You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled
"Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality
of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows
as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be
reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading
agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the
essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw
a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference
between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the
difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The
animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it
knows--that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf
knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state
develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like
himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos
which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the
present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy
to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to
those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.
How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the
question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the
factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological
matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the
formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for
the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the
nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth
century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in
tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester
manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a
day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal
mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy
men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it
was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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