Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles — John Shaqi
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principlesSullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Religion
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles
Sullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Conduct of life; Ethics; Religion and ethics
And, finally, we may approach the question from the point of view of
evolution. Everybody knows the pitiless manner in which the late
Professor Huxley contrasted the ethical man with the cosmical process,
how he pointed out that the one hope of progress lay in man's ability
to successfully combat by ethical idealism the rude realism of the
material order of which he is a part. The facts need no exposition.
Every man has the evidence of it in himself, in the periodical
insurrection of the ape and tiger element in him against the authority
of some mysterious power which in the course of his long sojourn here
has been acquired, and to which he recognises that the allegiance of
his life is due. That tearful, regretful expression of the _Grand
Monarque_, after one of Massillon's searching, scathing sermons on the
sensual and spiritual in every man, "_Ah, voila deux hommes que je
connais tres bien!_" may be repeated with even greater truthfulness by
every one of us, now that Darwin has superseded St. Paul in the
explanation of the phenomenon.
Now, here we have a surprising contradiction in Nature, the startling
apparition of an element in man so utterly opposed to all that is
beneath him, that a scientific chieftain tells us that his only hope is
to kill out that ape and tiger, or at any rate keep it under unceasing
control. Whence is this extraordinary human element, and what
explanation can be given of the contradiction unless there be some
higher synthesis into which the antinomy is taken up and resolved into
unity? If out of the primordial nebula both the cosmos and man, with
all that he is, have been evolved, then it would appear, plain as the
writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come
over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly
irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself
in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an
essential, nay, as _the_ essential law of his being.
How can we explain this? How can we account for this complete _volta
face_ in Nature, which bids man turn his back on all that made the
universe and him, and resolve to live by a law so irreconcilable with
the methods of the cosmos, that I take it we should be justified in
saying that had it been in operation before man Nature itself could not
have been evolved?
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