THE BASIS OF MORALS.

A POSTHUMOUS PAPER OF AN ANARCHIST PHILOSOPHER.1

"To philosophy gravity is nothing but the law of heavy bodies; and therefore morality can be nothing but the law of animal action."-Barratt.

ORALITY has ever been a fruitful theme for speculation, and

MOR

engaged the attention of the profoundest minds. A theory of moral sentiments and the rationale of "right" conduct has entered into every philosophical system of the past. From Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Spencer rival theories have found valiant defenders, and their respective views of conduct underlain and colored their systems of thought. But the modern student has no need to ponder over the musty tomes of by-gone speculation in considering this subject, for the wider generalisations of the doctrine of evolution here, as in all other problems, have opened new paths and grander vistas in hitherto unexplored directions.

The problem of ethics is primarily an inquiry into the source, rather than the course of action, for the source being definitely formulated, the course of actions may be clearly defined under the respective heads of "right" or "wrong" conduct, and its ultimate end deduced as a logical sequence.

I DYER D. LUM was an anarchist. He came of an old New England family and was born at Geneva, N. Y., February 15, 1839. The composite picture of his ancestry shows (as he used to express it) "the minute-man with his rifle ready for use between prayers," and on his maternal side the dim figure of an English crusader commemorated in the coat-of-arms of the Tappan family. He was a bookbinder by trade. During the civil war he served as a volunteer and took part in some of the hottest battles of the Rebellion. When captured, he escaped from prison, and was at the close of the war breveted Captain of Cavalry. In 1876 his name appeared on the ticket headed by Wendell Phillips as Lieutenant-Governor

The respective schools of ethics may be loosely classified as the empirical and the intuitive. While there is little difference between them as to the moral nature of particular actions, they differ widely when attempting to explain the source of authority inherent in the world-wide recognition of the moral ought as a "categorical imperative." John Stuart Mill states this very explicitly when he says that both schools recognise "to a great extent the same moral laws, but differ as to their evidence and the source from which they derive their authority. According to the one opinion, the principles of morality are evident a priori, requiring nothing to command assent, except that the meaning of the terms be understood. According to the other doctrine, right and wrong, as well as truth and falsehood, are questions of observation and experience."

The pre-evolutionary moralists were mainly intuitionists, whether finding the source of moral ideas in the eternal reason or fitness of Cudworth or Clarke, the love of order of Malebranche, the

of Massachusets. Embracing in all political questions the most radical cause, we find him as a leader of the Greenback movement, then as a socialist, and at last as an anarchist.

He was a fluent speaker as well as a ready writer, and contributions of his, both in prose and verse, appeared in various periodicals. It is characteristic of the broad range of his pen that one of these journals was The Catholic World. He served as a member of a committee appointed by Congress to investigate the labor troubles some years previous to the Haymarket riot, and when, after the throwing of the bomb, seven anarchist leaders of Chicago were tried for conspiracy, he rushed to their assistance and acted as their friend and adviser. His anarchism was not the anarchism of Spies, nor that of his more intimate friend Parsons with whom he had been associated on one and the same committee for the investigation of the labor troubles; but he saw in them victims of the cause of liberty, and that sufficed for him to befriend them. When after the trial the cause of anarchism became unpopular, Dyer D. Lum was naturally ostracised and lost many of his former friends. Financial troubles completed the failure of his last years, but he endured the most exasperating privations without complaint until the end. On April 6, 1893, he was found dead in a lodging-house on the Bowery in New York and the papers reported that he died of heart disease.

His essays, scattered through the back-numbers of various periodicals, characterise throughout the zealous love of freedom that marks his life. They are not always consistent, sometimes reckless, but then again indicating a deep insight, for he was a close student and a keen thinker. In his last years his interest became more and more concentrated on philosophical and psychological problems, involving the main question of practical life, the basis of ethics. His posthumous essay on ethics, which is here published for the first time, was deemed by himself as the maturest and best of all his writings, and he left it to the world as his last bequest.

love of being of Jonathan Edwards, the moral sense or conscience of Butler, Hutcheson, and Mackintosh, the sympathy of Adam Smith, or the recognition by the intellect of moral beauty of Dugald Stewart. On the other hand, the inductive or empirical school from Leibnitz, Hartley, and Paley to Jeremy Bentham have revived the ancient Hedonism of the Cyrenaic sect by affirming "pleasure" or "happiness" to be the sole motive for action and criterion of "right" conduct, whether viewed from the personal standpoint (Egoism), or from that of "the greatest good to the greatest number" (Utilitarianism). The successors of Bentham, such as Bain, Grote, and J. S. Mill, under the all-absorbing influence of evolutional conceptions, have so idealised Hedonism that but little of the pattern of the original texture is left, though a few crass theorists still exist as "survivals."

In the works of late writers on ethics, such as Spencer, Sidgwick, Stephen, Simcox, Thornton, Barratt, Courtney, Maude, Sorley, Wake, Owgan, and others, it will be seen how great is the divergence, even among those who accept the empirical method, no two of which agree on several vital points. From the great expounder of Egoism and royal authority, Hobbes, to Herbert Spencer, however wide the variation, "pleasure" remains the controlling motive in conduct. While among the writers of what is generally called the Evolutional school, we find more or less dissent from the "ego-altruism" of the expounder of EvolutionHerbert Spencer.

In such a conflict of opinions among those whose names adorn the literature of the day, it may seem temerity to attempt to recast this much debated problem and to seek the guidance of Hera to pass the dangerous straits of Scylla and Charybdis, yet the conviction that the science of morality has yet to be formulated, forbids thought to cease tentative efforts. Pleasure or happiness, which one school makes the result, the other the source or motive of "right" conduct, discloses a hitherto impassable gulf which Evolution must bridge over. The pure egoism of Hobbes and his inane followers who are attempting to adapt the conclusions of the royalist to individualistic philosophy, as well as the utilitarians of

Bentham, have both been supplanted by evolutional ideas, and the present tendency to recast them upon an organic basis offers an opportunity to apply later thought to ethics, for the transition from Hedonism to modern scientific thought has not yet been clearly made. The evolutional school has achieved such a result in the old-time controversy relative to the "forms of thought" in reconciling the intuitive and empirical schools, by demonstrating that what may now be conceded as innate or intuitive was originally acquired by experience, and through heredity becomes organised into mental structure. The same must be done for Kant's categorical Ought. Accepting evolution, therefore, as the philosophy by which all theories must be tested, we must seek such a reconciliation as will not only enable us to generalise a fundamental law from facts, but be subject to verification, and thus held within the lines of the knowable.

"Science," says G. H. Lewes, "is built up from abstractions, and these are built up from concretes; but no abstractions must contain more than is warranted by the concretes." How true this is needs but a moment's reflexion to see. Facts alone can but constitute the raw material, so to speak, of science, which begins with generalisations. We abstract from facts particular data in which there is common agreement, and this abstract generalisation we term law; not in the sense that law determines phenomena, but is determined by them-is their formula.

A scientific conception of social relations must follow the same method of procedure. In ethics our facts are subjective relations affecting conduct, and the generalisation or "law" we seek must be an ideal abstraction; one not alone determined by present phenomena, but by the past, and affording us a Type for which we may scan the future, thus rising to a higher abstract conception, yet in accordance with its concretes, by which both the source of "right" conduct may be defined, and its ultimate end determined. Conduct, past, present, and future; the crude conceptions of the primitive races, the highest aspirations of living souls, as well as the ultimate aim of human conduct-the goal of progress-must be brought under the scope of one general law, which, while in

agreement with all the multitudinous facts of past phases of social life, and explaining their shortcomings, will present us with a moral Type consonant with the empirical genesis of what may be admitted to have now become incorporated into organic form; but at the same time affording an inspiration which will illume the present with the conscious recognition of an Ideal in which may be seen reflected "the glory of the human."

How far the current theories of ethics approach this standard, we may the better understand by a rapid criticism, which will also the better enable us to grasp the fundamental law constituting the basis of action, and determine both the nature of "right" and give shape to the requisite determining rules of conduct. For this purpose we may divide current theories of ethics under four heads: (1) Egoistic Hedonism; (2) Universalistic Hedonism (Utilitarianism); (3) Intuitive Ethics; (4) Evolutional Ethics.

1. Egoistic Hedonism.- Hedonism, from the Greek noon, "pleasure," makes this the sole motive for action.

When Mill says, "Happiness is the sole end of action," the Egoist limits this to the individual ego; in the words of Barratt, "The individual ever acts to secure his own pleasure." It is unquestionably true that life consists in adaptation to environment, and that pleasure accompanies adaptation. The fundamental principle of Evolution, natural selection, carries with it the necessary conclusion that normal life involves at least the absence of continuous pain, which may be positively defined as pleasure or happiness; further, it may be conceded that in the moral world good and evil are the synonyms of pleasure and pain, but it does not thereupon follow that "pleasure is the only motive power."

Egoistic Hedonism ascribes to Self an independence it does not possess. Notwithstanding the stress now laid upon what Hobbes ignored, the Social Organism, the objection remains. We smile to-day at the last century conception of the mind as a tabula rasa, as typified in Condillac's marble statue, yet the Egoistic theory commits a similar error in virtually separating personality from hereditary conditions which determine it. By positing personal pleasure as the source of action, its logic tends to exalt self above