THE

ANDOVER REVIEW:

A RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY.

VOL. XIV.-SEPTEMBER, 1890.-No. LXXXI.

MODERN RECONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHICS.

Or these reconstructions there are three forms: one given by Mr. Darwin, one by Mr. Spencer, and one by Leslie Stephen.

I name the reconstructions forms because they are, in reality, but varying modes of the same undertaking, namely, to present ethics as a product of evolution.

That we may estimate this undertaking rightly it will be of service to consider what should be understood by ethics and what by evolution.

Science, it is said, deals with what is, history with what has been, ethics with what ought to be. This statement indicates obligation as the root-idea with which ethics has to deal. "You ought to love the Lord your God," that is, the Best Being, "with all your mind, might, and strength. You ought not to steal. You ought not to kill." In presence of obligation thus affirmatively and negatively stated, all ethical schools have divided into two broad classes, both schools, be it observed, concerned with an answer to the same question. The question is this, "Why ought I to love the Best Being? Why ought I not to steal or to kill?” The answers are noteworthy: "You ought to love the Best Being, because you ought." "You ought not to lie to kill, because you ought not." The second answer, "You ought to love the Best Being because of consequences to yourself and others; these consequences being utility, happiness, or the welfare of the social tissue." 66 You ought not to steal or to kill because of consequences to yourself and others; these consequences being hindrance, pain, or weakening of the social tissue."

Copyright, 1890, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

It is at once seen that, by one school, no end is given as the ground of obligation, while by the other there are stated the apparently varied ends of utility, happiness, social welfare.

The ethical side of our problem is, perhaps, not yet sufficiently distinct. What are we to understand by conscience for which evolution must give account or fail as an interpretation of man?

Permit me to say here what, doubtless, would have found a more fitting place at the beginning of this discussion. The space limits necessarily attaching to an article such as the present one, force many of my statements to a brevity and directness which will, I fear, give them the appearance of dogmatism. I can, however, honestly ask the reader to accept my assurance that I write in no dogmatic spirit, but, on the contrary, with much fear and trembling lest I conceal or mispresent the truth.

To return. What are we to understand by conscience? Conscience is the crystal-clear knowledge of a distinction between right and wrong, together with the knowledge of obligation to do the right and avoid the wrong. The perception of this distinction between right and wrong is, in its radical character, precisely like the perception of distinction between affirmative and negative, plus and minus, round and square.

It is important to observe, in this connection, that these mathematical distinctions cannot, in the first instance, be made, without direct, sensation experience of things greater or less, round or square. If one is blind from birth, and also without sense of touch, such distinctions cannot be known. Yet it nowise follows that when, under medical treatment, the sensations are restored and the distinctions made, they are produced by some psychical evolution from a consciousness where they did not and could not exist. In like manner the moral distinction, the distinction be. tween right and wrong, is seen directly and instantaneously when certain courses of conduct appear. My language should not be taken to mean that conscience classifies actions as right or wrong; that conscience determines whether it is right to play cards or wrong to play cards, right to drink a glass of wine or wrong to drink a glass of wine.

The power to know mathematically does not determine whether a given building is perpendicular or inclined. If, by my own sight or the sight of another, I learn that the building has certain characteristics, I declare at once that it is inclined. If, by my own sight or that of church or party, I am led to believe that card playing and wine drinking have certain characteristics, I pronounce them wrong without a moment's delay.

Evolution, therefore, when dealing with ethics, has no concern with the diverse moral judgments of mankind; it derives neither help nor hindrance from this long-admitted fact. I should not have thought it needful to emphasize this old-time misinterpretation of intuitional morality except for the fact that it appears with its old-time illustrations and claims in such an extended treatise as the "Principles of Morality," by Professor Fowler, of Oxford.

The question submitted by ethics to evolution is rather this: I see in this action a right, in that a wrong; whence this seeing? You see in that very same first action a wrong, in that very same second action a right; whence this seeing whence this common seeing, of a distinction between right and wrong? In presence of these actions I choose the first and refrain from the second; you choose the second and refrain from the first. Your conscience is at peace, so also is mine. Whence this common peace?

I have thus emphasized conscience as containing the twofold moment of a clear perception of right and wrong and the equally clear recognition of constraint, of obligation. This it is with which evolution is concerned, and for which it must give account. Such conscience, be it observed, is not a theory, it is a fact. Among the noblest types of our civilization are men who live under exactly such moral guidance. Mistaken they may be, ignorant of the derivative character of conscience they may be, but they exist, and with them evolution must make full settlement.

Let us consider now, and in the second place, the meaning of this term "evolution." The word has a popular use that is vague, so much so as to be misleading. The hazy, every-day consciousness takes evolution to teach that man is descended from the monkey, which, of course, is quite too shocking. As, however, leading ministers and theologians, to say nothing of scientists (who may be supposed to stand in peculiar peril), "come out " evolutionists, the every-day consciousness begins to feel about for wherefores and therefores, to try, that is, to have an understanding with this subject. Evolution, most generally stated, means the production of the heterogeneous from the homogeneous. This impressive statement may be helped by a simple illustration. An egg, a grain, are structurally and functionally alike in all their parts. The egg does not contain, as was at one time believed, a miniature chicken, not even a microscopic chicken; the grain does not contain the wheat shaft. By evolution, that is, by movement within their respective masses, the egg differentiates

into a chicken, the grain into a shaft of wheat. Note, for a moment, the essence of the idea; it is the production of the unlike from the alike, to phrase the matter inelegantly. The result, the chicken, is structurally and functionally unlike its source, the egg. I doubt not that such evolution as the chicken from the egg, the wheat shaft from the grain, we are all past doubting. Extending this idea of the production of the complex from the simple we reach that expression of evolution which may be called its scientific form, and which signifies that the present species of animals and plants are differentiations of simpler forms.

The evolution which nearly all reputable scientists regard as beyond question is the denial of special, creative acts for the innumerable species of plants and animals that everywhere abound. This evolution, I may say in passing, is not Darwinism — though Darwin believed it and aided to establish it by innumerable examples he was not its author. Darwinism is nothing more or less than one of the ways of accounting for, illustrating, the evolution thus indicated.

The problem was to know in what manner the simpler forms of animals and plants could be the occasions of the present astounding varieties. Mr. Darwin's doctrine of natural selection and survival of the fittest under struggle for existence is simply one of the answers to this question, an answer which is generally rejected by men of science as inadequate. It would be foreign to the purpose of our paper to note the answers given by Mr. Mivart, or by Lamark, a French naturalist of the beginning of the present century. Suffice it to say that there is a return to the views of the French writer, and this chiefly on the part of American scientists.

I have, as is seen, distinguished between evolution and attempts to account for or illustrate evolution. Before leaving this point I would discriminate also among those who accept evolution and would divide them into two classes, the logical and the illogical. I do this under conviction that the logic of evolution leads to the views of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Haeckel, according to which the present universe, with its definite modes of matter and its countless forms of life, evolved from an undifferentiated, nebulous, mass. This, I repeat, is the logic of evolution, and I do not believe that scientists who concern themselves wholly with matter can long resist the conclusion of their premises.

The extension of evolution as a method of Nature's working was inevitable. No supposed sacredness could withhold a subject