Arab will bend down when you are cursing him and let the curse fly over his head. That was in part the meaning of the human sacrifice. And as the gods wanted something good, not any shabby old thing, kings and king's sons and daughters had to die. This, in conjunction with another idea which we see elsewhere, led to "sons of God" taking the sins of the world upon themselves.

But every variety of scapegoat is known. The Hebrews (Leviticus, xvi) had the childish idea that they could unload the sins of the people upon a goat, which was driven into the wilderness. The "inspiration" was quite common. The Maoris transferred their annual accumulation of sins to a fern, which floated on the river out to sea. The Badagas of India prefer a calf, which is driven into the jungle (and is probably happy ever afterwards). The Egyptians chose a bull. The Iroquois Indians transferred all the sins of the tribe once a year to a white dog, which they (more prudently) burned. The Peruvians washed their sins off in the river, as the Hindus do in the Ganges today, and the spiritual animalculae were supposed to float out to sea.

Much less amusing was the development in the direction with which we are more familiar. Where there was only a very dim idea about the future life, the prosperity of the wicked was always a terrible problem. Why Shamash, or Jupiter', or Zeus, or Jahveh, permitted so much injustice, no one could say; for the Babylonians, Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews had no definite ideas of the life beyond the grave. Other peoples had no problem. They invented hell. Their gods would pass the record of the most ferocious torturing kings that had ever been. They would keep their victims alive for all eternity and torture them all the time.

I am not concerned here with the agony that this awful belief has caused, or with the religious persecutions, witch-burnings, and Inquisitions it inspired. I am noting it as one of the most awful aberrations of man's moral instinct under the influence of religion. It so got into the blood of men that people who considered themselves highly intellectual and refined in modern times could see no harm in it. Gladstone and Roosevelt believed in hell! (I tried hard to think of two other eminent men not politicians or theologians, but could not.)

And another aberration of the moral sense under the influence of superstition was cannibalism. No doubt it was sometimes due to primitive lack of humanity, sometimes to economic pressure (as the killing of the aged often is), but it was very largely "sacramental." You got the strength or virtue of the eaten man. This led, in mystic ways, to the rather common religious practice of eating the god, or communion; though there is another root to this, as we shall see. Head-hunting was another perversion inspired by religious beliefs.

Probably the largest and most eccentric moral aberrations were due to religion in precisely the field where it claims its highest service.

One great human tendency which we have seen made for sex license. There were others, however, which made for the restriction of sex. The menstrual trouble of women was one. They were periodically "unclean." In childbirth, the superior male thought, they were again unclean. All sorts of tabus grew up, and the sex act began, over large areas, to be regarded with suspicion. Priests and priestesses were forbidden it. Sacred seasons were not to be contaminated with it. Men and women began to believe that one became wonderfully wise and enlightened if one avoided copulation; and others became wonderfully holy. Out of it all arose, also', the contempt of woman, of which Egypt and Babylon knew nothing.

But about these and scores of other eccentricities of conscience a very large and absorbing volume could be written. I can only here give a few general ideas which may enable the reader to understand hundreds of the weird ideas and practices about which he reads in works on savage (if not civilized) peoples. We talk about "the human comedy" today. What about the last hundred thousand years, so vividly represented to us by the savage tribes which linger in the various phases through which the whole race has passed during that period? It is no mystery to us from the evolutionary point of view. You see how easily we introduce order into the chaos of facts. But what about it from the point of view of the philosopher who thinks moral law an august and eternal reality, or the theologian who thinks moral law the supreme concern of a God who complacently looked down upon this long wandering of the spirit of man?

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter VI
The Christian Ethic

It is difficult to see how any man or woman, knowing even the few facts which it is possible to give here, can doubt the modern theory of moral evolution. We are not taking a few bones of prehistoric man and guessing how he lived. It is there, all over the earth, today. Religion and morals, and the combination of the two or ethical religion, are actually in the human workshop, being made. We more advanced workers have finished the job and are watching the apprentices.

Yes, you may say (with a sigh), it was a natural evolution: unguided, wasteful, replete with the folly of childhood, dark with the awful impulses of the real savage. We do not understand that. But the time came. Revelation of a holier law broke gradually upon this turbid world. God made himself known to one or two peoples -- why to one or two, or so late, we don't know -- and bade them purify the conscience of the world. Stumbling man was taken by the hand and led -- at last.

Well, it takes several volumes of this series to show that this is as false as your idea that God created man and watched over him. Five or six volumes show you, from the facts, that nothing new or original appeared in Judea, Monotheism was already known. An ethic higher than that of the Hebrew prophets already existed. You do not know the truth about the ancient world.

You do not realize the truth about Judea. Even while I am writing this, in the heart of London, the papers tell that an English clergyman is in terrible difficulties with his flock, because he declines to read certain Psalms in church. You can guess which Psalms -- those about dashing the heads of little children on the stones, and so on; and these Psalms were written quite late in the history of Judea! And the English congregation rises in wrath, and says that, in the year 1926, these things shall be regarded as the Word of God!

Other volumes of this series study Christianity in every conceivable respect; every great phase of its history, every aspect of its doctrines and ethic, every claim of beneficent influence. Nothing is omitted. But it is necessary here to show, as I show in The Origin of Religion (Little Blue Book No. 1008), that nothing miraculous or new or puzzling happened when Christ appeared. The stream of natural moral evolution just flowed on.

I do not say "stood still," remember. It was flowing all the time. In the year 1 A.D. it ought to be much further than in the year 1000 B.C. There would be no great miracle if the world were more enlightened in 500 A.D. than in 500 B.C. It was a thousand years older, and three great civilizations had meantime added to man's heritage. (As a matter of fact, the world was not more enlightened in 500 A.D. than in 500 B.C.)

The only point here is to complete my story by inquiring if the new religion fits naturally into it. And instead of making a number of general statements for which the evidence cannot appear here, let us take two or three of what are commonly said to be the greatest moral innovations of Christ and Christianity.

The first is, of course, the Golden Rule. Let us take it humanly. Nobody is ever going to love his neighbor as he loves himself. It can't be done. The human emotions are not made that way. An ideal ought to be something that can be realized. But we need not worry about this. You are, of course, aware that the Golden Rule of life in this sense -- "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" -- is a quotation from the Old Testament. It is not a Christian contribution to the pretty sentiments of moralists. It was centuries old when Christ quoted it.

And as the Old Testament, as we have it, was written only late in the fifth century B.C., its doctrine of brotherly love is more than a century later than that of Buddha. Moreover, Buddha meant universal love. Every man was not the Jew's brother, or his neighbor. I presume you know enough about the ancient Jews to know that. The Jews never even professed to love anybody but Jews; and they hated quite a lot of those. A quarrel between Jews is something to see. But Buddha, as any work on him will tell you, demanded that every man should love his fellows as a mother -- these were his words -- loves her children.

Let us take the Golden Rule in its proper and more or less practical form: Act toward others as you would have them act toward you. It is a most admirable principle. It puts the Utilitarian theory of morality in a nutshell. It is so obvious a rule of social life that one is not surprised that few ever said it. It is not profound. It is common sense. If you do not want lies told you, don't tell them. If you want just, honorable, kindly, brotherly treatment from Cyrus P. Shorthouse or James F. Longshanks, try to get it by reciprocity.

Rather a good word, is it not, reciprocity? Well the famous and Agnostic Chinese moralist Confucius gave that as the Golden Rule six hundred years before Christ was born, and nearly two hundred years before the Old Testament, as we have it, was written!

You may shake your head, and say that you have heard that Rationalist story before. Confucius, you may say, only taught the Golden Rule in a negative form: Do not unto others what you do not want them to do to you. That statement is found in the whole of Christian literature. Christ went much farther than Confucius.

Well, presuming that you do not read Chinese, and that the translation of the Chinese classics is not available, open that most accessible of books, the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the article "Confucius." It is written by a Christian missionary and fine Chinese scholar, Dr. Legge, and it has been available to every Christian writer for years. Dr. Legge says, quoting the expression Golden Rule: "Several times he [Confucius] gave that rule in express words: What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others."

At last a disciple asked him if he could put it in a word. He gave the composite Chinese word "reciprocity." Dr. Legge tells us that it consists of the two characters "as heart": let the impulses of your heart be the same as those you want in your neighbor's. And lest you should still insist that perhaps it was only negative, Dr. Legge goes on: "It has been said [it is said by nearly every other Christian writer] that he only gave the rule in a negative form, but he understood it in its positive and most comprehensive form." No Chinese scholar differs from that; and Professor Westermarck gives other sayings of Confucius to prove it.

Yet, but, you say, there is the counsel to love even one's enemies. Did any moralist in the world ever urge such a refinement of virtue before Christ?

Alas, yes. (Pardon the sigh, but I never love my enemies. I think it would be bad social policy to do so. It rather encourages the mean and unjust.) The Old Testament says: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother." Perhaps that is not conclusive, but it does not matter, as the counsel had been given quite explicitly long before.

The great Chinese sage, Lao-tse, a contemporary of Confucius and nearly as Rationalistic as Confucius, said: "Recompense injury with kindness." That is near enough; and the doctrine seems to have been common in the humanitarian ethic of China. Later, in the fourth century B.C., we find the chief disciple of Confucius, the great moralist Mencius, who seems to have been the first in the world to condemn war, saying: "A benevolent man does not lay up anger' nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards him with affection and love."

There in the heart of Agnostic China, three hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the complete doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian morality.

Buddha in India taught the same doctrine. Love was to be universal, he insisted; and in the Dhammapada we read: "Hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule." It seems, in fact, to have been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China. In the "laws of Manu," compiled early in the Christian Era, but consisting of ancient Hindu writings, it is said: "Against an angry man let him not in return show anger: let him bless when he is cursed."

Non-Christian European moralists -- Socrates and Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- all had the same sentiment. "We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone," said Socrate, quoted approvingly by Plato. Seneca wrote a whole treatise on "Anger"' condemning it in every form. It is therefore not in the least surprising that, when Greek influence began to be felt in Judea, as we see in Ecclesiasticus and Proverbs, the same sentiment is reproduced. "Thou shalt not hate thy brother," was already written in Leviticus; but, as I said before, the Jew's "brother" always meant a Jew. The sentiment, however, was now so common in every school of moralists that the finer Hebrews naturally adopted it, and, through the school of the Rabbi Hillel, it passed on to the Christians.

Here, then, is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before Christ and in the "pagan" world. I trust the Christian reader will see in this a striking illustration of the way in which he is misled; but I will carry the argument just one step farther.

It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if this moral sentiment is lofty, it ought pre-eminently to apply to man's conception of God. On what principle must Christ as man love his enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish torment? Let your Dr. Rileys answer that. And, since God, the ideal, was held to punish transgressors of his law, human and ecclesiastical society everywhere continued without scruple to do so.

We realize today that this is immoral. We inflict penalties to deter would-be transgressors, not as punishment. Who introduced this idea into the world? Plato and Aristotle. They taught the Greeks that the "punishment" of a criminal was "a moral medicine" and a deterrent. Then came Christianity, and the sentiment was lost. Punishment, as such, was more abominable than ever. At last a group of humanitarians, won the reform. Who were they? Grotius (a liberal Christian or semi-Rationalist, and the least effective), and then Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beecaria, Filangiere, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and (above all) Bentham -- all Rationalists, most of the Agnostics.

We see this in detail elsewhere; and we also in another book make a full story of the moral sentiments of the Gospels. There is no sentiment put into the mouth of Christ which was not well known amongst the pagan moralists: not even the idea of giving the thief your trousers also (I am not sure of the particular garments) when he has taken your coat. The stream of moral evolution just runs on. The world at that time, from Rome to Alexandria, was full of sentimental moralizers. How their sentiments came to be put forth into the mouth of Christ is a question which. we must answer by an historical study of the times.

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter VII
Moral Law Is Social Law

Let us clear our minds of cant. That is now an old and threadbare saying, but it ought to be put at the beginning of every essay and book on morality. I dare not suggest that it ought to be the text of every sermon, or the sermons would be too short. We talk and write the most solemn, and often the most hypocritical, nonsense about morals. This series of books is for people who want facts, sane thinking, and fearless utterance. We have now seen the facts. Let us draw and express plain conclusions.

Moral-law is social law. We have the whole story of its evolution before us. We have studied tribes without moral ideas, tribes with a dull glimmer of moral sentiment, and tribes with a moral code in every stage of development. We have put these tribes in the strict order of their degree of culture -- as is, unfortunately, very rarely done -- and this corresponds to the various chronological stages in the evolution of the race. We have seen how even the eccentricities and distortions of the moral sentiment can be shown to be part of a normal and continuous development.

If this work were to run to a thousand pages, instead of less than one hundred, I could tell the whole wonderful story in fascinating detail. But we have seen enough here to convince any person; and other books develop the more important points. Moral law slowly dawns in the mind of the human race as a regulation of a man's relations with his fellows in the interest of social life. It is quite independent of religion, since it has entirely different roots in human psychology. It later partly by natural development and partly owing to the increasing ambition of priests, blends with religion. But it is still overwhelmingly human and utilitarian. Justice, honor, truthfulness, honesty, fidelity, and hospitality are its main lines. It is only at a late stage that it begins to include "virtues" and "vices" the utilitarian character of which can be disputed; and this development is plainly due in part to the -- to the primitive mind -- mysterious "uncleanness" of a woman's sexual physiology and to priestly calculations. Consecrated men and women find this an effective way of standing out from and above the common crowd. Virginity becomes the most shining of virtues.

We now see plainly how superfluous is the work of moral philosophers. This, they will say, is a "superficial" sketch, and they are "Profound." It is wholly untrue. What I have given the reader is a compilation of the most essential facts about the evolution of morals (never noticed by these theorists) and a series of the most rigorous and logical deductions from them. What they give their readers is an analysis of the "conscience" of a highly cultivated and refined modern man, in whose mind the influences of Christianity and a dozen other religions are confused with plain moral law.

It may be said that I explain the conscience of the savage and they explain the conscience of civilized man. They will themselves say -- I know the rhetoric well -- that it is quite natural that the more obtuse and coarser mind of the savage should first perceive the less refined and more utilitarian aspects of moral law, but as the mind of man becomes more sensitive and receptive, it perceives the finer shades of this august reality which has been slowly breaking through the mists. We now, they say, recognize "self-regarding" virtues, as well as rules of social value; and these, they insist, are completely inexplicable on the social or utilitarian theory of morals, yet are the most precious elements of character.

In this series of works I am not concerned with philosophers, as such. Not one of them is an orthodox Christian, and very few of them believe in any kind of God whom the plain man can understand. But the mysticism of philosophy in this respect encourages those who believe in God to suppose that in conscience we really have a reality, a fact, which science cannot explain, and which points, as Eucken says, to a spiritual and supernatural order. So let us work out the matter candidly.

At the time when I was a professor of philosophy (moral as well as mental) and a priest, it was my duty to know every detail of this controversy about ethics; and the controversy was then at its height, on account of the recent rise and rapid spread of Agnosticism. You cannot, on Agnostic principles, maintain the fine "self-regarding virtues," it was said to Rationalists. Since a self-regarding virtue obviously means one that does not affect our fellows, for good or evil, how could we urge it on social principles?

In the first place, we could not enforce it, we should have little force even in urging it upon the mass of mankind, but we could maintain it without the least inconsistency. It is possible for any group of men and women to set up a standard of character which they think admirable, and maintain it because they think it admirable. They may, as members of Ethical Culture Societies do, say that they will cultivate "the good life for its own sake." They think a chaste and obstemious man or woman far superior to one who is not chaste or one who drinks beer and smokes. There is no reason in the world why they should not maintain and practice their ideal; and they are, in general, admirable (if somewhat narrow-minded) bodies of men and women, of higher than the average Christian character.

But as I have pointed out to them for years, having lectured for them for three decades, there is not the slightest use in appealing to large bodies of people to "cultivate the good life for its own sake." Only those who share their taste, their standard of character, will join. They make no progress.

That proves the failure of Rationalists to sustain character, says the moral philosopher. In point of fact, one of the leading British philosophers, Professor Bosanquet, who used to lecture in the Ethical Movement, quitted it a few years before his death, making precisely this statement. Religion was necessary, he said. What, then, did he offer the world instead as a basis of conduct? Hegelian Absolutism -- the most incomprehensible of all the metaphysical webs that were ever spun by the great spiders!

Let us be practical. What are these self-regarding virtues which cannot be sustained or enforced on social principles, and the command of which in the human conscience today disproves the social theory of morality?

First, of course, chastity: in fact, one may as well say, first and second and third and last -- chastity. The great struggle is about chastity or purity. I am going to face that very candidly and fully, and I devote the next and last chapter to it. Let us be quite sure that it is the only point.

As a rule it is said that the three great vices are impurity, drinking and gambling. Impurity, as I said, we take up in the next chapter. Gambling on a small scale is so little connected with morality that I have known parsons and bishops to indulge in it, with a laugh. Practically everybody will admit that it becomes a "vice" only when it is liable to have consequences for others, for your wife and children. In fact, the girl who gambles in a club at New York or London, or even Cincinnati or Kansas City, often runs the risk of very serious consequences, as everybody knows. In other words, when gambling is a vice, it is because of its consequences.

As for drunkenness, I have never been drunk except once (in Prohibitionist Chicago) when a man whose character I did not at the time know secretly drugged my innocent wine with alcohol. Most of us have not the least temptation to get drunk. It means illness, incapacity for work, hours of misery for an hour's pleasure. In grave cases of habitual drunkenness injury is done to dependents, and the social principle at once enters. In cases of occasional drunkenness there is no need to invoke the moralist. The next morning will preach its own sermon. The idea that we shall all get drunk more frequently when we cease to believe in God is one of the funniest of propositions. In point of statistical fact, drunkenness during the last hundred years has decayed in almost the same proportion as religion.

In respect of all three "major vices" we shall prove that the world has grown steadily better while ethical philosophers and preachers were proving to demonstration that it must be growing steadily worse.

Well, what are the other self-regarding virtues? Truthfulness? Theologians have always dealt with veracity as a utilitarian quality. The little lie, the "white lie," was only a venial sin. The lie that injured others was proportionately grave. In fact, truthfulness is so obviously a desirable social quality that it is absurd, to mention it in this controversy.

What about unseen acts? Either they have consequences to others (and therefore fall under the social code) or consequences to the man himself (in which case he is a fool rather than immoral) or no consequences at all. The only serious case is that of sexual behavior, and we discuss it presently.

But can we maintain a fine sense of honor, generosity, loyalty, and unselfishness? You have only to reflect on the human consequences if we could not, the human advantages if we could, to answer yourself. No system of morals or religion ever did maintain such a standard generally. The task still lies before the race. We are steadily getting nearer to it. Take the word "utility" in its broadest (but quite legitimate) sense, and ask yourself whether it would be of any "utility" to the race to have all men, or even the minority, strictly honorable, chivalrous, loyal, generous, kindly and good-natured. The human value to each and all of us would be incalculable.

Finally, remember that there is such a thing as a momentum of character. I mean that a fine character once formed (a splendid human asset) expresses itself in every act. The honorableness and generosity extend to things where, on strict calculation, the man might act otherwise. I have known thousands of such characters, Christian and Agnostic. They are not tempted to betray a confidence, as another man would be. They are not tempted to steal or cheat when nobody looks on. Rhetoric apart, we want a better society composed of such men and women; and the intrinsic human value of such an ideal, the happiness and comfort and welfare it would bring, make it an essential part of our code of social morals. Some day right conduct will be automatic,

The Human Origin of Morals

Chapter VIII
The Revolt Against Morality

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

I may assume that even my Fundamentalist readers have heard of one philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. You heard of him first during the war. You may not know that he loathed bloodshed and brawling, and, like Haeckel, heavily criticized the beer-drinking and dueling of German students; but you were convinced that he was responsible for that shocking demoralization of Germany of which you heard so much.

Next you heard of him from William Jennings Bryan and Dr. Riley and whatever preacher you sit under wherever you may be. An appalling murder (with awful details which were never published) was committed by two abnormal boys in Chicago. To save them, Clarence Darrow put the blame on their reading of Nietzsche: not on Nietzsche, as you were assured that this "great scientist" (he was not a scientist at all, but a literary man) and "German" (really of Polish blood) and "Darwinian" (he knew next to nothing about Darwinism), proved that evolution made an end of all morals.

Probably you heard that a Briton named George Bernard Shaw said the same thing; but as he happens to be a fierce anti-Darwinist, he may not have been mentioned. At all events, you will have heard that there was a terrible man in America named Wiggam, who "gave the show away" in the same manner. I could give you a dozen other names.

I have an esteemed friend in England whom I avoid as much as possible. Throughout a long life he has never played cards, never smoked, never tasted beer or wine, never entered a theatre.... How he comes to possess two children is a mystery to me. But he is one of the most ardent Nietzscheans in England.

Strange, isn't it? He is one of the gentlest of men. To tell you the truth, so was Nietzsche. He loathed bloodshed, cruelty, meanness, injustice, hypocrisy, and lies. The sight of all this in the world drove him mad. But he was not mad when he wrote his great works. For the grown man, who can understand them, they are a splendid tonic and inspiration. But he wrote, however, in paradoxes and fiery exaggerations, as high-strung prophets do. And he did make very serious mistakes, as most men did in the infancy of science.

Nietzsche, though not a scientist, heard about Darwin, and misunderstood him. He supposed that Darwin really said what Fundamentalist writers make him say: that all progress depends on a bloody struggle for life, so there must be no mercy or philanthropy. What Darwin said was that in animal evolution, in the remote past, the law (or fact) had been bloody struggle. Darwin never dealt with the laws of human progress, now and in the future. In fact, he expressly defended humanitarianism.

You see the simple mistake of Nietzsche, and of others who do not understand science. He thought that modern society was running counter to the essential laws of life. He thought -- this was another great mistake -- that Christianity had brought into the world the moral principles which made us help the weak. He thought all this would ruin the race, and so in pure humanitarian zeal he fought morals and he fought Christianity. It is not strictly true that he rejected all moral principle. He was one of the most moral of men. He rejected the current morality as a "slave-morality," and wanted it changed to a higher.

However, you need not worry about Nietzsche. Very few follow him, or ever will follow him, in his errors. You need not worry about your Wiggams. They are, not "advanced," but forty years out of date. You need not worry about G.B. Shaw. He is the only real Shavian, as far as his essential ideas are concerned, in England.

But there is one respect in which these anti-moral writers have the support of a very large number of the most brilliant authors (chiefly novelists and dramatists) of modern times, and it has to be seriously considered. They attack morality. Do not shudder: it does not promote understanding. I know many of these men well. They are men of higher character than you and I. Let us understand it.

When you say "morals," most people think of the generally accepted code as regards sex. That is why they attack morals. They do not admit those sex rules. In other words, instead of the whole educated and refined world being agreed upon the contents of the moral law, as philosophers and theologians say, half the most influential writers and artists of modern times reject what these philosophers and theologians regard as its essential contents: sex-regulations. And, as half or more of the educated and refined people of the modern world prefer these writers to all others, you have a plain indication that moral law in regard to sex is very widely and seriously disputed in some respects.

It is a simple and natural situation. I have described how religion and morals have been blended for tens of thousands of years. We have also seen how, under the influence of religion, ideas got into the moral code which were not original parts of it. Now, in the twentieth century, the world is discarding religion, and it is therefore re-examining its moral code. Are there any elements of it which are purely ecclesiastical in origin? If so, they do not concern us. Are we to follow blindly the code of the Middle Ages?

Nobody does; not even Catholics. We have altered line after line of the moral ideal. Pride is no longer the greatest sin. Asceticism is no longer the greatest virtue. Priestly celibacy will probably be abandoned in the Roman Church. Birth-control is practiced generally by educated clergymen. The serious question is whether "chastity," as such, is another of these ancient errors.

Before you throw up your arms, reflect. It never was observed by the bulk of the community. Rupert Hughes has lately shown that even in the Puritan days in America "vice" was rampant. So do not begin to paint a frightful coming degeneration.

Or, rather, do paint this coming degeneration. Work out the consequences. But do not begin by saying that women and children will not dare to venture out, etc. The police will see to that. The world gets safer for them every decade. Well then. ... You see, when you try to work out the consequences, you come to this conclusion: Many things will be done in violation of Christian law, but those who are not Christians can hardly be expected to observe a purely Christian law. As to any possible social consequences, our principles cover all that. There will still be law.

It is no use your squirming. Social consequences will be attended to by society. Any act which involves injustice or does an injury is, and will remain, immoral. It is as much a part of our law as yours; and we, apparently, get it better observed by pointing out that it is a human and social law. The man who brings trouble upon a woman is guilty of a crime. The husband or wife who stealthily breaks the marriage contract, and expects the other spouse to keep it, flagrantly violates the law of justice.... Yes, I know; many will do it. They always did.

So the evolutionary or social or what is broadly called Utilitarian theory of morals smiles at all these supposed difficulties. Some things will be no longer considered "immoral" which once were thought immoral! as has happened repeatedly. An act that injures no one in any way will be regarded as a man's or woman's own business. Hypocrisy, secret violations of contract, lies -- all the things that have accompanied the universal "immorality" of the past -- will slowly disappear. It will take time, a very long time. We have inherited a dreadful past. But we are gradually getting more frankness, courage, honorableness, and consideration for others. Out of that dark, abhorrent chaos which we have surveyed a new order is rising: the finer and happier order of Shelley's Prometheus:

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