Evolution and Ethics quotes

not by allowing the free play of the struggle for existence, but by excluding that struggle; and by substituting selection directed towards the administrator's ideal for the selection it exercises.

But the Eden would have its serpent, and a very subtle beast too.

Man shares with the rest of the living world the mighty instinct of reproduction and its consequence, the tendency to multiply with great rapidity.

But the most important is the tendency, so strongly developed in man, to reproduce in himself actions and feelings similar to, or correlated with, those of other men.

Man is the most consummate of all mimics in the animal world; none but himself can draw or model; none comes near him in the scope, variety, and exactness of vocal imitation; none is such a master of gesture; while he seems to be impelled thus to imitate for the pure pleasure of it.

And there is no such another emotional chameleon. By a purely reflex operation of the mind, we take the hue of passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the complementary colour.

However complete may be the indifference to public opinion, in a cool, intellectual view, of the traditional sage, it has not yet been my fortune to meet with any actual sage who took its hostile manifestations with entire equanimity.

Indeed, I doubt if the philosopher lives, or ever has lived who could know himself to be heartily despised by a street boy without some irritation.

And, though one cannot justify Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai on such a very high gibbet, yet, really, the consciousness of the Vizier of Ahasuerus, as he went in and out of the gate, that this obscure Jew had no respect for him, must …

I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own history.

Surely, one must be very "fit," indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the "unfit."

In my belief the innate qualities, physical, intellectual, and moral, of our nation have remained substantially the same for the last four or five centuries.

In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauperism have nothing to do with heredity; but are the consequence, partly, of circumstances and, partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under different conditions of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration.

It was a shrewd man of the world who, in discussing sewage problems, remarked that dirt is riches in the wrong place; and that sound aphorism has moral applications.

The benevolence and open-handed generosity which adorn a rich man, may make a pauper of a poor one;

it seems clear that the struggle for existence in this class can have no appreciable selective influence upon the other 95 per cent. of the population.

What sort of a sheep breeder would he be who should content himself with picking out the worst fifty out of a thousand, leaving them on a barren common till the weakest starved, and then letting the survivors go back to mix with the rest?

And the parallel is too favourable; since in a large number of cases, the actual poor and the convicted criminals are neither the weakest nor the worst.

He will have to learn the lesson of self-restraint and renunciation.

But the practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better.

That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of a vast amount of improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt.

But, in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to social organization, and in proportion as civilization has grown in worth, these deeply ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects.

After the manner of successful persons, civilized man would gladly kick down the ladder by which he has climbed.

He would be only too pleased to see "the ape and tiger die." But they decline to suit his convenience;

Even purely intellectual progress brings about its revenges. Problems settled in a rough and ready way by rude men, absorbed in action, demand renewed attention and show themselves to be still unread riddles when men have time to think.

The beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is Legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths, enters into mankind and thenceforth refuses to be cast out.

Sacred customs, venerable dooms of ancestral wisdom, hallowed by tradition and professing to hold good for all time, are put to the question. Cultured reflection asks for their credentials; judges them by its own standards;

its stability depends on the steadiness with which they abide by that agreement; and, so far as they waver, that mutual trust which is the bond of society is weakened or destroyed.

Wolves could not hunt in packs except for the real, though unexpressed, understanding that they should not attack one another during the chase.

The most rudimentary polity is a pack of men living under the like tacit, or expressed,

But the attempt of the Stoics to blind themselves to the reality of evil, as a necessary concomitant of the cosmic process, had less success than that of the Indian philosophers to exclude the reality of good from their purview.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to evil.

Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced. Before the grim realities of practical life the pleasant fictions of optimism vanished.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to evil.

Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced.

Before the grim realities of practical life the pleasant fictions of optimism vanished. If this were the best of all possible worlds, it nevertheless proved itself a very inconvenient habitation for the ideal sage.

Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced. Before the grim realities of practical life the pleasant fictions of optimism vanished.

If this were the best of all possible worlds, it nevertheless proved itself a very inconvenient habitation for the ideal sage.

The stoical summary of the whole duty of man, "Live according to nature," would seem to imply that the cosmic process is an exemplar for human

one as the other.

The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Yet if that which I have insisted upon is true; if the cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends; if the imitation of it by man is inconsistent with the first principles of ethics; what becomes of this surprising theory?

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends;

to influence and modify the cosmic process.

In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the Titan to his will.

In every family, in every polity that has been established, the cosmic process in man has been restrained and otherwise modified by law and custom; in surrounding nature, it has been similarly influenced by the art of the shepherd, the agriculturist, the artisan.

And much may be done to change the nature of man himself. [Note 23}

The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

But if we may permit ourselves at larger hope of abatement of the essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the infancy of

the attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful overconfidence and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage.

We are grown men, and must play the man

cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in and around us, with stout hearts set on diminishing it. So far, we all may strive in one faith towards one hope:

(Atlantic Monthly for July, August, and October, 1860, reprinted in 1861)

Novelties are enticing to most people; to us they are simply annoying.

We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches (the Atlantic still affects the older type of nether garment), is sure to have hard-fitting places;

Novelties are enticing to most people; to us they are simply annoying.

We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes.

A new theory, like a new pair of breeches (the Atlantic still affects the older type of nether garment), is sure to have hard-fitting places; or, even when no particular fault can be found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort.

But your intellectually short-sighted people are apt to be preternaturally clear-sighted, and to find their way very plain to positive conclusions upon one side or the other of every mooted question.

In fact, most people, and some philosophers, refuse to hold questions in abeyance, however incompetent they may be to decide them.

And, curiously enough, the more difficult, recondite, and perplexing, the questions or hypotheses are—such, for instance, as those about organic Nature—the more impatient they are of suspense.

As to the other illustration, is the reviewer so complete an optimist as to insist that the arrangement and the weapon are wholly perfect (quoad the insect) the normal use of which often causes the animal fatally to injure or to disembowel itself?

Either way it seems to us that the argument here, as well as the insect, performs hari-kari.

The Examiner adds:

… vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[III-16} A worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned.

If a writer must needs use his own favorite dogma as a weapon with which to give coup de grace to a pernicious theory, he should be careful to seize his edge-tool by the handle, and not by the blade.

We can barely glance at a subsidiary philosophical objection of the North American reviewer, which the Examiner also raises, though less explicitly. Like all geologists, Mr. Darwin draws upon time in the most unlimited manner. He is not peculiar in this regard. Mr.

"Or if a quadruped, not yet furnished with wings, were suddenly inspired with the instinct of a bird, and precipitated itself from a cliff, would not the descent be hazardously rapid?"

Doubtless the animal would be no better supported than the objection.

But Darwin makes very little indeed of voluntary efforts as a cause of change, and even poor Lamarck need not be caricatured.

… the possibility of the existence of any large animal, as the labour required to get at a sufficiency of the store of food-stuffs, contained in such plants as these, could hardly extract from them an equivalent for the waste involved in that expenditure of work.

We are compact of dust and air; from that we set out, and to that complexion must we come at last.

The plant either directly, or by some animal intermediary, lends us the capital which enables us to carry on the business of life, as we flit through the upper world, from the one term of our journey to the other.

of drawers—therefore my wages are the produce of my day's labour"—there is no great harm in such metaphorical speech, so long as the poor man does not delude himself into the supposition that it represents the exact truth.

"Virtually" is apt to cover more intellectual sins than "charity" does moral delicts.

After what has been said, it surely must be plain enough that each day's work has involved the consumption of the carpenter's vital capital, and the fashioning of his timber, at the expense of more or less consumption of those forms of capital.

As ships, house, and clock, the unfinished articles have no value whatever—that is to say, no person who wanted to purchase one of these things, for immediate use, would give a farthing for either.

The only value they can have, apart from that of the materials they contain, is that which they possess for some one who can finish them, or for some one who can make use of parts of them for the construction of other things.

A man might buy an unfinished house for the sake of the bricks; or he might buy an incomplete clock to use the works for some other piece of machinery.

… the organization of a deer to which it owes its ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at least equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of the wolf which enables him to track, and sooner or later to bring down, the deer.

Viewed under the dry light of science, deer and wolf are alike admirable; and, if both were non-sentient automata, there would be nothing to qualify our admiration of the action of the one on the other.

But the fact that the deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts suffering, engages our moral sympathies. We should call men like the deer innocent and good, men such as the wolf malignant and bad;

Her terrible aspect is not to be ignored or covered up with shams; but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness.

Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst form of wrong.

This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense.

but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst form of wrong.

This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense.

A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings;

beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.

The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Ormuzd has not had his way in this world, neither has Ahriman.

Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism.

The human species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.

The history of civilization—that is, of society—on the other hand, is the record of the attempts which the human race has made to escape from this position.

The first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war, whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step, created society. But, in establishing peace, they obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence.

the struggle for existence would have been abolished, and the millennium would have finally set in. But it is obvious that this state of things could have been permanent only with a stationary population.

Add ten fresh mouths; and as, by the supposition, there was only exactly enough before, somebody must go on short rations.

The

about the matter. It is social stability. Society is stable, when the wants of its members obtain as much satisfaction as, life being what it is, common sense and experience show may be reasonably expected.

Mankind, in general, care very little for forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort; and nothing really stirs the great multitude to break with custom and incur the manifest perils of revolt except the belief that misery in this world, or damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the continuance of the state of things in which they have been brought up.

But when they do attain that conviction, society becomes as unstable as a package of dynamite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion which sends it back to the chaos of savagery.

And I can but admire the insight into human nature which has led Mr. Booth to leave his unquestioning and unhesitating instruments unbound by vows.

A volunteer slave is worth ten sworn bondsmen.

(3) That the success of the Salvation Army, with its present force of 9416 officers "wholly engaged in the work," its capital of three quarters of a million, its income of the same amount, its 1375 corps at home, and 1499 in the colonies and …

Whereupon he whipped up his horse and set off at a hand-gallop. Nearly jerked off my seat, I shouted, "My good friend, do you know where I want to go?"

"No, yer honner," said the driver, "but, any way, I am driving fast."

I have never forgotten this object-lesson in the dangers of ill-regulated enthusiasm. We are all invited to jump on to the Salvation Army car, which Mr. Booth is undoubtedly driving very fast.

Whereupon he whipped up his horse and set off at a hand-gallop. Nearly jerked off my seat, I shouted, "My good friend, do you know where I want to go?" "No, yer honner," said the driver, "but, any way, I am driving fast."

I have never forgotten this object-lesson in the dangers of ill-regulated enthusiasm.

We are all invited to jump on to the Salvation Army car, which Mr. Booth is undoubtedly driving very fast.

"Commissioner's" present action. But what then? The upshot of all this is that Mr. Booth-Clibborn has made as great a blunder as simple Mr. Trotter did.

The pair of Balaams greatly desired to curse, but have been compelled to bless.

They have, between them, completely justified my reliance on Mr. Sumner as a perfectly trustworthy witness;

And I have just proved that Mr. "Commissioner" Booth-Clibborn asserts the exact contrary of that which your report of the judgment of the Master of the Rolls tells us that distinguished judge said.

Under these circumstances, I think that my politeness in applying no harder adjective than "Jesuitical" to these proceedings is not properly appreciated.

The "Times," January 22nd, 1891

And this because he had promised Mr. Stead to keep the fact secret.

In short, Mr. Bramwell Booth did not say what was wrong; but he did what was wrong.

I will take care to give every weight to the correction. Most people, I think, will consider that one of the "main pillars of my argument," as Mr. Stead is pleased to call them, has become very much strengthened.