1 Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1891), vol. i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867.
2 For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, 2d ed.
3 Social Evolution (1894), p. 307.
4 Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 254.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Practical Reason; cited by Fisher, History of the Christian Church (1888), p. 623.
6 “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons.”—T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 361.
7 Prolegomena to the History of Israel, tr. Black and Menzies (1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
8 Wake, The Evolution of Morality (1878), vol. ii, p. 4; Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 237; George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 79.
9 T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 240.
10 “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality, which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly, “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man, as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore, the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history of mankind” (Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life, tr. Gulliver and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.
11 “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”—George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54.
12 “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole realm of ethics.”—Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1887), p. 201.
13 S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 354. The same thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral graveyard ... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall spring.”
14 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.
15 “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the inner by the outer.”—G. Lowes Dickinson, “Ideals and Facts,” Hibbert Journal for January, 1911, p. 266.
16 “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”—Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development (1897), p. 397.
17 See Chapter XVIII. “The activity of a free people creates a great number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights; so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests and high faculties of our nature.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 10.
18 Principles of Economics, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilized nations.”—Lecky, The Map of Life (1900), pp. 53 f.
19 The Moral Ideal, new and revised edition, p. 19.
20 “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and purified by its religions.”—William Newton Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God (1909), p. 13.
21 “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an attainment” (Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 301).
22 Meditations, tr. Long, xi, 18.
23 “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”—James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 261.
24 Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 291.
25 After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours” (The Malay Archipelago, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings Millward in National Geographic Magazine for March, 1909, p. 287).
26 “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the clan.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 54.
27 The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2 Sam. v. 1.
28 Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”
29 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 267. See also Coulanges, The Ancient City, bk. ii, chap. ix.
30 Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a member of his own kindred or political community; ... he may deceive, rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).
31 It should be carefully noted that this is very different from saying that his life is immoral. To pronounce it immoral would be like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason” (Physics and Politics (1873), p. 115).
32 “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral idea.”—Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 191.
33 See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.
34 Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks: “The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather than positive” (The Naturalist on the River Amazon). Cf. Edward Howard Griggs, The New Humanism, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.
35 For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of morality, see Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.
36 “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 149.
37 “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic hearth.”—Helen Bosanquet, The Family (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 171.
38 The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship group.
39 When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor, a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality now consists in obedience to the law.
40 Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.
41 “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), p. 37.
42 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 283.
43 The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a merely preventive measure—not as a measure of justice or punishment. But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.
44 “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons, because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without protection.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 90.
45 Gen. iv. 13, 14.
46 “Blood atonement ... was one of the very earliest cases we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social obligation.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 506.
47 “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”—Wines, Punishment and Reformation (1895), p. 33.
48 On the Lex talionis consult Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the Lex talionis has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all peoples.
49 The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 267.
50 Seeck (Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (1901), Bd. i, S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as the slave of the winner.
51 The Truth about the Congo (1907), p. 29.
52 “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal, however, from a white employer ... is no sin.”—Starr, The Truth about the Congo (1907), pp. 28 f.
53 See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
54 On this subject see Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”
55 Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks, Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 73).
56 Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to the stranger. See Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.
57 Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the Greenlander ... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for which their language has no word” (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 334).
58 Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing slaves.
59 Quoted by Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. vi.
60 Often we find vestiges of the abandoned practice in what may be called celestial cannibalism (see W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 224). Thus the god of war of the Mexican Aztecs and the gods of many Polynesian tribes were cannibals, for human sacrifices must be regarded as a sort of celestial cannibalism, when the offering is made in the belief that the god actually repasts on the blood and the finer essences of the sacrificial victim. Where men have thus made their gods like unto themselves, and the practice of cannibalism has been consecrated by religion, the gods, because religion is always conservative, are certain to remain anthropophagi much longer than their worshipers. Consequently we find human sacrifices still lingering on as a kind of survival among peoples, as, for instance, the Mexicans, who have themselves left far behind the practice of eating human flesh.
61 Letourneau, La guerre dans les diverses races humaines (1895), p. 185.
62 Od. i. 260.
63 Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 350.
64 Ibid. vol. i, pp. 355 f.
65 Ibid. vol. i, pp. 368, 398, 401.
66 Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 359 f.
67 Ibid. vol. i, p. 349.
68 For the influence of the war ethics of the modern nations upon their peace ethics, see VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
69 Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 65.
70 Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 176.
71 Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), p. 250.
72 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 172.
73 This moralization of pure physical myths marks the advance of all races in culture and morality. As we shall see, Greek and Hebrew mythologies underwent just such an ethicalizing process.
74 Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), p. 73.
75 “It has long been recognized that the Egyptians had a much more highly organized conscience than that of most other nations of early times.”—Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 86.
76 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 193 f.
77 Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), pp. 62 f.
78 Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 64.
79 The same evolution is to be traced in China. “Imitations made of wood, clay, straw, paper, and of other material have been substituted for the real things.... Slaves and servants, wives and concubines are also burned, i.e., in paper imitations. They point back to the time when actual human sacrifices were the custom” (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (1910), p. 71).
80 Primitive Culture (1874), vol. ii, p. 85.
81 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 187 ff.
82 Truthfulness was one of the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian ideal. The requirements here were very exact: “I have not altered a story in the telling of it; I have repeated what I have heard just as it was told to me,” are the words of one in the judgment hall of Osiris. Cf. Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt (1884), pp. 76 f.
83 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
84 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
85 Annihilation appears to have been the lot of the very wicked; but the texts are not perfectly clear on this point. Consult Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. 55.
86 Here are six declarations of the confession which correspond almost exactly with six of the Ten Commandments: (1) I have not blasphemed; (2) I have not stolen; (3) I have not slain any one treacherously; (4) I have not slandered any one, or made false accusations; (5) I have not reviled the face of my father; (6) I have not eaten my heart through with envy. See Rawlinson, History of Ancient Egypt, 2d ed., vol. i, p. 142.
87 Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt (1898), p. 135.
88 Ibid. p. 162.
89 “In this judgment the Egyptian introduced for the first time in the history of man the fully developed idea that the future destiny of the dead must be dependent entirely upon the ethical quality of the earthly life, the idea of future responsibility,—of which we found the first traces in the Old Kingdom” (Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905), p. 173). Professor Breasted suggests a connection between the growth of the ideal of an ethical ordeal in the hereafter with the discontinuance of the building of immense pyramids. He says: “It is impossible to contemplate the colossal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty, so well known as the pyramids of Gizeh, and to contrast them with the comparatively diminutive royal tombs which follow in the next two dynasties, without ... discerning more than exclusively political causes behind this sudden and startling change.... The recognition of a judgment and the requirement of moral worthiness in the hereafter ... marked a transition from reliance on agencies external to the personality of the dead to dependence on inner values. Immortality began to make its appeal as a thing achieved in a man’s own soul” (Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), pp. 178 f.).
90 Records of the Past, New Series, vol. iii. For extended comments on the maxims of Ptah-hotep, see Amélineau, Essai sur l’évolution historique et philosophique des idées morales dans l’Egypt ancienne (1895), pp. 93 ff.
91 Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (1899), p. ii.
92 For other documents of this age which embody the same spirit of social justice as the precepts of Ptah-hotep, see Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), lect. vii.
93 Amélineau, Essai, pp. 140 f.
94 Alongside slavery proper there existed the system of serfdom, the nature of which is revealed by the history of the Children of Israel in Lower Egypt. The status of the Egyptian serf appears to have been somewhat like that of the Helots of Laconia in Greece. If we rightly interpret the Biblical account of the servitude of the Children of Israel, the number of serfs, if their increase seemed dangerous, was kept down by enforced infanticide (Ex. i. 7–22).
95 Laurent, Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité, t. i, p. 321.
96 Amélineau, Essai, p. 344. The monotheist Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV), the reform Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it is true, pursued throughout his reign a peace policy, but this policy manifestly was dictated by temperament, or the king’s preoccupation with religious affairs, and not by moral scruples. His reform was essentially a religious and not a social or moral one. Not one of the historical documents of the age contains a word in condemnation of war as inherently wrong (see Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), vol. ii, pp. 382–419), though in these “the customary glorying in war has almost disappeared” (Petrie, A History of Egypt (1896), vol. ii, p. 218).
97 This, however, must not be regarded as wholly an act of wanton savagery. The killing of his prisoners by the king was probably a sort of sacrifice in honor of the god who had given him victory over his enemies. See Amélineau, Essai, p. 12.
98 Essai, p. ix; see also p. 252, n. 1.
99 For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see Amélineau, Essai, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul (1895), p. x; and Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387.
100 Petrie, Egypt and Israel (1911), p. 133.
101 Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest indifferently the good and the bad.
102 It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 297.
103 King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (1899), p. 220.
104 The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
105 Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:
106 Cf. above, p. 35.
107 The stele which bore this code of laws was discovered at Susa in 1901–1902. The reign of Hammurabi is placed at about the end of the third millennium B.C. There are translations of the code by C. H. W. Johns (1903) and Robert Francis Harper (1904).
108 “If a man owe a debt and Adad [god of storms] inundate his field and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall not pay the interest for that year.”—Code, sec. 48. [We have used throughout Harper’s translation.]
109 Code, secs. 196, 197, 200. Cf. similar provisions of the Mosaic code: Ex. xxi. 23–25; Deut. xix. 21.
110 Ibid. secs. 209, 210.
111 Ibid. secs. 229, 230.