The Human Origin of Morals. Joseph McCabe

"theory of morals." He merely cleared up men's ideas as to what is just, and insisted that the moral sentiment depended upon knowledge.

      Plato, who was the first sociologist as well as a great philosopher, lost his balance between his two interests. It is clear that, as a student of social life, he saw that moral law is "utilitarian," as we now say. It is social law, enforced for the good of society. But Plato also had a theory that a merely material world can produce nothing, and all truth, goodness, and beauty must come from a spiritual world or, as he said, a world of "ideas": not ideas in the mind of man, but self-existing realities. The "good" was one of these ideas, and conscience was its voice and interpreter.

      Aristotle, the most learned and logical of the Greek thinkers, did not believe in Plato's ideas. No one does today. But, although Aristotle wrote the first treatise on Ethics (the science of morality) he did not succeed in understanding the nature of moral law, and he has left us no theory of it.

      By this time all Greece was speculating—and there has never been any country like it for speculation—on moral law, and there were three main opinions. There was the Platonic theory; and Christian writers followed it later, saying that the "ideas" were in the mind of God. Then there was the theory of the Stoics, and some others. Although the Stoics talked politely about the gods, it is fairly clear that they did not believe in them. For them moral law was just "the Law of Nature." It existed. It was part of the scheme of things. A man was at discord with nature if he did not observe it.

      The third theory was really our modern theory, or the correct theory. Probably the great early scientist and evolutionist Democritus first discovered the truth. At all events, there were soon several schools in Greece maintaining that the object and origin of moral law was simply concern for human welfare. Some, whom we call Hedonists, said that the test of a moral act was whether it promoted happiness (the, Greek of which is hedone). Some made happiness consist mainly in pleasure. Others, like Epicurus, the last and sanest of the Greeks, though his views are nearly always misrepresented and slandered, said that moral acts were those which promoted a passionless tranquillity of life. Epicurus built on science, not philosophy, and tried to bring the world back to science.

      But Greece fell, and the whole tradition of independent thinking perished. The Romans were poor thinkers, and most of them, being Agnostics, followed the Stoics or the Epicureans. Their humanitarian ideas did magnificent work for the world.

      During the next thirteen or fourteen centuries moral law was simply held to be a divine command. When at last independent thinking began again, when the great Deistic, movement attacked revelation, all the old ideas were revived. Some followed the Stoic theory, that moral law is the Law of Nature. Some connected it with the divine will, as revealed, not in a Bible but in man's conscience. But some (Hobbes and Locke) more or less brought out its human significance; and already some (like Mandeville) satirized it as a superstition.

      At the end of the eighteenth century German philosophy began, and from that day to this some weird theories of morality have been formulated. A vast library of the subject exists, and there is neither space nor reason even to mention all the theories here.

      There are two main views. One is the old, idea that moral law is a sort of eternal and august reality, either in "nature" or in God or in a mystic world which nobody can understand. It is "intued" (seen directly) by the mind, and so these theories are known as Intuitionalism. Against this a number of British thinkers (Hume, Bentham, Spencer, Mill, etc.) held that moral law is a human law regulating the welfare or "utility" of social life. These are called Utilitarians; and we shall now see how science stepped in amongst the philosophers, scattering them right and left, and proving that the Utilitarians were right.