BOOKS.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORALITY.* IT is likely that at a future period, possibly not very remote, the current studies in various departments of social science will be regarded with a kind of interest which the reader of to-day often misses. The fabric of knowledge is being slowly reconstructed in every direction under our eyes. And yet our very closeness to the work which is going on around us renders it inevitable that we should be often without that truer insight into the meaning and importance of the new features which will be possessed by those who will come after us. The science of ethics is of necessity one of special interest in a period like the present. It is a kind of meeting-place where three great contemporary streams of tendency to some extent commingle their currents. It cannot be doubted that the science is destined sooner or later to be affected by the present tendencies of know- ledge which set from the direction of biology. In one sense, indeed, the claim is a perfectly just one that the whole subject is but a sub-department of higher biology. It must also, it would appear, be profoundly influenced by the present tendencies of development in theology, a subjeet with which it has had the closest association in the past. And last, bat not
* The Origin and Growth of the Herat instincts. By Alexander Sutherland,' LA. London: Longman', Green, and Co. [25a.
least, it must be remembered that that broad stream of generalised knowledge which we call philosophy, to which such vast contributions have been made of late, passes right through the territory which ethics has made its own. Who, therefore, is to feel himself equipped to deal competently with the science in the future P For the writer whose work is to last must certainly have close affinities with many different branches of knowledge. The knowledge and train- ing of even a John Stuart Mill is no longer a sufficient out- fit with which to undertake such a task.
The two large volumes before us which Mr. Alexander Sutherland has given us under the title of The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instincts are interesting as bringing out the difficulties and limitations under which a writer on this subject at present labours. The volumes are evidently the work of one who has given much time and thought to the subject on which he writes. The author tells us that full half of the book is a detailed expansion of the fourth and fifth chapters of Darwin's Descent of Man, and that his purpose on the whole is to show how from the needs of animal life as they rose and developed there sprang, at first slowly but quickening as it advanced, that moral instinct which, with its concomitant intelligence, forms the noblest feature of life. Notwithstanding the promising title and aspect of the work, and the care and conscientious labour of the author, it has proved to us on the whole deeply disappointing. It is possible to put into a few sentences what appears to us to be its main deficiency ; but before doing so let us briefly refer to the argument. The idea which runs through the two volumes is the gradual growth as we rise in the scale of life of the quality of sympathy. This is the foundation from which arises the moral instinct. The growth of this quality is associated throughout the lower forms of life with the slow evolution of parental instinct and of parental care. The increase of both, and their growing efficiency as we rise from the cold-blooded animals to the warm, into the birds on the one hand and the mammals on the other, is traced in a series of chapters. In the mammals as we rise above the marsupials parental devotion increases. In the monkeys it has reached a high degree of development. In the savage races it is still higher, and it tends to culminate at present amongst the most advanced sections of mankind. The growth of sympathy in connection with this increase of the parental instinct, and in connection at length with the conjugal tenderness and fidelity which come with it, is insisted on throughout the greater part of the first book. This part of the work is on the whole effectively done; although it could hardly be claimed for it that it is in any way original. Mr. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Wallace, the American author Fiske, and several other writers have already presented essentially the same facts. The argument, however, gains greatly in clearness and cogency by the con- sistent manner in which it is presented by the author.
Bat it is when Mr. Sutherland leaves the question of the gradual development of sympathy on lower levels, and sets to construct, from the foundation which he has raised, a theory of morality, that the chief weakness of the work begins to make itself felt. Whether from a biological or an ethical point of view, the deficiency is alike apparent. If we look at the matter, in the first place, from a strictly biological stand- point, we have to keep clearly before the mind a single principle which goes to the root of the whole matter. It is that in so far as science is concerned with the subject of morality, man is a moral animal because he is a social animal. The science of ethics is, in short, intimately and inseparably associated with the science of society. When, therefore, we have morality developed from sympathy, and we are told that both the content of duty and its sanctions are founded on dympathy, we feel instinctively that, with whatever degree of anterest and effectiveness the facts may be presented, we are in the presence of a generalisation which has no real depth,— the argument is proceeding merely on the surface. For in the evolution of society we are concerned with principles entirely different from those which have operated in life during previous stages, with principles which overrule and control the individual, as an individual, at every point. In the development which is proceeding therein Mr. Sutherland seems to us to have mistaken the function of sympathy. In every stage of its evolution society has its standards of morals, always in close and vital association with the principles which are regulating and controlling its life and development. Sympathy is, beyond doubt, an immense social force operating towards the enforcement of these standards. But it certainly does not originate them. We should be merely begging the whole question if we imagined that it did. To ask what, are the larger principles behind those standards is to bring us to the brink of the really important questions which underlie the origin of the moral sentiments. But these Mr. Sutherland does not seem to us to illumine. If, in the second place, we look now at the author's work from within the narrower position of the science of ethics, it must be pointed out that' there is nothing new in this association of the moral instincts with sympathy. It is a very old theory. Both Adam Smith and Hume regarded sympathy as the ultimate element into which the moral sentiments might be analysed. The older Utilitarians made great play with the idea, and it was a favourite one with John Stuart Mill, although Professor Sidgwick has lately criticised it rather adversely. The late Professor Huxley, in one of the paradoxes in which he delighted, once said that to act strictly according to our sym- pathies in a civilised State would be incompatible with civil existence, and that it would probably remain so in any State of the kind likely to arise in the future. This was only another way of saying that the constitution of society, and therefore morality itself, required a deeper explanation than any which could be got out of a mere theory of the progressive development of sympathy. That deeper explanation it is not our purpose to discuss on the pr esent occasion ; but it will not, in our opinion at any rate, be reached by those who seek it from the rationalistic standpoint.
Mr. Sutherland's work seems to us rather to fall between two stools. There is nothing to be said against his mention of the effects of natural selection or his treatment of the general princi- ples of evolution. Yet he does not seem to possess that firm, original grasp of the deeper principles that have been con- cerned in the evolution of life which would have enabled him to have applied these principles himself, and which might, therefore, have carried him effectively into the region where the science of morality becomes part of the science of society. Without this he seems to touch ethical questions merely on the surface. Yet we say so much with a certain reserve, for the work is written throughout with that intellectual recti- tude which marks the scientific mind, and no one who is interested in the subject can read it without profit.
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