The Human Origin of Morals. Joseph McCabe

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       Joseph McCabe

      The Human Origin of Morals

      Published by Good Press, 2020

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066405656

Table of Contents

       Chapter I. Theories of Moral Law

       Chapter II. Evolution and Morals

       Chapter III. The Dawn of Conscience

       Chapter IV. Religion and Morals

       Chapter V. Moral Eccentricities

       Chapter VI. The Christian Ethic

       Chapter VII. Moral Law Is Social Law

       Chapter VIII. The Revolt Against Morality

      Chapter I. Theories of Moral Law

       Table of Contents

      There are few subjects on which so much solemn nonsense has been written as on the nature of conscience and moral law; and there is no other phenomenon of the human mind of which it is possible to give so simple and natural an explanation.

      There are few facts of human life which have been so deeply woven into the web of religious thought as what are called a man's moral and immoral actions; and there are none which have so little real connection with religion.

      There is no other element of our decaying religions which has been so reverently clothed by modern philosophers with a mantle of mysticism; and there is none which evolutionary science explains more clearly.

      There is nothing which so readily brings together our modern oracles, inside and outside of the Churches, our preachers and essayists and editorial writers, as zeal for the august and eternal authority of moral sentiment; and there is nothing that has been more persistently assailed and more caustically ridiculed by a large number of the most brilliant literary men of our time.

      There is no institution of the past that so universally commands the lip-homage of our skeptical and rebellious generation as well as of believers; and there is nothing in human history which has caused, and causes today, as much hypocrisy.

      Clearly, we need a discussion of the nature of morality. We have seen what religion is, and how it evolved. We have examined the fundamental doctrines of God and immortality. Let us now, in the same plain and candid way, examine what seems to be the common ground of all idealism, the moral sentiment.

      I begin, as usual, with facts. No one will question the universal, never-ending concern about morals in our press and literature as well as our churches; and few are likely to question the enormously widespread hypocrisy in practice. No one will question that a number of brilliant writers are anti-moralists, while most writers represent moral law as the supreme reality, the foundation of social life; the starry heavens above our head, as Kant said, the granite substratum under the soil of our cities, as Emerson said. And if any do not know the mysticism with which philosophers veil the moral law, or the ease with which science explains it, he will soon be informed.

      This extraordinary confusion of thought is not so surprising as the reader may be inclined to imagine. It will, in fact, be most useful to understand the confusion itself before we go further.

      Think of the evolution of man's ideas in regard to thunder and lightning. To the blurred mind of primitive man, as in the blurred mind of a dog, these are simply facts. They occur. When man began to see that events have causes, and to believe that the causes in nature were spirits, he very promptly made a god of thunder and lightning. And it was a very great god: the sky-god, mountain-god, thunder-god of the nature-religions.

      When the higher religions made God spiritual, they still maintained that thunder was his voice, in a special way, and lightning his weapon. Even the simple explanation given by Franklin did not destroy the belief. In the law of civilized nations today it is an "act of God" when lightning shatters a building: even if it kills innocent children.

      Moral law was another kind of thunder, and, being "spiritual," it remained a sort of supernatural phenomenon even when man became fully civilized. Until modern times it was quite unintelligible. There was the law, no one knew why, no one knew whence. It was written in every man's conscience. A strange thing, this, and philosophers set to work on it.

      Philosophers never believe in revelation, and they do not love science. They were quite pleased when science began to explain the order of the heavens, the beauty of the rose or of the sunset, and the adaptations of organs. But science must not touch "spiritual" things, they said. That was their business. So the confusion goes on; and the way in which theology is still allowed to dominate our education, our law-courts, our press, and a large part of our lives, maintains the confusion in the general mind.

      You will see this clearly if I very briefly sketch the history of speculation on the nature of morality.

      We have so little literature of the older civilizations that we cannot say much about, the ideas of their thinkers, as far as they have had any thinkers, but we have found a little Egyptian moral treatise (The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep), of more than four thousand years ago, which seems to show that even then educated men who were not priests understood that moral law was, simply a human and social law of conduct. I explain in The Myth of Immortality (Little Blue Book No. 1059) that that was the conviction of the two great moralists, Buddha and Confucius.

      However, real speculation began with the Greeks. Most of the people who talk about "brilliant Greece" and "meteoric Athens" know very little about the subject. Earnest thinking about nature and man began amongst the Greeks, not of Athens or the homeland, but of Asia Minor.

      We understand this today. The refugees of the splendid old civilization of Crete, which was destroyed by the early barbaric Greeks about 1450 BC, went in part to Palestine, where they helped to civilize the Hebrews (who came later), and in large part to Asia Minor, where they civilized the, Greek immigrants. As these Greeks of Asia Minor were independent of the religious bigotry of the home-land, they speculated with great freedom and wonderful success. They were really scientists, not philosophers. They guessed the vastness of the universe, believed in atoms and evolution, and made very little pretense of believing in gods.

      As the history of thought is usually written, it is said that, fortunately, these "mere Materialists" were soon thrust aside, and the great thinkers of Athens turned away from nature and studied man.

      In point of fact, it was a great misfortune; for it meant the strangling of science in its cradle. Moreover, these Greek thinkers of the homeland, while they rejected current religion, as all philosophers do, were much influenced by fear of the pious democracy; and the philosophical ideas which they gave the world instead of theology are now quite discredited.

      First of them was the mystic Pythagoras. He is said to have been influenced by Buddhism. We can only say that it is a great pity that he did not introduce into Europe the Agnostic and purely humanitarian ethic of Buddha. Instead of that he discovered—I am