Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom DogBlatchford, Robert
Philosophy
Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog
Blatchford, Robert
Criminals; Free will and determinism
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....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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