A Handbook of Ethical Theory. George Stuart Fullerton

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СКАЧАТЬ intermediate stages in the evolution of civilization some type of conduct appears to be appropriate and natural.

      Whither, then, shall we turn for our conception of man's nature? Shall we merely draw up a list of the instincts and impulses which may be observable in all men? Shall we say no more than that man is gifted with an intelligence superior to that of the brutes? To do this is, to be sure, to give some vague indication of man's original endowment. But it can give us little indication of what it is possible for man, with such an endowment, and in such an environment as makes his setting, to become. And what man becomes, that he is.

      If man's nature can be revealed only through the development of his capacities, it is futile to seek it in a return to undeveloped man. The nature of the chicken is not best revealed in the egg. And, as man can develop only in interaction with his environment, we must, to understand him, study his environment also.

CHAPTER IX

       Table of Contents

      MAN'S MATERIAL ENVIRONMENT

      24. THE STRUGGLE WITH NATURE.—It is not possible to disentangle from each other and to consider quite separately the diverse elements which enter into the environment of man and which 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 as such, that achieves a conquest over nature. However, it is possible, and it is convenient, to direct attention successively upon the one and the other aspect of his environment.

      At every stage of his development, man must have food, shelter, some means of defense. If they are not easily obtainable, he must strain every nerve 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 any fashion. The rules which determine his conduct seem rather the dictates of a stern necessity than the products of anything resembling free choice.

      He who is lashed by hunger and haunted by fear, who cannot provide for the remote future, but must accept good or ill fortune as the accident of the day precipitates his lot upon him, lives and must live a life at but one remove from that of the brute. In such a life the instincts of man attain to a certain expression, but intelligence 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 and fed, there can be little place. One must be assured that one can live, and live in reasonable security and physical well-being, before the problem of enriching and embellishing life can fairly present itself as an important problem. One must be set free before one can deliberately set out to shape one's life after an ideal.

      Not that a severe struggle with physical nature is necessarily and of itself a curse. It may call out man's powers, stimulate to action, and result in growth and development. Where a prodigal nature amply provides for man's bodily necessities without much effort on his part, the result may be, in the absence of other stimulating influences giving rise to new wants, a paralyzing 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 sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain unaffected by it, incapable of effort, unintelligent, slothful, the weak and passive recipients of what is brought to them by the labor of others.

      But the struggle with physical nature, sometimes a spur to progress and issuing in triumph, may also issue in defeat. Nature may be too strong for man, or, 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 state rose and flourished upon the shores of the Aegean; no such efflorescence of civilization could be looked for among the Esquimaux of the frozen North.

      25. THE CONQUESTS OF THE MIND.—Physical environment counts for much, but the physical environment of man is the same as that of the creatures below him who seem incapable of progress. It is as an intelligent being that he succeeds in bringing about ever new and more complicated adjustments to his environment.

      From the point of view of his animal life in many respects inferior to other creatures—less strong, less swift, less adequately provided with natural means of defense, less protected by nature against cold, heat and the inclemencies of the weather, endowed with instincts less unerring, less prolific, through a long period of infancy helpless and dependent—man nevertheless survives and prospers.

      He has conquered the strong, overtaken the swift, called upon his ingenuity to furnish him with means of defence. He has defied cold and heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the torrid sun of the tropics. Intelligence has supplemented instinct and has guaranteed the survival of the individual and of the race.

      It has even protected man against himself, against the very dangers arising out of his immunity from other dangers. A gregarious creature, increasing and multiplying, he would be threatened with starvation did 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 compassed those complicated forms of social organization which reveal themselves in cities and states, solving problems of production, transportation and distribution before which undeveloped man would stand helpless.

      And from the problem of living at all he has passed to that of living well. He has created new wants and has satisfied them. He has built up for himself a rich and diversified life, many of the activities of which appear to have the remotest of bearings upon the mere struggle for existence, but the exercise of which gives him satisfaction. Thus, the primitive instinct of curiosity, once relatively 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 enrich the domains of literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. Civilized man is to a great extent occupied with the production of what he does not need, if need be measured by what his wants are at a lower stage of his development. But these same things he needs imperatively, if we measure his need by his desires when they have been multiplied and their scope indefinitely widened.

      26. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE AND THE WELL-BEING OF MAN.—It is evident that the successful exploitation of the resources of material nature is of enormous significance to the life of man. It may bring emancipation; it offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to reflect, that the development of the arts and sciences, the increase of wealth and of knowledge, must in the nature of things increase human happiness.

      One is tempted, further, to maintain that an advance in civilization must imply an advance in moralization. Man has a moral nature which exhibits itself to some degree at every stage of his development. 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 man against his fellow-man, and subordinates all other considerations to the inexorable law of self- preservation, his moral nature would have the opportunity to show itself in a fuller measure?

      When СКАЧАТЬ