The Soul of Democracy | Page 5

pull in the nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: they are not superadded to life by some divine or other authority. They are simply the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must obey to grow and be happy.
If the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth. History is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical standards.
For instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. The first man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in war, "I will not kill you and eat you; I will let you live and work for me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse.
Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher recognition of the moral order.
Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and it is the worst punishment imaginable.
Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.
This gradual elevation of moral standards, or growth in the recognition of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can be traced historically as a long and confused process. There was a time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the strong arm. The man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong enough, and others submitted to his superior force. Then follows an age when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. This is the condition among the Veddahs of Ceylon, studied so interestingly by Haeckel. Living in isolated family groups, scattered through the tropical wilderness: one man, one woman and their children forming the social unit: they as nearly represent primitive life as any other body of people now on the earth.
Then follows a long roll of ages when the tribe is the highest social unit. Each member of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness of life of all the other members and of some obligation toward them; but men of other tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. Then comes a period when appreciation of the sacredness of life is extended over all those of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same language. That was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew and Gentile," "Greek and barbarian"--the very word "barbarous" coming from the unintelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who spoke other than the Hellenic tongue. Even Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism, says, in the Republic, that in the ideal state, "Greeks should deal with barbarians as Greeks now deal with one another." If one remembers what occurred in the Peloponnesian war--how Greek men voted to kill all the men of military age in a conquered Greek city and sell all the women and children into slavery--one will see that Plato's dream of humanity was not so very wide.
From that time on, there has been further extension of the appreciation of the sacredness of life and of the consciousness of moral obligation toward other human beings. We are far from the end of the path. Our sympathies are still limited by accidents of time and place, race and