THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Huxley, in his Romanes lectures at Oxford in 1893, argued that biology
could not be taken as an ethical guide; that "nature red in tooth and
claw" (as Tennyson was phrasing it) exalted brutality and cunning rather
than justice and love; but Spencer felt that a moral code which could
not meet the tests of natural selection and the struggle for existence, was
from the beginning doomed to lipservice and futility. Conduct, like any-
or mal-
thing else, should be called good or bad as it is well adapted,
adapted, to the ends of life; "the highest conduct is that which conduces
to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life." 79 Or, in terms
of the evolution formula, conduct is moral according as it makes the
individual or the group more integrated and coherent in the midst of a
heterogeneity of ends. Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in
diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself
the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.
This is a rather v?.gue definition, as it must be; for nothing varies so
much, from place to place and from time to time, as the specific neces-
sities of adaptation, and therefore the specific content of the idea of good.
It is true that certain forms of behavior have been stamped as good as
adapted, in the large, to the fullest life by the sense of pleasure which
natural selection has attached to these preservative and expansive actions.
The complexity of modern life has multiplied exceptions, but normally,
pleasure indicates biologically useful, and pain indicates biologically
dangerous, activities. 80 Nevertheless, within the broad bounds of this
principle, we find the most diverse, and apparently the most hostile, conceptions
of the good. There is hardly any item of our Western moral code
which is not somewhere held to be immoral; not only polygamy, but
fuicide, murder of one's own countrymen, even of one's parents, finds in
one people or another a lof ty moral approbation.
The wives of the Fijian chiefs consider it a sacred duty to suffer strangulation
on the death of their husbands. A woman who had been rescued by
Williams 'escaped during the night, and, swimming across the river, and
presenting herself to her own people, insisted on the completion of the sac-
rifice which she had in a moment of weakness reluctantly consented to forego';
and Wilkes tells of another who loaded her rescuer 'with abuse,' and
ever afterwards manifested the most deadly hatred towards him. 9 ' 81 "living-
stone says of the Makololo women, on the shores of the Zambesi, that they
were quite shocked to hear that in England a man had only one wife: to
have only one was not 'respectable.* So, too, in Equatorial Africa, according
to Reade, 'If a man marries, and his wife thinks that he can afford another
spouse, she pesters him to many again; and calls him a "stingy fellow" if
he declines to do so.' 82
Such facts, of course, conflict with the belief that there is an inborn
moral sense which tells each man what is right and what is wrong. But
TO
I, 22, 26;ii, 3. "% 98. *I,469. "I, 3*7-