Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 8

man himself. And yet it does not always favour their presence. The weak nations of the world in arms and commerce have contributed their full share to the higher life of the race; and the triumphs of a country on the battlefield or in business give no security for the presence among its people of the ideals which illumine or of the righteousness which exalts. The history of Germany herself might point the moral. A century ago, when she lay crushed beneath the heel of Napoleon, her poets and philosophers were the prophets of ideals which helped to bind her scattered states into a powerful nation, and which enriched the mind of man. To-day we are forced to ask whether military and industrial success have changed the national bent: for poetry seems to have deserted her, and her philosophy betrays the dominance of material interests.
Material success and the struggle for it are apt to monopolise the attention; and perhaps the greatest danger of the new social order is the growing materialisation of the mental outlook. It would be needless to point to the evidence, amongst all classes in the mercantile nations, of the feverish haste to be rich and to enjoy. For to point to this has been common with the moralists of all ages. This age like others--perhaps more than most--is strewn with the victims of the struggle. But it can also boast a product largely its own--the new race of victors who have emerged triumphant, with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice of the past generation. Their interests make them cosmopolitan; they are unrestrained by the traditional obligations of ancient lineage; and the world seems to lie before them as something to be bought and sold. Neither they nor others have quite realised as yet the power which colossal wealth gives in modern conditions. And it remains to be seen whether the multimillionaire will claim to figure as Nietzsche's 'over-man,' spurning ordinary moral conventions, and will play the _r?le_, in future moral discourses, which the ethical dialogues of Plato assign to the 'tyrant,'
General literature, even in its highest forms, seems to reflect a corresponding change of view as to what is of most worth in life. Already the strong hold on duty and the spiritual world which Tennyson unfalteringly displayed, even the deeper insight into motive and the faith in goodness which are shown by Browning, are read by us as utterances of a past age. We have grown used to a presentment of human life such as Ibsen's in which the customary morality is regarded as a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal passions,--a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does not fail to weary and disgust,--or perhaps as only a spectacle in which what men call good and evil are the light and shade of a picture which may serve to produce some artistic emotion. An attitude akin to these becomes an ethical point of view in Nietzsche, the enfant terrible of modern thought, who maintains that man's life must be interpreted physiologically only and not spiritually, and who would replace philanthropy by a boundless egoism.
Influences of the second kind are usually more prominent than the preceding in the case of the philosophical moralist, and they are not always avoided by the moralist who boasts his independence of philosophy. The former influences are more constantly at work: they supply the facts for all ethical reflexion. Ethical thought is not so uniformly influenced by the conceptions arrived at in science or philosophy. But there are certain periods of history in which conceptions regarding the truth of things--whether arrived at by scientific methods or not--have had a profound influence upon men's views of good and evil. At the beginning of our era, for instance, the view of God and man introduced by Christianity, resulted in a deepened and, to some extent, in a distinctive morality. Again, at the time of the Renaissance, the new knowledge and new interests combined with the weakening of the Church's and of the Empire's authority to bring about the demand for a revision of the ecclesiastical morality, and led to some not very successful attempts to find a firmer basis for conduct.
At the present day also it is the case that philosophers of different schools are for the most part agreed in claiming ethical importance for their conceptions about reality. In particular, the scientific thought of the last generation has been reformed under the, influence of the group of ideas which constitute the theory of evolution. There is hardly a department of thought which this new doctrine has not touched; and upon morality its influence may seem to be peculiarly important and direct.