sentiments of benevolence and sympathy. For the spread of civilization has certainly made man more sensitive to pain, more capable of sympathy and of entering by imagination into the situations of others. It is noteworthy that the same Adam Smith who argued so forcibly the cause of individualism in trade, made sympathy the basis of his moral system.
Advance in sympathy has shown itself in the abolition of judicial torture, in prison reform, in the improved care of the insane and defective; in the increased provision for hospitals, and asylums, and in an innumerable multitude of organizations for relief of all sorts and conditions of men. Missions, aside from their distinctly ecclesiastical aims, represent devotion of human life and of wealth to the relief of sickness and wretchedness, and to the education of children in all lands. Sympathy has even extended to the animal world. And the notable fact in modern sympathy and kindness, as contrasted with the mediæval type, is that the growth in individuality has demanded and evoked a higher kind of benevolence. Instead of fostering dependence and relieving wants, the best modern agencies aim to promote independence, to set the man upon his own feet and enable him to achieve self-respect.
"Social settlements" have been strong factors in bringing about this change of attitude.
=Justice.=--Various movements looking toward greater justice in distribution have likewise been called out by the conditions since the industrial revolution. Naturally one reaction was to denounce the whole individualistic tendency as represented in the "cash-payment" basis.
This found its most eloquent expositor in Carlyle. His _Past and Present_ is a bitter indictment of a system "in which all working horses could be well fed, and innumerable workingmen should die starved"; of a _laissez-faire_ theory which merely says "impossible" when asked to remedy evils supposedly due to "economic laws"; of a "Mammon Gospel" which transforms life into a mutual hostility, with its laws-of-war named "fair competition." The indictment is convincing, but the remedy proposed--a return to strong leaders with a reëstablishment of personal relations--has rallied few to its support. Another reaction against individualistic selfishness has taken the form of communism. Numerous experiments have been made by voluntary associations to establish society on a moral basis by abolishing private property. "These new associations," said Owen, one of the most ardent and generous of social reformers, "can scarcely be formed before it will be discovered that by the most simple and easy regulations all the natural wants of human nature may be abundantly supplied; and the principle of selfishness will cease to exist for want of an adequate motive to produce it."
In contrast with these plans for a return to earlier conditions, the two most conspicuous tendencies in the thought of the past century have claimed to be advancing toward freedom and justice along the lines which we have just traced. The one, which we may call "individualistic" reform, has sought justice by giving free play to individual action.
The other, socialism, has aimed to use the power of the State to secure more adequate justice and, as it believes, a more genuine freedom. The great reform movement in Great Britain during the nineteenth century emphasized free trade and free contracts. It sought the causes of injustice in the survival of some privilege or vested interest which prevents the full working of the principles of free contract and competition. Let every man "count as one"; make laws for "the greatest good of the greatest number." The trouble is not that there is too much individualism, but that there is too little. Tax reformers like Henry George have urged the same principle. If land is monopolized by a few who can levy a toll upon all the rest of society, how can justice obtain? The remedy for injustice is to be found in promoting greater freedom of industry and trade. Socialism on the other hand claims that individualism defeats itself; it results in tyranny, not freedom. The only way to secure freedom is through united action. The merits of some of these programs for social justice will be examined in Part III. They signify that the age is finding its moral problem set anew by the collision between material interests and social good. Greek civilization used the industry of the many to set free the higher life--art, government, science--of a few. The mediæval ideal recognized the moral value of industry in relation to character. The modern conscience, resting back upon a higher appreciation of human dignity and worth, is seeking to work out a social and economic order that shall combine both the Greek and the mediæval ideas. It will require work and secure freedom. These are necessary for the individual person. But it is beginning to be seen that these values cannot be divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other enjoy the freedom.
The growth of democracy means that all members of society should share in the value and the service of work. It means that all should share according to capacity in the values of free life, of intelligence and culture. Can material goods be so produced and distributed as to promote this democratic ideal?
§ 6. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE The development of intelligence in the modern world, as in Greece, has two sides: on the one hand, a working-free from the restrictions which theology or the State or other social authorities imposed; on the other hand, positive progress in knowledge of nature and of human life. Under its first aspect it is known as the growth of rationalism; under its second aspect, as the growth of science and education. We cannot separate the development into two periods, the one negative, the other positive, as was convenient in the case of Greece. The negative and the positive in the modern world have gone on contemporaneously, although the emphasis has sometimes been on one side and sometimes upon the other. We may, however, indicate three periods as standing out with clearly defined characteristics.
(1) The Renaissance, in which the Greek spirit of scientific inquiry found a new birth; in which the discovery of new continents stimulated the imagination; and in which new and more fruitful methods of investigation were devised in mathematics and the natural sciences.
(2) The period of the Enlightenment, in which the negative aspect of the process reached its sharpest definition. The doctrines of revealed religion and natural religion were criticised from the standpoint of reason. Mysteries and superstition were alike rejected. General intelligence made rapid progress. It was the "Age of Reason."
(3) The Nineteenth Century, in which both the natural and social sciences underwent an extraordinary development. The doctrine of evolution has brought a new point of view for considering the organic world and human institutions. Education has come to be regarded as both the necessary condition for the safety of society and as the right of every human being; Science, in large measure set free from the need of fighting for its right to exist, is becoming constructive; it is assuming increasingly the duty of preserving human life and health, of utilizing and preserving natural resources, of directing political and economic affairs.
=1. The Renaissance.=--It would be giving a wrong impression to imply that there was no inquiry, no use of reason in the mediæval world. The problems set by the inheritance of old-world religion and politics, forced themselves upon the builders of castles and cathedrals,[93] of law and of dogma. As indicated above, the universities were centers of discussion in which brilliant minds often challenged received opinions.
Men like Roger Bacon sought to discover nature's secrets, and the great scholastics mastered Greek philosophy in the interest of defending the faith. But theological interest limited freedom and choice of theme. It was not until the expansion of the individual along the lines already traced--in political freedom, in the use of the arts, in the development of commerce--that the purely intellectual interest such as had once characterized Greece awoke. A new world of possibilities seemed dawning upon the Italian Galileo, the Frenchman Descartes, the Englishman Francis Bacon. The instruments of thought had been sharpened by the dialectics of the schools; now let them be used to analyze the world in which we live. Instead of merely observing nature Galileo applied the experimental method, putting definite questions to nature and thus preparing the way for a progress step by step toward a positive knowledge of nature's laws. Descartes found in mathematics a method of analysis which had never been appreciated before. What seemed the mysterious path of bodies in curved lines could be given a simple statement in his analytic geometry. Leibniz and Newton carried this method to triumphant results in the analysis of forces. Reason appeared able to discover and frame the laws of the universe--the "principles" of nature. Bacon, with less of positive contribution in method, sounded another note which was equally significant. The human mind is liable to be clouded and hindered in its activities by certain inveterate sources of error. Like deceitful images or obsessions the "idols" of the tribe, of the cave, of the market, and of the theater--due to instinct or habit, to language or tradition--prevent the reason from doing its best work. It needs vigorous effort to free the mind from these idols. But this can be done. Let man turn from metaphysics and theology to nature and life; let him follow reason instead of instinct or prejudice.
"Knowledge is power." Through it may rise above the kingdom of nature the "kingdom of man." In his _New Atlantis_, Bacon foresees a human society in which skill and invention and government shall all contribute to human welfare. These three notes, the experimental method, the power of rational analysis through mathematics, and the possibility of controlling nature in the interests of man, were characteristic of the period.
=2. The Enlightenment.=--A conflict of reason with authority went on side by side with the progress of science. Humanists and scientists had often set themselves against dogma and tradition. The Reformation was not in form an appeal to reason, but the clash of authorities stimulated men to reasoning upon the respective claims of Catholic and Protestant.
And in the eighteenth century, under the favoring influence of a broad toleration and a general growth of intelligence, the conflict of reason with dogma reached its culmination. The French call the period "_l'Illumination_"--the illumination of life and experience by the light of reason. The Germans call it the _Aufklärung_, "the clearing-up." What was to be cleared up? First, ignorance, which limits the range of man's power and infects him with fear of the unknown; then superstition, which is ignorance consecrated by wont and emotion; finally, dogma, which usually embodies irrational elements and seeks to force them upon the mind by the power of authority, not of truth. Nor was it merely a question of intellectual criticism. Voltaire saw that dogma was often responsible for cruelty. Ignorance meant belief in witchcraft and magic.
From the dawn of civilization this had beset man's progress and quenched many of the brightest geniuses of the past. It was time to put an end once for all to the remnants of primitive credulity; it was time to be guided by the light of reason. The movement was not all negative. Using the same appeal to "nature," which had served so well as a rallying cry in the development of political rights, the protagonists of the movement spoke of a "natural light" which God had placed in man for his guidance--"the candle of the Lord set up by himself in men's minds, which it is impossible for the breath or power of man wholly to extinguish." A natural and rational religion should take the place of supposed revelation.
But the great achievement of the eighteenth century in the intellectual development of the individual was that the human mind came to realize the part it was itself playing in the whole realm of science and conduct. Man began to look within. Whether he called his work an _Essay concerning Human Understanding_, or a _Treatise of Human Nature_, or a _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, or a _Critique of Pure Reason_, the aim was to study human experience. For of a sudden it was dawning upon man that, if he was then living upon a higher level of knowledge and conduct than the animal or the savage, this must be due to the activity of the mind. It appeared that man, not satisfied with "nature," had gone on to build a new world with institutions and morality, with art and science.
This was no creation of instinct or habit; nor could it be explained in terms of sense, or feeling, or impulse alone; it was the work of that more active, universal, and creative type of intelligence which we call reason. Man, as capable of such achievements in science and conduct, must be regarded with new respect. As having political rights, freedom, and responsibility, man has the dignity of a citizen, sovereign as well as subject. As guiding and controlling his own life and that of others by the power of ideas, not of force, he has the dignity of a moral person, a moral sovereignty. He does not merely take what nature brings; he sets up ends of his own and gives them worth. In this, Kant saw the supreme dignity of the human spirit.
=3. The Present Significance and Task of Scientific Method.=--In the thought that man is able to form ends which have value for all, to set up standards which all respect, and thus to achieve worth and dignity in the estimation of his fellows, the Individualism of the eighteenth century was already pointing beyond itself. For this meant that the individual attains his highest reach only as a member of a moral society. But it is one thing to point out the need and meaning of a moral society, it is another thing to bring such a society into being.
It has become evident during the past century that this is the central problem for human reason to solve. The various social sciences, economics, sociology, political science, jurisprudence, social psychology, have either come into being for the first time, or have been prosecuted with new energy. Psychology has assumed new significance as their instrument. Not that the scientific progress of the century has seen its greatest triumphs in these fields. The conspicuous successes have been rather in such sciences as biology, or in the applications of science to engineering and medicine. The social sciences have been occupied largely in getting their problems stated and their methods defined. But the discoveries and constructions of the nineteenth century are none the less indispensable prerequisites for a moral society. For the new conditions of city life, the new sources of disease, the new dangers which attend every successive step away from the life of the savage, demand all the resources of the sciences.[94] And as the natural sciences overcome the technical difficulties which obstruct their work of aiding human welfare, the demand will be more insistent that the social sciences contribute their share toward enabling man to fulfil his moral life. Some of the specific demands will become more evident, as we study in subsequent chapters the present problems of political, economic, and family life.
=Education.=--The importance for the moral life of the modern development of science is paralleled by the significance of modern education. The universities date from the Middle Ages. The classical interest of humanism found its medium in the college or "grammar school." The invention of printing and the growth of commerce promoted elementary schools. Supposed necessities of popular government stimulated a general educational movement in the United States. Modern trade and industry have called out the technical school. Germany has educated for national defense and economic advance; England has concerned itself preëminently for the education of statesmen and administrators; and the United States for the education of voters. But, whatever the motive, education has been made so general as to constitute a new element in the modern consciousness and a new factor to be reckoned with. The moral right of every child to have an education, measured not by his parents' abilities, but by his own capacity, is gaining recognition. The moral value of a possession, which is not, like material goods, exclusive, but common, will be more appreciated when we have worked out a more social and democratic type of training.[95] =Theoretical Interpretation of this Period in Ethical Systems.=--While the theoretical interpretation of this period is to be treated in Part II., we may point out here that the main lines of development which we have traced find expression in the two systems which have been most influential during the past century. These are the systems of Kant and of the Utilitarians. The political and certain aspects of the intellectual development are reflected in the system of Kant. He emphasized freedom, the power and authority of reason, human dignity, the supreme value of character, and the significance of a society in which every member is at once sovereign and subject. The Utilitarians represent the values brought out in the development of industry, education, and the arts. They claimed that the good is happiness, and happiness of the greatest number. The demands for individual satisfaction and for social distribution of goods are voiced in this system.
LITERATURE The histories of philosophy and of ethics give the theoretical side. In addition to those previously mentioned the works of Höffding, Falckenberg, and Fischer may be named. Stephen, _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and _The Utilitarians_; Fichte, _Characteristics of the Present Age_ (in _Popular Works_, tr. by Smith); Stein, _Die sociale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie_, 1897; Comte, _Positive Philosophy_, tr. by Martineau, 1875, Book VI. Tufts and Thompson, _The Individual and His Relation to Society as Reflected in British Ethics_, 1896, 1904; Merz, _History of European Thought in the 19th Century_, 1904; Robertson, _A Short History of Free Thought_, 1899; Bonar, _Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their Historical Relations_, 1893.
ON THE MEDIÆVAL AND RENAISSANCE ATTITUDE: Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3rd ed., 1877; Adams, _Civilization during the Middle Ages_, 1895; Rashdall, _The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_, 1895; Eicken, _Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung_, 1877; Burckhardt, _The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy_, 1892; Draper, _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_, 1876.
ON THE INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL SIDE: Ashley, _English Economic History_; Cunningham, _Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects_, 1900; and _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, 3rd ed., 1896-1903; Hobson, Bücher zur socialen Geschichte Englands_, 1881; Carlyle, _Past and Present_; Ziegler, _Die Geistigen und socialen Strömungen des ON THE POLITICAL AND JURAL DEVELOPMENT: Hadley, _Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government_, 1903; Pollock, _The Expansion of the Common Law_, 1904; Ritchie, _Natural the Relation of Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century_, 1905.
ON THE LITERARY SIDE: Brandes, _The Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century_, 1905; Francke, _Social Forces in German Literature_, 1895; Carriere, _Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwicklung und die Ideale der Menschheit_, 3rd ed., 1877-86.
FOOTNOTES: ch. v.
[90] P. 40.
[91] See p. 176.
[92] Cunningham, _An Essay on Western Civilization_, pp. 77 ff.
[93] The writer is indebted to his colleague Professor Mead for the significance of this for the beginnings of modern science.
[94] "Civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living organisms associated with him such a special state of things by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance of Nature's prehuman dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the conditions or perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs...We may think of him as the heir to a vast and magnificent kingdom who has been finally educated so as to fit him to take possession of his property, and is at length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many important respects, the laws of his Mother Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no retreat is possible--his only hope is to control, as he knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters. They already make him wince: how long will he sit listening to the fairy-tales of his boyhood and shrink from manhood's task?"--RAY [95] John Dewey, _The School and Society_.
CHAPTER IX A GENERAL COMPARISON OF CUSTOMARY AND REFLECTIVE MORALITY To eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may result in ultimate gain. A more conscious and individualistic attitude may result in definite conceptions of duty and rights, of values and ideals. At the same time, as humanity's eyes have been opened and its wisdom increased, many forms of nakedness unknown in ruder conditions have been disclosed. With every increase of opportunity and efficiency for good there is a corresponding opportunity for evil. An immensely more complex environment gives scope for correspondingly more capable and subtle personalities. Some will react to the situation in such a way as to rise to a higher moral level, both in personal integrity and in public usefulness. Others will find in facilities for gratifying some appetite or passion a temptation too strong for their control and will become vicious, or will seize the chances to exploit others and become unjust in their acquirement and use of power and wealth. There will be a Nero as well as an Aurelius, a Cæsar Borgia as well as a Savonarola, a Jeffreys as well as a Sidney, a Bentham, or a Howard. For an Eliot or a Livingston or an Armstrong, there are the exploiters of lower races; and for an Elizabeth Fry, the women who trade in the wretchedness of their kind. By the side of those who use great abilities and resources unselfishly are those who view indifferently the sacrifice of human health or life, and pay no heed to human misery. Such contrasts show that the "evolution of morality" is also an evolution of weakness, wretchedness, evil, and crime. They suggest some general comparisons between custom and reflective morality. They require from every age a renewed analysis of conduct and the social system. As a preliminary to such an analysis, we review in this chapter some of the general relations between the morality of custom and the morality of reflection.
§ 1. ELEMENTS OF AGREEMENT AND CONTINUITY The moral life shows its continuity in two ways. First, the earlier type of group and customary morality persists in part; in the second place, when the moral is differentiated from the other spheres of life in which it was embedded, it does not have to find entirely new conceptions. It borrows its terms from the group life or from the various spheres, religious, political, æsthetic, economic, which separate out from the older group unity.
The following quotation from Grote will serve as a vivid restatement of the régime of custom: "This aggregate of beliefs and predispositions to believe, Ethical, Religious, Æsthetical, and Social, respecting what is true or false, probable or improbable, just or unjust, holy or unholy, honorable or base, respectable or contemptible, pure or impure, beautiful or ugly, decent or indecent, obligatory to do or obligatory to avoid, respecting the status and relations of each individual in the society, respecting even the admissible fashions of amusement and recreation--this is an established fact and condition of things, the real origin of which is for the most part unknown, but which each new member of the group is born to and finds subsisting...It becomes a part of each person's nature, a standing habit of mind, or fixed set of mental tendencies, according to which particular experience is interpreted and particular persons appreciated...The community hate, despise or deride any individual member who proclaims his dissent from their social creed...Their hatred manifests itself in different ways...at the very least by exclusion from that amount of forbearance, good will and estimation without which the life of an individual becomes insupportable...'Nomos (Law and Custom), king of all' (to borrow the phrase which Herodotus cites from Pindar) exercises plenary power, spiritual and temporal, over individual minds; moulding the emotions as well as the intellect, according to the local type...and reigning under the appearance of habitual, self-suggested tendencies."[96] The important facts brought out are (1) the existence in a social group of certain habits not only of acting, but of feeling and believing about actions, of valuing or approving and disapproving. (2) The persistent forcing of these mental habitudes upon the attention of each new member of the group. The newcomer, whether by birth or adoption, is introduced into a social medium whose conditions and regulations he can no more escape than he can those of his physical environment. (3) Thus the mental and practical habits of the newly introduced individual are shaped. The current ways of esteeming and behaving in the community become a "standing habit" of his own mind; they finally reign as "habitual, self-suggested tendencies." Thus he becomes a full member of the social group, interested in the social fabric to which he belongs, and ready to do his part in maintaining it.
=1. Persistence of Group Morality.=--Comparing this state of affairs with what obtains to-day in civilized communities, we find certain obvious points of agreement. The social groups with which an individual comes in touch are now more numerous and more loosely formed. But everywhere there are customs not only of acting, but of thinking and feeling about acting. Each profession, each institution, has a _code_ of which the individual has to take account. The nature of this code, unexpressed as well as formulated, is brought to the attention of the individual in countless ways; by the approval and disapproval of its public opinion; by his own failures and successes; by his own tendency to imitate what he sees about him, as well as by deliberate, intentional instruction.
In other words, group morality does not vanish in order that conscious and personal morality may take its place. Group and customary morality is still the morality of many of us most of the time, and of all of us for a good deal of the time. We do not any of us think out all of our standards, weigh independently our values, make all our choices in a rational manner, or form our characters by following a clearly conceived purpose. As children we all start in a family group. We continue in a school group and perhaps a church group. We enter an occupation group, and later, it may be, family, political, social, and neighborhood groups. In every one of these if we are members, we must to a certain degree accept standards that are given. We have to play according to the rules of the game. As children we do this unconsciously. We imitate, or follow suggestions; we are made to conform by all the agencies of group morality--group opinion, ritual, pleasure and pain, and even by taboos;[97] above all, we act as the others act, and coöperate more or less to a common end. We form habits which persist, many of them as long as we live. We accept many of the traditions without challenge. Even when we pass from the early family group to the new situations and surroundings which make us repeat more or less of the experience of the race, a large share of our conduct and of our judgments of others is determined by the influences of group and custom. And it is fortunate for progress that this is true. If every one had to start anew to frame all his ideals and make his laws, we should be in as melancholy a plight morally as we should be intellectually if we had to build each science anew. The fundamental safeguards which the group provides against individual impulse and passion, the condition of close association, interdependence and mutual sympathy which the group affords, the habituation to certain lines of conduct valued by the group--all this is a root on which the stem and flower of personal morality may grow.
Individualism and intellectual activity, however necessary to man's progress, would give no morality did they not start out of this deeper level of common feeling and common destiny. The rational and personal agencies of the "third level" come not to destroy, but to fulfill the meaning of the forces and agencies of the first and second levels described in Chapters III and IV.
=2. The Moral Conceptions.=--The conceptions for the moral are nearly all taken from the group relations or from the jural and religious aspects, as these have been gradually brought to clearer consciousness.
As already noted, the Greek term "ethical," the Latin "moral," the German "_sittlich_," suggest this--_ethos_ meant the "sum of the characteristic usages, ideas, standards, and codes by which a group was differentiated and individualized in character from other groups."[98] Some specific moral terms come directly from group relations. The "kind" man acts as one of the kin. When the ruling or privileged group is contrasted with the man of no family or of inferior birth, we get a large number of terms implying "superiority" or "inferiority" in birth, and so of general value. This may or may not be due to some inherent superiority of the upper class, but it means at least that the upper class has been most effectual in shaping language and standards of approval. So "noble" and "gentle" referred to birth before they had moral value; "duty" in modern usage seems to have been principally what was due to a superior. Many words for moral disapproval are very significant of class feeling. The "caitiff" was a captive, and the Italians have their general term for morally bad, "_cattivo_," from the same idea. The "villain" was a feudal tenant, the "blackguard" looked after the kettles, the "rascal" was one of the common herd, the "knave" was the servant; the "base" and "mean" were opposed to the gentle and noble. Another set of conceptions reflects the old group _approvals_ or combines these with conceptions of birth. We have noted the twofold root of _kalokagathia_ in Greek. "Honor" and "honesty" were what the group admired, and conversely "_aischros_" and "_turpe_" in Greek and Latin, like the English "disgraceful" or "shameful," were what the group condemned. "Virtue" was the manly excellence which called out the praise of a warlike time, while one of the Greek terms for morally bad originally meant cowardly, and our "scoundrel" has possibly the same origin. The "bad" was probably the weak or the womanish. The economic appears in "merit," what I have earned, and likewise in "duty" and "ought," what is due or owed--though duty seems to have made itself felt especially, as noted above, toward a superior. Forethought and skill in practical affairs provided the conception of "wisdom," which was highest of the virtues for the Greeks, and as "prudence" stood high in mediæval systems. The conception of valuing and thus of forming some permanent standard of a better and a worse, is also aided, if not created, by economic exchange. It appears in almost identical terms in Plato and the New Testament in the challenge, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?"[99] From the processes of fine or useful arts came probably the conceptions of measure, order, and harmony. A whole mode of considering the moral life is jural. "Moral law," "authority," "obligation," "responsibility," "justice," "righteousness," bring with them the associations of group control and of the more definitely organized government and law. Finally the last named terms bear also a religious imprint, and numerous conceptions of the moral come from that sphere or get their specific flavor from religious usage. The conceptions of the "soul" have contributed to the ideal of a good which is permanent, and which is made rather by personal companionship, than by sensuous gratification. "Purity" began as a magical and religious idea; it came to symbolize not only freedom from contamination but singleness of purpose. "Chastity" lends a religious sacredness to a virtue which had its roots largely in the conception of property. "Wicked" is from witch.
We have indeed certain conceptions drawn from individual experiences of instinct, or reflection. From the sense recoil from what was disgusting such conceptions as "foul," and from kindred imagery of what suits eye or muscular sense come "straightforward," "upright," "steady." From the thinking process itself we have "conscience." This word in Greek and Latin was a general term for consciousness and suggests one of the distinctive, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the moral.
For it implies a "conscious" thoughtful attitude, which operates not only in forming purposes, but in measuring and valuing action by the standards it approves. But it is evident that by far the larger part of our ethical terms are derived from social relations in the broad sense.
§ 2. ELEMENTS OF CONTRAST =Differentiation of the Moral.=--The most obvious difference between the present and the early attitude is that we now make a clear distinction between the moral aspect of behavior and other aspects such as the conventional, the political, the legal; while in customary morality all activities esteemed by society were put upon the same level and enforced with the same vigor. Matters which we should regard as purely matters of fashion or etiquette, or as modes of amusement, such as styles of wearing the hair, were imperative. To mutilate the body in a certain way