Josephus Nelson Larned

“ Perhaps it is enough to note the fact that, being incident as they are to intrinsic relations, self-existing in man, which undergo no complication and no change, the moral notions that define them may easily have been quite as distinct at some earlier stages of human culture as they are now. If they manifest themselves no more potently in conduct than they did twenty centuries ago—which seems doubtful, upon the whole—the fact must show us how little our modern civilization has yet advanced the race in moral discipline, whatever gains in moral knowledge it may have brought. ”

“ Is there less ruthlessness in the pursuit of ambitious or avaricious ends? Has any nobler type of character been fashioned by all your schools and institutions than the type of Socrates and Plato? Is your democratic Yankee, with his newspaper, his caucus, his party "platform," and his patent ballot-box, a more admirable patriot than the grim republican of old Rome? Is your modern mechanic, with his cunning tools and his marvelous engines, a more honest workman than the patient cathedral-builders of the middle ages? ”

“ The patriarchal family, the clan, the gens the tribe, seem to have always, at a certain stage in the development of humanity, circumscribed for each man his recognition of other men as human fellows, and his perception of the relations which he sustains to them as such. Within that close circle of recognized relationships, however, we can find in the primitive states of society almost as perfect a determination of moral rights and obligations, so far as many particulars of conduct are concerned, as we find in the civilized communities of the present day. ”

“ Such relations as exist between the individual man and his fellows at large, in the united body which we call society; but it will be found that a man's relations to society are only the sum of his relations to the several members of it, and that society, in fact, is nothing more to him than a congregation of the persons between whom and himself he comes to recognize that there are relations of human fellowship existing. Nothing new, as a true factor in morals, is introduced by social organization—not even by the institution of government ”

“ They do not belittle the modern triumphs of the race in commerce, science, art, invention, and organization. But they look upon all this as an evil, delusive, vainglorious show—a devil's work of tinsel and veneer—a bubble-blown fabric, quite empty of the substance of eternal things. ”

“ In ancient Greece, even at the golden prime of that splendid narrow culture which exhibited itself so incomparably in art, in literature, and in civic virtue, the moral rules which concern liberty and life, and the simpler of the moral rules which concern rights of property, were defined very perfectly as between the fellow-citizens of each state, and between the kindred states, but very imperfectly beyond that strict limit of familiar association. The stranger, the alien, the enslaved captive, the barbarian of the non-Hellenic world, were not human fellows to the Greek ”

“ It is this: that the particulars of conduct in which the moral advancement of the human race is most obvious and indisputable are exactly and entirely those which we have seen to be incident to the direct relations of human fellowship, and that the qualities developed are entirely those which appertain to that relationship, having their root in benevolence and justice alone. On the one hand, charities, friendships, institutions of kindly helpfulness, and all generous, gentle amenities of social intercourse ”

“ Yes; there certainly is something involved in morals beyond the knowledge of right and wrong; some kind of a force, or some kind of a law of feeling in man, which constrains him toward the right line of conduct when he has discerned it. That it only operates in coincidence with his perception of the line of right—that men, in other words, have no conscience with respect to wrongful deeds which they have not yet recognized as wrongful—appears to be shown by all the facts of human history. If it were otherwise, the Greek should have had a conscience to protest against infanticide ”

“ They insist that there has been no moral growth in human nature, as a whole, to accompany the evolution of rational faculties and powers; and that, while human conduct has been gathering its potent gains of prudence, ingenuity, skillfulness, and the like—which are qualities relative to means and ends—it has gained, on the whole, in the absolute qualities of rightness and goodness, either nothing at all or less. ”

“ But I may safely say that civilization is a certain cumulative succession of modifications or changes in the state and character of men—which indicates the conception quite distinctly enough, and excludes every matter of debate. In like manner I may avoid the disputations of the ethical schools, and yet set out a notion of morals that will serve every present purpose of thinking, if I say that moral philosophy has for its subject human conduct, considered with reference to whatever absolute qualities may be found in it. ”

“ Is there not more trickishness, more cheating, more fraud, more overreaching, more adulteration, more sham, more outside pretension and inside falsity? Are they as true in political action to the state in which they have united and incorporated themselves? Is there as much genuine patriotism? Is there not more political corruption and neglect of political duty? These are certainly the questions which stagger the optimist most. ”

“ If it has not yet curtailed the devices of fraud, and if men make dishonest use of the knowledge and the skill that they have gained in every art, even more, perhaps, than their fathers used the scantier methods of fraud which they knew, the reason seems to be explained, and I can find nothing in the fact to argue against a final ripening of moral fruits in this region of human conduct, as well as in the rest. ”

“ He cannot help losing the sense of strangeness and of remoteness in his cognition of other men, even though they inhabit the antipodes. He cannot resist the influence of the association into which he is thrown with all men, of all nations, races, classes, and creeds, and he necessarily extends to them, more and more in common, his recognition of human fellowship. In other words, he generalizes more and more his notions of right conduct toward men, because his clear perception of those relations of fellowship upon which such notions are based has become a general instead of a partial one. ”

“ The dispute of the moralists has reference, not to any characteristic of the qualities in conduct which we cognize as moral, but to the mode in which they are cognized. Our conception of such qualities involves the conception of absoluteness in them, and it is only by that notion of absoluteness that they are distinguished from the other qualities which appear in human conduct, such as wisdom, prudence, ingenuity, and the like. ”

“ It may be that men have acquired larger perceptions of right without being trained to obey them any better, except in a few directions of conduct, where the least resistance of opposing appetites and passions is encountered. But still it must be true that all culture tends, first, to develop the moral intelligence which forms right notions of conduct, and, finally, to perfect the moral discipline which makes conduct obedient to them. ”

“ However the sullen pessimist may disparage them, as sentimental and superficial, the moral quality in them is unmistakable. He yields, therefore, to the evidence of a moral growth of human character in these amiable directions, but he contends that it is all awry, and more deforming than otherwise in the result. He points to the other sides of the historical exhibition of humanity, and asks us what we can find to please us in the total showing. Is there less hypocrisy among men, he demands to know, than there was twenty centuries ago? ”

“ We are brought, then, face to face with the fact that there are certain directions in which the process of civilization appears to be much more certainly a process of moral development, as evinced in human conduct and character, than it does in others; certain particulars of conduct, that is, in which the fact of moral progress is undeniable, and certain others in which, at least, it is open to doubt. ”

“ In some of these, the person and the thing have been pushed apart to a wide remove from one another; in others, the association of ownership between them is subtilely conditioned by various circumstances and contingencies; in others, several persons are associated with the same thing, in common ownership, or with a succession of rights in it, or with rights that are various in degree; in still others, the thing which is the subject of property is a pure figment of the brain—the mere idea of a property-right which has itself become property by a convenient fiction. ”

“ But such beliefs are accepted at last and acted upon and reasoned upon, exactly as though they held in each man's mind the firmest ground that his own perceptions and his own reason could give them. It has appeared to be the same with all the larger generalizations in morals. They are diffused in society by the propagation which we call a growth of public opinion, and they sometimes enforce themselves in the moral code of a community even before the major part of its members have half recognized the ground of fact upon which they rest. ”

“ It is a relationship to which nothing in human conduct can be incident primarily, however powerful an influence upon conduct may be referred to it secondarily. The emotions of religion, induced by a conscious relationship of responsibility to some supreme, divine government in the universe, give a color of their own, it is true, to the quality of human acts, but they do not assume to impart that quality nor to change it. ”

“ There are social states still existing, as I have said, in which one man's cognition of another seems to be very slightly different from his cognition of brute creatures, and we may take these to represent one of the primitive stages of human development. But progress occurred in the evolution of consciousness, until the attributes of the subjective "self," which it had cognized first, became more or less perfectly projected upon an objective "self," and one man recognized in another a repetition of the same fact of existence which he found in his own being ”

“ There seem to be two forms in which the absoluteness of quality that we are searching after in human conduct is found appertaining to these intrinsic relationships. We have it, I think, in the qualities that we call truthfulness and courage, and I do not perceive it in any others within this category, except such as are no more than modifications and combinations of these, with their opposites. ”

“ These take in, as has been said, all the relationships in which "property" is concerned, embracing the whole organization of trade and of labor under hire: and they also take in a great part of the political relationships that arise out of the institutions of government. Now, it is undeniably in these spheres of conduct that the moral effects of civilization present the most discouraging appearance. Are men as honest in work and trade as they were in more primitive times? ”

“ For the inference is plain that, if the progress of the race in intellectual culture and in social organization is attended with a certain moral development in some particulars of conduct more distinctly than in others, there must be reasons for this difference, and most likely they will be found in some bearing which the one process of culture has upon the other. ”

“ Of the four groups of relationships to which all conduct is incident, the one first named does not fall within the region of morals, and the second only touches upon the borders of it. Without entering into the reasons of the fact, it may be seen that the kind of quality we are looking for in human actions cannot exist where the act is entirely conditioned by purely physical laws, as in the case of a man's dealing with the inanimate world. ”

“ There are certain moral fruits so conspicuous in the history of civilization, that no pessimist can dispute them. That the long, slow movements in society, which have been tending, with steady purpose and sure result, to establish order and the reign of equal laws ”

“ Having acquired, so far as this, a partly definite notion of morals, we may now return to take up the conception of civilization, and bring the two sets of ideas into conjunction.
I did not venture to say of civilization that it is "a certain degree of progress" in the state of man, because there are those who deny that the cumulative succession of changes, in man and society, which appear in the process called civilization, are, on the whole, progressive chances. ”

“ Out of all the complications that arise, however, there is not one distinctly new quality evolved. We distinguish in this region of conduct such absolute characteristics as those of honesty (under many names) and tolerance, but they are all of the composite class, and have their root, for the most part, in justice and truthfulness intermingled, with benevolence sometimes imparting its amiable tone to them. ”

“ We know that, among the Indian savages of our own time, theft and murder within the membership of a tribe are condemned as distinctly, almost, as they are among ourselves; but as between tribe and tribe, or between Indian and white man, neither killing nor stealing connects itself with any apparent sense of wrong. ”

“ The truth, then, seems to be that the civilizing process in society has, thus far, had two quite contrary moral effects: one, to cultivate and quicken in men the intelligence which apprehends their relations to one another, and which perceives a right line in all the conduct that is incident to those relations ”

“ Men accept from one another a great deal of what becomes the serviceable common stock of knowledge in every department. We are all of us settled now in the belief that the earth is round, that it revolves about the sun, that it rotates on its axis, that the other planets do the same, and that these motions are all controlled by the same force, under the same law, which governs the fall of a ripened apple from its stem ”