On Mr. Spencer's Data of EthicsGuthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Philosophy
On Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics
Guthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Ethics, Evolutionary; Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. Data of ethics
But this scientific truth does not in its mere enunciation bear upon the
question as to our ethical relationship to the Unknown Power. It is only
when we study its spiritual or subjective manifestation as an orderly
development that we can recognise a power to which we owe a moral
obligation. The scientific evidence of moral obligation to the
inscrutable power rests, not upon the recognition of the power of which
the cosmos is a manifestation, nor upon the fact of its inscrutability,
but upon the knowledge of the subjective factor, its manifested history,
and the inductions to be drawn from a study of that history in the laws
of the working of altruistic sympathy, of quantitative life, and of the
harmony of life as already set forth. Professor Fiske's conclusion is a
good statement of this scientific establishment of personal
responsibility to the divine power, and of religion as the crown and
sanction of Ethics.
"Now, science began to return a decisively affirmative answer to such
questions as these when it began, with Mr. Spencer, to explain moral
beliefs and moral sentiments as products of evolution. For clearly, when
you say of a moral belief or a moral sentiment that it is a product of
evolution, you imply that it is something which the universe through
untold ages has been labouring to bring forth, and you ascribe to it a
value proportionate to the enormous effort that it has cost to produce
it. Still more, when with Mr. Spencer we study the principles of right
living as part and parcel of the whole doctrine of the development of
life upon the earth; when we see that, in an ultimate analysis, that is
right which tends to enhance fulness of life, and that is wrong which
tends to detract from fulness of life--we then see that the distinction
between right and wrong is rooted in the deepest foundations of the
universe; we see that the very same forces, subtle, exquisite, and
profound, which brought upon the scene the primal germs of life and
caused them to unfold, which through countless ages of struggle and
death have cherished the life that could live more perfectly, and
destroyed the life that could only live less perfectly, and humanity,
with all its hopes, and fears, and aspirations, has come into being as
the crown of all this stupendous work--we see that these very same
subtle and exquisite forces have wrought into the very fibres of the
universe those principles of right living which it is man's highest
function to put into practice. The theoretical sanction thus given to
right living is incomparably the most powerful that has ever been
assigned in any philosophy of Ethics. Human responsibility is made more
strict and solemn than ever, when the eternal power that lives in every
event of the universe is thus seen to be in the deepest possible sense
the author of the moral law that should guide our lives, and in
obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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