Problems of Conduct | Page 6

valuation; to be able to point out the insidious dangers of conduct
which is not yet as generally rebuked as it ought to be; and at the same
time to emancipate ourselves and others from the mistaken and merely
arbitrary precepts that are intermingled with our genuine morality, and
so attain the largest possible freedom of action, such should be the
outcome of a thorough study of ethical principles and ideals.


PART I
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY

CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OP PERSONAL MORALITY
In almost any field it is wise to precede definition by an impartial
survey of the subject matter. So if we are to form an unbiased
conception of what morality is, it will be safest to consider first what
the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and
what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure
that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere
closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First
Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to
observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is
in their lives to which men have given the name "morality," of what use

it has been, and through the action of what forces it has tended to
develop. With these data in mind, we shall be the better able, in the
Second Part, to formulate our criteria for judging the different codes of
morality; we shall find that we are but making explicit and conscious
the considerations that, unexpressed and unrealized, have been the
persistent and underlying factors in their development. How early in
the evolutionary process did personal morality of some sort emerge? Of
course the words (in any language) and the explicit conceptions
"morality," "duty," "right," "wrong," etc, are very late in appearance,
presupposing as they do a power of reflection and abstraction which
develops only in man and with a considerable civilization. Even in the
Homeric poems, which reflect a degree of mental cultivation in some
respects equal to our own, these concepts hardly appear. But ages
earlier, far back in the course of animal evolution, there emerged
phenomena which we may consider rudimentary forms of morality; and
all early human history was replete writh unanalyzed and unformulated
moral struggles. Concretely, we mean by personal morality courage,
industriousness, self-control, prudence, temperance, and other similar
phenomena, which have this in common, that they involve a crossing of
earlier-developed impulses and redirection of the individual's conduct,
with the result, normally, that his welfare is enhanced. Exceptions to
this result will be considered later; but the point to be noted at the
outset is that personal morality is not at first the outcome of reflection,
or a purely human affair. If we were to take the term "morality" in a
narrower sense, as meaning conscious obedience to a sense of duty or
to the moral law, it would obviously be a late product. But morality in
this sense is only an ultimate development of what in its less conscious
and reflective forms dates far back in pre-human history.
Take courage, for example, which may be briefly defined as action in
spite of the instinct of fear and contrary to its leading. Nearly all of the
higher animals exhibit courage in greater or less degree, and there are
many touching instances of it recorded to the credit of those we best
know. Industriousness, again, is proverbial in the case of bees and ants
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard!"--and noteworthy in the case of many
birds, of beavers, and a long list of other animals. Prudence may be
illustrated by the case of the camel who fills himself with water enough

to last for many desert days, or that of the bird who builds her nest with
remarkable ingenuity and pains out of the reach of invaders. Whether
or not we shall attribute self-control to the lower animals is a mere
matter of definition; in the looser sense we may credit with it the
hungry fox who does not touch the bait whose dangerous nature he
vaguely suspects. Temperance is probably one of the latest of the
virtues, and is rather conspicuously absent in much of human history
and biography; but perhaps students of animal psychology can
guarantee instances to which the name might fairly be given.
In lesser degree, then, but unmistakably present, we find the same sort
of conduct appearing in the animals to which we give in man the names
courage, prudence, etc. Purely instinctive these acts usually are though
we may see even in the animals the beginnings of mental conflicts, of
reasoning, of reflection. But morality (if we keep to the wider sense of
the term)