Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 8

question which ought to be asked of every new
advance in material civilisation, Does it foster, or at least does it leave
unimpeded, the development of man's spiritual inheritance? Certainly,
the control of nature by mind is not necessarily hostile to the ideals
which give dignity to the arts and sciences and to 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
_rôle_, 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