Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

But even when the moralists did not lay down the "Golden Rule," they taught that the cause of sin and of suffering was selfishness; and they spoke strongly against self-pity, and self-love, and self-aggrandisement.

What is the lesson of Buddha, and of the Indian, Persian, and Greek moralists? Buddha went out into the world to search for the cause of human sin and sorrow. He found the cause to be self-indulgence and the cure to be self-conquest. "The cause of pain," he said, "is desire." And this lesson was repeated over and over again by Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch, and Seneca..

The moral is that selfishness is bad, and unselfishness is good. And this moral is backed by the almost universal practice of all men in all ages and of all races in testing or weighing the virtue or the value of any person's conduct.

What is the common assay for moral gold? The test of the motive. Sir Gorgio Midas has given £100,000 to found a Midas hospital. What says the man in the street? "Ah! fine advertisement for the Midas pills!" Mr. Queech, the grocer and churchwarden, has given £5 to the new Methodist Sunday School. "H'm!" says the cynical average man, "a sprat to catch a mackerel." Sir Norman Conquest, Bart, M.P., has made an eloquent speech in favour of old-age pensions. Chigwin, the incorruptible, remarks with a sniff that "it looks as if there would soon be a General Election."

What do these gibes mean? They mean that the benevolence of Messrs. Midas, Queech, and Conquest is inspired by selfishness, and therefore is not worthy, but base.

Now, when a gang of colliers go down a burning pit to save life, or when a sailor jumps overboard in a storm to save a drowning fireman, or when a Russian countess goes to Siberia for trying to free the Russian serfs, there is no sneer heard. Chigwin's fierce eye lights up, the man in the street nods approvingly, and the average man in the railway compartment observes sententiously:

"That's pluck."

Well. Is it not clear that these acts are approved and held good? And is it not clear that they are held to be good because they are felt to be unselfish?

Now, I make bold to say that in no case shall we find a man or woman honoured or praised by men when his conduct is believed to be selfish. It is always selfishness that men scorn. It is always self-sacrifice or unselfish service they admire. This shows us that deep in the universal heart the root idea of morality is social service. This is not a divine truth: it is a human truth.

Selfishness has come to be called "bad" because it injures the many without benefiting the one. Unselfishness has come to be called "good" because it brings benefit and pleasure to one and all. "It is twice bless'd: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes." As Marcus Aurelius expresses it: "That which is not for the interest of the whole swarm is not for the interest of a single bee." And again he puts it: "Mankind are under one common law; and if so they must be fellow-citizens, and belong to the same body politic. From whence it will follow that the whole world is but one commonwealth."

And Epictetus, the Greek slave, said that as "God is the father of all men, then all men are brothers."

For countless ages this notion of human brotherhood, and of the evil of self-love, has been to morality what the sap is to the tree. And now let us think once more how the notion first came into being.

I said that morality – which is the knowledge of good and evil – did not come by revelation from God, but by means of evolution. And I said that this idea was first put forth by Spencer and Darwin, and afterwards dealt with by other writers.

Darwin's idea was two-fold. He held that man inherited his social instincts (on which morality is built) from the lower animals; and he thought that very likely the origin of the social instinct in animals was the relation of the parents to their young. Let us first see what Darwin said.

In Chapter Four of The Descent of Man Darwin deals with "moral sense." After remarking that, so far as he knows, no one has approached the question exclusively from the side of natural history, Darwin goes on:

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable – namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense, or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well, developed as in man.

For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, and feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them…

Every one must have noticed how miserable dogs, horses, sheep, etc., are when separated from their companions, and what strong mutual affection the two former kinds, at least, shown on their reunion…

All animals living in a body, which defend themselves or attack their enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one another; and those that follow a leader must be in some degree obedient. When the baboons in Abyssinia plunder a garden, they silently follow a leader, and if an imprudent young animal makes a noise, he receives a slap from the others to teach him silence and obedience…

With respect to the impulse which leads certain animals to associate together, and to aid one another in many ways, we may infer that in most cases they are impelled by the same sense of satisfaction or pleasure which they experience in performing other instinctive actions…

In however complex a manner this feeling (sympathy) may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection for those communities which included the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring…

Thus the social instincts, which must have been acquired by man in a very rude state, and probably even by his early apelike progenitors, still give the impulse to some of his best actions; but his actions are in a higher degree determined by the expressed wishes and judgment of his fellow-men, and unfortunately very often by his own strong selfish desires.

Those quotations should be enough to show Darwin's idea of the origin of the social, or moral, feelings. But I shall quote besides Haeckel's comment on Darwin's theory.

Speaking of the "Golden Rule" in his Confessions of Faith of a Man of Science, Haeckel says:

In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident; as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of apes and other social mammals; in a similar manner, but with wider scope, it was already present in the most primitive communities and among the hordes of the least advanced savages. Brotherly love – mutual support, succour, protection, and the like – had already made its appearance among gregarious animals as a social duty; for without it, the continued existence of such societies is impossible. Although at a later period, in the case of man, these moral foundations of society came to be much more highly developed, their oldest prehistoric source, as Darwin has shown, is to be sought in the social instincts of animals. Among the higher vertebrates (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.), the development of social relations and duties is the indispensable condition of their living together in orderly societies. Such societies have for man also been the most important instrument of intellectual and moral progress.

There is a very able article in the March, 1905, issue of the Nineteenth Century, by Prince Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid, on Darwin's theory of the origin of the moral sense, in which the striking suggestion is made that primitive man, besides inheriting from animals the social instinct, also copied from them the first rudiments of tribal union and mutual aid. This notion may be gathered from the following picturesque passages:

Primitive man lived in close intimacy with animals. With some of them he probably shared the shelters under the rocks, occasionally the caverns, and very often food…

Our primitive ancestors lived with the animals, in the midst of them. And as soon as they began to bring some order into their observations of nature, and to transmit them to posterity, the animals and their life supplied them with the chief materials for their unwritten encyclopaedia of knowledge, as well as for their wisdom, which they expressed in proverbs and sayings. Animal psychology was the first psychology man was aware of – it is still a favourite subject of talk at the camp fires; animal life, closely interwoven with that of man, was the subject of the very first rudiments of art, inspiring the first engravers and sculptors, and entering into the composition of the most ancient epical traditions and cosmogonic myths…

The first thing which our children learn in natural history is something about the beasts of prey – the lions and the tigers; But the first thing that primitive savages must have learned about nature was that it represents a vast agglomeration of animal clans and tribes; the ape tribe, so nearly related to man, the ever-prowling wolf tribe, the knowing, chattering bird tribe, the ever-busy insect tribe, and on. For them the animals were an extension of their own kin – only so much wiser than themselves. And the first vague generalisation which men must have made about nature – so vague as to hardly differ from a mere impression – was that the living being and his clan or tribe are inseparable. We can separate them —they could not; and it seems even doubtful whether they could think of life otherwise than within a clan or a tribe…

And that man who had witnessed once an attack of wild dogs, or dholes, upon the biggest beasts of prey, certainly realised, once and for ever, the irresistible force of the tribal unions, and the confidence and courage with which they inspire every individual. Man made divinities of these dogs, and worshipped them, trying by all sorts of magic to acquire their courage.

In the prairies and the woods our earliest ancestors saw myriads of animals, all living in clans and tribes. Countless herds of red deer, fallow deer, reindeer, gazelles, and antelopes, thousands of droves of buffaloes and legions of wild horses, wild donkeys, quaggas, zebras, and so on, were moving over the boundless plains, peacefully grazing side by side. Even the dreary plateaus had their herds of llamas and wild camels. And when man approached these animals, he soon realised how closely connected all these beings were in their respective droves or herds. Even when they seemed fully absorbed in grazing, and apparently took no notice of the others, they closely watched each other's movements, always ready to join in some common action. Man saw that all the deer tribe, whether they graze or merely gambol, always kept sentries, which never release their watchfulness and never are late to signal the approach of a beast of prey; he knew how, in case of a sudden attack, the males and the females would encircle their young ones and face the enemy, exposing their lives for the safety of the feeble ones; and how, even with such timid creatures as the antelopes, or the fallow deer, the old males would often sacrifice themselves in order to cover the retreat of the herd. Man knew all that, which we ignore or easily forget, and he repeated it in his tales, embellishing the acts of courage and self-sacrifice with his primitive poetry, or mimicking them in his religious tribal dances…

Social life – that is, we, not I– is, in the eyes of primitive man, the normal form of life. It is life itself. Therefore "we" must have been the normal form of thinking for primitive man: a "category" of his understanding, as Kant might have said. And not even "we," which is still too personal, because it represents a multiplication of the "I's," but rather such expression as "the men of the beaver tribe," "the kangaroo men," or "the turtles." This was the primitive form of thinking, which nature impressed upon the mind of man.

Here, in that identification, or, we might even say, in this absorption of the "I" by the tribe, lies the root of all ethical thought. The self-asserting "individual" came much later on. Even now, with the lower savages, the "individual" hardly exists at all. It is the tribe, with its hard-and-fast rules, superstitions, taboos, habits, and interests, which is always present in the mind of the child of nature. And in that constant, ever-present identification of the unit with the whole lies the substratum of all ethics, the germ out of which all the subsequent conceptions of justice, and the still higher conceptions of morality, grew up in the course of evolution.

Besides these excellent contributions to the subject, Prince Kropotkin gives us other new and striking thoughts, bearing upon the parental source of the social feelings indicated by Darwin. But first let us go back to Darwin. In Chapter Four of The De-scent of Man Darwin says:

The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents, and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection. With those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers.

Dr. Saleeby, in the Academy in the spring of 1905, had some interesting remarks upon the origin of altruism. He "finds in the breast of the mammalian mother the fount whence love has flowed," and points out that the higher we go in the mammalian scale the more dependent are the young upon their mothers.

After describing the helplessness of the human baby, he continues thus:

Yet, this is the creature which has spread over the earth so that he numbers some fifteen hundred millions to-day. He is the "lord of creation," master of creatures bigger, stronger, fleeter, longer-lived than himself. The earth is his and the fulness thereof. Yet without love not one single specimen of him has a chance of reaching maturity, or even surviving for a week. Verily love is the greatest thing in the world.

Well, upon this subject of the parental origin of altruism, Prince Kropotkin throws another light. First, alluding to Darwin's cautious handling of the subject of the maternal origin of social feelings, Prince Kropotkin, quotes Darwin's own remarkable comment, thus:

This caution was fully justified, because in other places he pointed out that the social instinct must be a separate instinct in itself, different from the others – an instinct which has been developed by natural selection for its own sake, as it was useful for the well-being and preservation of the species. It is so fundamental, that when it runs against another instinct, even one so strong as the attachment of the parents to their offspring, it often takes the upper hand. Birds, when the time has come for their autumn migration, will leave behind their tender young, not yet old enough for a prolonged flight, and follow their comrades.

He then offers the following suggestion:

To this striking illustration I may also add that the social instinct is strongly developed with many lower animals, such as the land-crabs, or the Molucca crab; as also with certain fishes, with whom it hardly could be considered as an extension of the filial or parental feelings. In these cases it appears rather an extension of the brotherly or sisterly relations or feelings of comradeship, which probably develop each time that a considerable number of young animals, having been hatched at a given place and at a given moment, continue to live together – whether they are with their parents or not. It would seem, therefore, more correct to consider the social and the parental instincts as two closely connected instincts, of which the former is perhaps the earlier, and therefore the stronger, and which both go hand in hand in the evolution of the animal world. Both are favoured by natural selection, which as soon as they come into conflict keeps the balance between the two, for the ultimate good of the species.

To sum up all these ideas. We find it suggested that the social feelings from which morality sprang, were partly inherited by man from his animal ancestors, partly imitated from observation of the animals he knew so well in his wild life.

And we find it suggested that these social feelings probably began in the love of animals for their young, and in the brotherhood and comradeship of the young for each other.

It was the social feelings of men that made their Bibles: the Bibles did not make the social feelings.

Morality is the result of evolution, not of revelation.

CHAPTER FIVE – THE ANCESTRAL STRUGGLE WITHIN US

I HAVE spoken of the "nature" handed down to us by our fore-parents. I might have said "natures," for our inheritance, being not from one, but from many, is not simple, but compound.

We too commonly think of a man as an Englishman or a Frenchman; as a Londoner or a Yorkshireman; as good or bad.

We too commonly think of a man as one person, instead of as a mixture of many persons. As though John Smith were all John Smith, and always John Smith.