A Handbook of Ethical Theory

ich influence his development. His environment is two-fold, material and social; but his material setting may affect his social relations, and it is social man, not the individual

to attain them. Are his powers feeble and his intelligence undeveloped, it may tax all his efforts to keep himself alive and to continue the race in

ntelligence plays a feeble part. The man remains a slave, under dictation, and moved by the dread of immediate disaster. For an interest in what is remote in time and place, for the extension of knowledge for its own sake, for the development of activities which have no direct bearing upon the problem of keeping him alive an

zing slothfulness, an animal passivity and content. This may be observed in whole peoples highly favored by soil and climate, and protected by their situation from external dangers. It may be observed in certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of civilization. The idle son

r, at least, for man at an early stage of his development. She may thwart his efforts and dwarf his life. It was through no accident that the Athenian st

n is the same as that of the creatures below him who seem incapable of progress. It is as an intelligen

ided with natural means of defense, less protected by nature against cold, heat and the inclemencies of the weather, endowed with in

old and heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the to

d not his intelligent control over nature furnish him with a food-supply which makes it possible for vast numbers of human beings to live and thrive on a territory of limited extent. Moreover, he has compasse

latively aimless and insignificant, has developed into the passion for systematic knowledge and the persistent search for truth; the rudimentary aesthetic feeling which is revealed in primitive man, and traces of which are recognizable in creatures far lower in the scale, has blossomed out in those elaborate creations, which, at an enormous expense of labor and ingenuity, have come to enri

normous significance to the life of man. It may bring emancipation; it offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to reflect

elopment. What more natural to conclude than that, with the progressive unfolding of his intelligence, with increase in knowledge, with some relaxation of the struggle for existence which pits

s highest such judgments appear to be justified. But

ably well satisfied. His competition with his fellows may not be bitter and absorbing. The simple life is not necessarily an unhappy life, if the simplicity which characterizes it be not too extreme.

in happiness, but in unhappiness, unless the satisf

effort. Where the effort is excessive man becomes again the slave of his environment. His task is set for him, and he fulfi

e a grossly material one, even when endowed with no little wealth. With wealth comes the opportunity for the development of the arts which embellish life, but that opportunity may not be embraced. Man may be materially rich and spiritually poor; he may allow some of his faculties to lie dormant, and may lose the enjoyments which would have been his had they been devel

ult is an advance in moralization. An advance in civilization-in knowledge, in the control over nature's resources, in the evolution of the industrial and even of the fine arts-does not necess

holly without information in the field of morals, and we may here fall back upon such conceptions as men generally possess before they have evolved a science of mo

as a whole. The social bonds which have obtained between members of the same group may be relaxed; the devotion to the common good may be replaced by the selfish calculation of profit to the individual; the exploitation of man by his fellow-man may be accepted as natural and normal. It is not without its significance that the most highly civilized of states have, under the pressure of economic advance, come

ing in stocks, who goes to his bed at night scheming how he may with impunity exploit his fellow-man, and who rises in the morning with a strained consciousness of possible fluctuations in the market which may overwhelm him in irretrievable disaster, lives in perils which easily bear comparison with those which threaten the precarious existence of primitive man. To masses of

ch or poor, a prey to dangers and anxieties, engaged in an unequal combat with his environment, absorbed in the satisfaction o

, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment the habit of