STAGES OF THE DISCUSSION OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS.[1]
THE relation of ethics to evolution has been a subject of rarely intermittent debate for almost half a century. Minds great and small have mingled in the discussion. It has been waged on scientific, metaphysical, religious, and sentimental grounds. The wealth of ideas thus developed has naturally been considerable. When the whole body of pertinent facts, drawn from so many fields of technical and popular experience, were thus massed upon a single group of problems, no less fruitful a result was to be expected. Analogies and generalizations have been carried through, distinctions have been established, methods of research have been perfected. Upon a general survey of what has been accomplished during these years of discussion, one might well be impressed with the thought, that here, if anywhere, is a subject that has been thoroughly threshed out.
This first impression would be at least so far true, that it is rather the wealth of ideas than any scarcity of them that calls for renewed treatment of the entire subject. It is after all a tangled, confused, disordered wealth. What it needs is not so much any immediate increase as to be pulled apart and set in order. One can see a number of reasons for the present confusion, two of which are worth mentioning here. In the first place, the ethical discussion has been but a part of the immensely greater controversy that has been waged through all these years, concerning the facts and explanations and consequences of universal evolution. The narrower discussion has had to follow every phase of the larger, and has thus been deprived of the unity and consecutiveness that might otherwise have been possible. In the second place, though the ethical discussion has in the long run touched upon almost every conceivably pertinent issue, the individual treatments have, as a rule, been anything but comprehensive. Those who have taken part have usually been
- ↑ Read before the fourth meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Philadelphia, December 30, 1904.
