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    The Human Origin of Morals
    The Human Origin of Morals
    The Human Origin of Morals
    Ebook61 pages57 minutes

    The Human Origin of Morals

    By Joseph McCabe

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    This treatise considers all aspects of morals and morality. McCabe spends a whole chapter arguing the starting point for the moral code or conscience, and considering its existence in long-dead generations. He quotes Kant in particular.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateDec 8, 2020
    ISBN4064066405656
    The Human Origin of Morals

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      Book preview

      The Human Origin of Morals - Joseph McCabe

      Joseph McCabe

      The Human Origin of Morals

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4064066405656

      Table of Contents

      Chapter I. Theories of Moral Law

      Chapter II. Evolution and Morals

      Chapter III. The Dawn of Conscience

      Chapter IV. Religion and Morals

      Chapter V. Moral Eccentricities

      Chapter VI. The Christian Ethic

      Chapter VII. Moral Law Is Social Law

      Chapter VIII. The Revolt Against Morality

      Chapter I. Theories of Moral Law

      Table of Contents

      There are few subjects on which so much solemn nonsense has been written as on the nature of conscience and moral law; and there is no other phenomenon of the human mind of which it is possible to give so simple and natural an explanation.

      There are few facts of human life which have been so deeply woven into the web of religious thought as what are called a man's moral and immoral actions; and there are none which have so little real connection with religion.

      There is no other element of our decaying religions which has been so reverently clothed by modern philosophers with a mantle of mysticism; and there is none which evolutionary science explains more clearly.

      There is nothing which so readily brings together our modern oracles, inside and outside of the Churches, our preachers and essayists and editorial writers, as zeal for the august and eternal authority of moral sentiment; and there is nothing that has been more persistently assailed and more caustically ridiculed by a large number of the most brilliant literary men of our time.

      There is no institution of the past that so universally commands the lip-homage of our skeptical and rebellious generation as well as of believers; and there is nothing in human history which has caused, and causes today, as much hypocrisy.

      Clearly, we need a discussion of the nature of morality. We have seen what religion is, and how it evolved. We have examined the fundamental doctrines of God and immortality. Let us now, in the same plain and candid way, examine what seems to be the common ground of all idealism, the moral sentiment.

      I begin, as usual, with facts. No one will question the universal, never-ending concern about morals in our press and literature as well as our churches; and few are likely to question the enormously widespread hypocrisy in practice. No one will question that a number of brilliant writers are anti-moralists, while most writers represent moral law as the supreme reality, the foundation of social life; the starry heavens above our head, as Kant said, the granite substratum under the soil of our cities, as Emerson said. And if any do not know the mysticism with which philosophers veil the moral law, or the ease with which science explains it, he will soon be informed.

      This extraordinary confusion of thought is not so surprising as the reader may be inclined to imagine. It will, in fact, be most useful to understand the confusion itself before we go further.

      Think of the evolution of man's ideas in regard to thunder and lightning. To the blurred mind of primitive man, as in the blurred mind of a dog, these are simply facts. They occur. When man began to see that events have causes, and to believe that the causes in nature were spirits, he very promptly made a god of thunder and lightning. And it was a very great god: the sky-god, mountain-god, thunder-god of the nature-religions.

      When the higher religions made God spiritual, they still maintained that thunder was his voice, in a special way, and lightning his weapon. Even the simple explanation given by Franklin did not destroy the belief. In the law of civilized nations today it is an act of God when lightning shatters a building: even if it kills innocent children.

      Moral law was another kind of thunder, and, being spiritual, it remained a sort of supernatural phenomenon even when man became fully civilized. Until modern times it was quite unintelligible. There was the law, no one knew why, no one knew whence. It was written in every man's conscience. A strange thing, this, and philosophers set to work on it.

      Philosophers never believe in revelation, and they do not love science. They were quite pleased when science began to explain the order of the heavens, the beauty of the rose or of the sunset, and the adaptations of organs. But science must not touch spiritual things, they said. That was their business. So the confusion goes on; and the way in which theology is still allowed to dominate our education, our law-courts, our press, and a large part of our lives, maintains the confusion in the general

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