It matters not to the argument whether the actions entailing such effects are voluntary or involuntary. It matters not from the biological point of view whether the motives prompting them are high or low. The vital functions accept no apologies on the ground that neglect of them was unavoidable, or that the reason for neglect was noble. The direct and indirect sufferings caused by non-conformity to the laws of life are the same whatever induces the non-conformity; and cannot be omitted in any rational estimate of conduct. If the purpose of ethical inquiry is to establish rules of right living; and if the rules of right living are those of which the total results, individual and general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness; then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognize only the remote results.
§ 38. Here might be urged the necessity for preluding the study of moral science by the study of biological science. Here might be dwelt on the error men make in thinking they can understand those special phenomena of human life with which Ethics deals, while paying little or no attention to the general phenomena of human life, and while utterly ignoring the phenomena of life at large. And, doubtless, there would be truth in the inference that such acquaintance with the world of living things, as discloses the part which pleasures and pains have played in organic evolution, would help to rectify these one-sided conceptions of moralists. It cannot be held, however, that lack of this knowledge is the sole cause, or the main cause, of their one-sidedness. For facts of the kind above instanced, which, duly attended to, would prevent such distortions of moral theory, are facts which it needs no biological inquiries to learn, but which are daily thrust before the eyes of all. The truth is, rather, that the general consciousness is so possessed by sentiments and ideas at variance with the conclusions necessitated by familiar evidence that the evidence gets no attention. These adverse sentiments and ideas have several roots.
There is the theological root. As before shown, from the worship of cannibal ancestors who delighted in witnessing tortures, there resulted the primitive conception of deities who were propitiated by the bearing of pains, and, consequently, angered by the receipt of pleasures. Through the religions of the semi-civilized, in which this conception of the divine nature remains conspicuous, it has persisted, in progressively modified forms, down to our own times; and still colors the beliefs, both of those who adhere to the current creed and of those who nominally reject it.
There is another root in the primitive and still-surviving militancy. While social antagonisms continue to generate war, which consists in endeavors to inflict pain and death while submitting to the risks of pain and death, and which necessarily involves great privations, it is needful that physical suffering, whether considered in itself or in the evils it bequeaths, should be thought little of, and that among pleasures recognized as most worthy should be those which victory brings.
Nor does partially developed industrialism fail to furnish a root. With social evolution, which implies transition from the life of wandering hunters to the life of settled peoples engaged in labor, and which therefore entails activities widely unlike those to which the aboriginal constitution is adapted, there comes an under-exercise of faculties for which the social state affords no scope, and an overtaxing of faculties required for the social state; the one implying denial of certain pleasures and the other submission to certain pains. Hence, along with that growth of population which makes the struggle for existence intense, bearing of pains and sacrifice of pleasures is daily necessitated.
Now always and everywhere, there arises among men a theory conforming to their practice. The savage nature, originating the conception of a savage deity, evolves a theory of supernatural control sufficiently stringent and cruel to influence his conduct. With submission to despotic government severe enough in its restraints to keep in order barbarous natures, there grows up a theory of divine right to rule, and the duty of absolute submission. Where war is made the business of life by the existence of warlike neighbors, virtues which are required for war come to be regarded as supreme virtues; while, contrariwise, when industrialism has grown predominant, the violence and the deception which warriors glory in come to be held criminal. In like manner, then, there arises a tolerable adjustment of the actually accepted (not the nominally accepted) theory of right living, to living as it is daily carried on. If the life is one that necessitates habitual denial of pleasures and bearing of pains, there grows up an answering ethical system under which the receipt of pleasures is tacitly disapproved and the bearing of pains avowedly approved. The mischiefs entailed by pleasures in excess are dwelt on, while the benefits which normal pleasures bring are ignored; and the good results achieved by submission to pains are fully set forth, while the evils are overlooked.
But while recognizing the desirableness of, and indeed the necessity for, systems of ethics adapted, like religious systems and political systems, to their respective times and places, we have here to regard the first as, like the others, transitional. We must infer that like a purer creed and a better government, a truer ethics belongs to a more advanced social state.
Led, _à priori_, to conclude that distortions must exist, we are enabled to recognize as such the distortions we find: answering in nature, as these do, to expectation. And there is forced on us the truth that a scientific morality arises only as fast as the one-sided conceptions adapted to transitory conditions are developed into both-sided conceptions. The science of right living has to take account of all consequences in so far as they affect happiness, personally or socially, directly or indirectly; and by as much as it ignores any class of consequences, by so much does it fail to be science.
§ 39. Like the physical view, then, the biological view corresponds with the view gained by looking at conduct in general from the standpoint of Evolution.
That which was physically defined as a moving equilibrium, we define biologically as a balance of functions. The implication of such a balance is that the several functions, in their kinds, amounts, and combinations, are adjusted to the several activities which maintain and constitute complete life; and to be so adjusted is to have reached the goal toward which the evolution of conduct continually tends.
Passing to the feelings which accompany the performance of functions, we see that of necessity during the evolution of organic life, pleasures have become the concomitants of normal amounts of functions, while pains, positive and negative, have become the concomitants of excesses and defects of functions. And though in every species derangements of these relations are often caused by changes of conditions, they ever re-establish themselves: disappearance of the species being the alternative.
Mankind, inheriting from creatures of lower kinds, such adjustments between feelings and functions as concern fundamental bodily requirements; and daily forced by peremptory feelings to do the things which maintain life and avoid those which bring immediate death; has been subject to a change of conditions unusually great and involved. This has considerably deranged the guidance by sensations, and has deranged in a much greater degree the guidance by emotions. The result is that in many cases pleasures are not connected with actions which must be performed, nor pains with actions which must be avoided, but contrariwise.
Several influences have conspired to make men ignore the well-working of these relations between feelings and functions, and to observe whatever of ill-working is seen in them. Hence, while the evils which some pleasures entail are dilated upon, the benefits habitually accompanying receipt of pleasures are unnoticed; at the same time that the benefits achieved through certain pains are magnified while the immense mischiefs which pains bring are made little of.
The ethical theories characterized by these perversions are products of, and are appropriate to the forms of social life which the imperfectly-adapted constitutions of men produce. But with the progress of adaptation, bringing faculties and requirements into harmony, such incongruities of experience, and consequent distortions of theory, must diminish; until, along with complete adjustment of humanity to the social state, will go recognition of the truths that actions are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future happiness, special and general, they are immediately pleasurable, and that painfulness, not only ultimate but proximate, is the concomitant of actions which are wrong.
So that from the biological point of view, ethical science becomes a specification of the conduct of associated men who are severally so constituted that the various self-preserving activities, the activities required for rearing offspring, and those which social welfare demands, are fulfilled in the spontaneous exercise of duly proportioned faculties, each yielding when in action its quantum of pleasure, and who are, by consequence, so constituted that excess or defect in any one of these actions brings its quantum of pain, immediate and remote.
NOTE TO § 33. In his _Physical Ethics_, Mr. Alfred Barratt has expressed a view which here calls for notice. Postulating Evolution and its general laws, he refers to certain passages in the _Principles of Psychology_ (1st Ed. Pt. III. ch. viii. pp. 395, sqq. cf. Pt. IV. ch. iv.) in which I have treated of the relation between irritation and contraction which "marks the dawn of sensitive life;" have pointed out that "the primordial tissue must be differently affected by contact with nutritive and with innutritive matters"--the two being for aquatic creatures respectively the soluble and the insoluble; and have argued that the contraction by which a protruded part of a rhizopod draws in a fragment of assimilable matter "is caused by a commencing absorption of the assimilable matter." Mr. Barratt, holding that consciousness "must be considered as an invariable property of animal life, and ultimately, in its elements, of the material universe" (p. 43), regards these responses of animal tissue to stimuli, as implying feeling of one or other kind. "Some kinds of impressed force," he says, "are followed by movements of retraction and withdrawal, others by such as secure a continuance of the impression. These two kinds of contraction are the phenomena and external marks of pain and pleasure respectively. Hence the tissue acts so as to secure pleasure and avoid pain by a law as truly physical and natural as that whereby a needle turns to the pole, or a tree to the light" (p. 52). Not without questioning that the raw material of consciousness is present even in undifferentiated protoplasm, and everywhere exists potentially in that Unknowable Power which, otherwise conditioned, is manifested in physical action (_Prin. of Psy._, § 272-3), I demur to the conclusion that it at first exists under the forms of pleasure and pain. These, I conceive, arise, as the more special feelings do, by a compounding of the ultimate elements of consciousness (_Prin. of Psy._, §§ 60, 61): being, indeed, general aspects of these more special feelings when they reach certain intensities. Considering that even in creatures which have developed nervous systems, a great part of the vital processes are carried on by unconscious reflex actions, I see no propriety in assuming the existence of what we understand by consciousness in creatures not only devoid of nervous systems but devoid of structures in general.
NOTE TO § 36. More than once in the _Emotions and the Will_, Dr. Bain insists on the connection between pleasure and exaltation of vitality, and the connection between pain and depression of vitality. As above shown, I concur in the view taken by him; which is, indeed, put beyond dispute by general experience as well as by the more special experience of medical men.
When, however, from the invigorating and relaxing effects of pleasure and pain respectively, Dr. Bain derives the original tendencies to persist in acts which give pleasure and to desist from those which give pain, I find myself unable to go with him. He says: "We suppose movements spontaneously begun, and accidentally causing pleasure; we then assume that with the pleasure there will be an increase of vital energy, in which increase the fortunate movements will share, and thereby increase the pleasure. Or, on the other hand, we suppose the spontaneous movements to give pain, and assume that, with the pain, there will be a decrease of energy, extending to the movements that cause the evil, and thereby providing a remedy" (3d Ed. p. 315). This interpretation, implying that "the fortunate movements" merely _share_ in the effects of augmented vital energy caused by the pleasure, does not seem to me congruous with observation. The truth appears rather to be that though there is a concomitant general increase of muscular tone, the muscles specially excited are those which, by their increased contraction, conduce to increased pleasure. Conversely, the implication that desistance from spontaneous movements which cause pain, is due to a general muscular relaxation shared in by the muscles causing these particular movements, seems to me at variance with the fact that the retractation commonly takes the form not of a passive lapse but of an active withdrawal. Further, it may be remarked that depressing as pain eventually is to the system at large, we cannot say that it at once depresses the muscular energies. Not simply, as Dr. Bain admits, does an acute smart produce spasmodic movements, but pains of all kinds, both sensational and emotional, stimulate the muscles (_Essays_, 1st series, p. 360, 1, or 2d ed. Vol. I. p. 211, 12). Pain, however (and also pleasure when very intense), simultaneously has an inhibitory effect on all the reflex actions; and as the vital functions in general are carried on by reflex actions, this inhibition, increasing with the intensity of the pain, proportionately depresses the vital functions. Arrest of the heart's action and fainting is an extreme result of this inhibition; and the viscera at large feel its effects in degrees proportioned to the degrees of pain. Pain, therefore, while directly causing a discharge of muscular energy as pleasure does, eventually lowers muscular power by lowering those vital processes on which the supply of energy depends. Hence we cannot, I think, ascribe the prompt desistance from muscular movements causing pain, to decrease in the flow of energy; for this decrease is felt only after an interval. Conversely, we cannot ascribe the persistence in a muscular act which yields pleasure to the resulting exaltation of energy; but must, as indicated in § 33, ascribe it to the establishment of lines of discharge between the place of pleasurable stimulation and those contractile structures which maintain and increase the act causing the stimulation--connections allied with the reflex, into which they pass by insensible gradations.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW.
§ 40. The last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their relations to conduct, recognized only their physiological aspects: their psychological aspects were passed over. In this chapter, conversely, we are not concerned with the constitutional connections between feelings, as incentives or deterrents, and physical benefits to be gained, or mischiefs to be avoided; nor with the reactive effects of feelings on the state of the organism, as fitting or unfitting it for future action. Here we have to consider represented pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, as constituting deliberate motives--as forming factors in the conscious adjustments of acts to ends.
§ 41. The rudimentary psychical act, not yet differentiated from a physical act, implies an excitation and a motion. In a creature of low type the touch of food excites prehension. In a somewhat higher creature the odor from nutritive matter sets up motion of the body toward the matter. And where rudimentary vision exists, sudden obscuration of light, implying the passage of something large, causes convulsive muscular movements which mostly carry the body away from the source of danger. In each of these cases we may distinguish four factors. There is (_a_) that property of the external object which primarily affects the organism--the taste, smell, or opacity; and connected with such property there is in the external object that character (_b_) which renders seizure of it, or escape from it, beneficial. Within the organism there is (_c_) the impression or sensation which the property (_a_) produces, serving as stimulus; and there is connected with it, the motor change (_d_) by which seizure or escape is effected.
Now Psychology is chiefly concerned with the connection between the relation _a b_, and the relation _c d_, under all those forms which they assume in the course of evolution. Each of the factors, and each of the relations, grows more involved as organization advances. Instead of being single, the identifying attribute _a_, often becomes, in the environment of a superior animal, a cluster of attributes; such as the size, form, colors, motions, displayed by a distant creature that is dangerous. The factor _b_, with which this combination of attributes is associated, becomes the congeries of characters, powers, habits, which constitute it an enemy. Of the subjective factors, _c_ becomes a complicated set of visual sensations co-ordinated with one another and with the ideas and feelings established by experience of such enemies, and constituting the motive to escape; while _d_ becomes the intricate and often prolonged series of runs, leaps, doubles, dives, etc., made in eluding the enemy.
In human life we find the same four outer and inner factors, still more multiform and entangled in their compositions and connections. The entire assemblage of physical attributes _a_, presented by an estate that is advertised for sale, passes enumeration; and the assemblage of various utilities, _b_, going along with these attributes, is also beyond brief specification. The perceptions and ideas, likes and dislikes, _c_, set up by the aspect of the estate, and which, compounded and recompounded, eventually form the motive for buying it, make a whole too large and complex for description; and the transactions, legal, pecuniary, and other, gone through in making the purchase and taking possession, are scarcely less numerous and elaborate.
Nor must we overlook the fact that as evolution progresses, not only do the factors increase in complexity, but also the relations among them. Originally, _a_ is directly and simply connected with _b_, while _c_ is directly and simply connected with _d_. But eventually, the connections between _a_ and _b_, and between _c_ and _d_, become very indirect and involved. On the one hand, as the first illustration shows us, sapidity and nutritiveness are closely bound together; as are also the stimulation caused by the one and the contraction which utilizes the other. But, as we see in the last illustration, the connection between the visible traits of an estate and those characters which constitute its value, is at once remote and complicated; while the transition from the purchaser's highly composite motive to the numerous actions of sensory and motor organs, severally intricate, which effect the purchase, is through an entangled plexus of thoughts and feelings constituting his decision.
After this explanation will be apprehended a truth otherwise set forth in the _Principles of Psychology_. Mind consists of feelings and the relations among feelings. By composition of the relations, and ideas of relations, intelligence arises. By composition of the feelings, and ideas of feelings, emotion arises. And, other things equal, the evolution of either is great in proportion as the composition is great. One of the necessary implications is that cognition becomes higher in proportion as it is remoter from reflex action; while emotion becomes higher in proportion as it is remoter from sensation.
And now of the various corollaries from this broad view of psychological evolution, let us observe those which concern the motives and actions that are classed as moral and immoral.
§ 42. The mental process by which, in any case, the adjustment of acts to ends is effected, and which, under its higher forms, becomes the subject-matter of ethical judgments, is, as above implied, divisible into the rise of a feeling or feelings constituting the motive, and the thought or thoughts through which the motive is shaped and finally issues in action. The first of these elements, originally an excitement, becomes a simple sensation; then a compound sensation; then a cluster of partially presentative and partially representative sensations, forming an incipient emotion; then a cluster of exclusively ideal or representative sensations, forming an emotion proper; then a cluster of such clusters, forming a compound emotion; and eventually becomes a still more involved emotion composed of the ideal forms of such compound emotions. The other element, beginning with that immediate passage of a single stimulus into a single motion, called reflex action, presently comes to be a set of associated discharges of stimuli producing associated motions, constituting instinct. Step by step arise more entangled combinations of stimuli, somewhat variable in their modes of union, leading to complex motions similarly variable in their adjustments; whence occasional hesitations in the sensori-motor processes. Presently is reached a stage at which the combined clusters of impressions, not all present together, issue in actions not all simultaneous; implying representation of results, or thought. Afterward follow stages in which various thoughts have time to pass before the composite motives produce the appropriate actions. Until at last arise those long deliberations during which the probabilities of various consequences are estimated, and the promptings of the correlative feelings balanced, constituting calm judgment. That under either of its aspects the later forms of this mental process are the higher, ethically considered as well as otherwise considered, will be readily seen.
For from the first, complication of sentiency has accompanied better and more numerous adjustments of acts to ends; as also has complication of movement, and complication of the co-ordinating or intellectual process uniting the two. Whence it follows that the acts characterized by the more complex motives and the more involved thoughts, have all along been of higher authority for guidance. Some examples will make this clear.
Here is an aquatic creature guided by the odor of organic matter toward things serving for food; but a creature which, lacking any other guidance, is at the mercy of larger creatures coming near. Here is another which, also guided to food by odor, possesses rudimentary vision; and so is made to start spasmodically away from a moving body which diffuses this odor, in those cases where it is large enough to produce sudden obscuration of light--usually an enemy. Evidently life will frequently be saved by conforming to the later and higher stimulus, instead of to the earlier and lower.
Observe at a more advanced stage a parallel conflict. This is a beast which pursues others for prey, and, either lacking experience or prompted by raging hunger, attacks one more powerful than itself, and gets destroyed. Conversely, that is a beast which, prompted by a hunger equally keen, but either by individual experience or effects of inherited experience, made conscious of evil by the aspect of one more powerful than itself, is deterred from attacking, and saves its life by subordinating the primary motive, consisting of craving sensations, to the secondary motive, consisting of ideal feelings, distinct or vague.
Ascending at once from these examples of conduct in animals to examples of human conduct, we shall see that the contrasts between inferior and superior have habitually the same traits. The savage of lowest type devours all the food captured by to-day's chase, and, hungry on the morrow, has perhaps for days to bear the pangs of starvation. The superior savage, conceiving more vividly the entailed sufferings if no game is to be found, is deterred by his complex feeling from giving way entirely to his simple feeling. Similarly are the two contrasted in the inertness which goes along with lack of forethought, and the activity which due forethought produces. The primitive man, idly inclined, and ruled by the sensations of the moment, will not exert himself until actual pains have to be escaped; but the man somewhat advanced, able more distinctly to imagine future gratifications and sufferings, is prompted by the thought of these to overcome his love of ease: decrease of misery and mortality resulting from this predominance of the representative feelings over the presentative feelings.
Without dwelling on the fact that among the civilized, those who lead the life of the senses are contrasted in the same way with those whose lives are largely occupied with pleasures not of a sensual kind, let me point out that there are analogous contrasts between guidance by the less complex representative feelings, or lower emotions, and guidance by the more complex representative feelings, or higher emotions. When led by his acquisitiveness--a re-representative feeling which, acting under due control, conduces to welfare--the thief takes another man's property; his act is determined by certain imagined proximate pleasures of relatively simple kinds, rather than by less clearly imagined possible pains that are more remote and of relatively involved kinds. But in the conscientious man, there is an adequate restraining motive, still more re-representative in its nature, including not only ideas of punishment, and not only ideas of lost reputation and ruin, but including ideas of the claims of the person owning the property, and of the pains which loss of it will entail on him: all joined with a general aversion to acts injurious to others, which arises from the inherited effects of experience. And here at the end we see, as we saw at the beginning, that guidance by the more complex feeling, on the average, conduces to welfare more than does guidance by the simpler feeling.
The like holds with the intellectual co-ordinations through which stimuli issue in motions. The lowest actions, called reflex, in which an impression made on an afferent nerve causes by discharge through an efferent nerve a contraction, shows us a very limited adjustment of acts to ends: the impression being simple, and the resulting motion simple, the internal co-ordination is also simple. Evidently when there are several senses which can be together affected by an outer object; and when, according as such object is discriminated as of one or other kind, the movements made in response are combined in one or other way; the intermediate co-ordinations are necessarily more involved. And evidently each further step in the evolution of intelligence, always instrumental to better self-preservation, exhibits this same general trait. The adjustments by which the more involved actions are made appropriate to the more involved circumstances, imply more intricate, and, consequently, more deliberate and conscious co-ordinations; until, when we come to civilized men, who in their daily business, taking into account many data and conditions, adjust their proceedings to various consequences, we see that the intellectual actions, becoming of the kind we call judicial, are at once very elaborate and very deliberate.
Observe, then, what follows respecting the relative authorities of motives. Throughout the ascent from low creatures up to man, and from the lowest types of man up to the highest, self-preservation has been increased by the subordination of simple excitations to compound excitations--the subjection of immediate sensations to the ideas of sensations to come--the overruling of preservative feelings by representative feelings, and of representative feelings by re-representative feelings. As life has advanced, the accompanying sentiency has become increasingly ideal; and among feelings produced by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which have evolved latest, are the re-compounded or doubly ideal. Hence it follows that as guides, the feelings have authorities proportionate to the degrees in which they are removed by their complexity and their ideality from simple sensations and appetites.
A further implication is made clear by studying the intellectual sides of these mental processes by which acts are adjusted to ends. Where they are low and simple, these comprehend the guiding only of immediate acts by immediate stimuli--the entire transaction in each case, lasting but a moment, refers only to a proximate result. But with the development of intelligence, and the growing ideality of the motives, the ends to which the acts are adjusted cease to be exclusively immediate. The more ideal motives concern ends that are more distant; and with approach to the highest types, present ends become increasingly subordinate to those future ends which the ideal motives have for their objects. Hence there arises a certain presumption in favor of a motive which refers to a remote good, in comparison with one which refers to a proximate good.
§ 43. In the last chapter I hinted that besides the several influences there named as fostering the ascetic belief that doing things which are agreeable is detrimental while bearing disagreeable things is beneficial, there remained to be named an influence of deeper origin. This is shadowed forth in the foregoing paragraphs.