History as Past Ethics: An Introduction to the History of Morals

Professor Freeman defined history as “past politics.” Mr. Buckle argued that the essence of the historical evolution consists in intellectual progress. Many present-day economists hold that the dominant forces in the historical development are economic. Churchmen consistently make the chief factor in history to be religion.

Whether the upholders of these several interpretations of history would have us understand them as speaking of the ultimate goal of the historic evolution, or merely of the dominant motive under which men and society act, none of these interpretations can be accepted by the student of the facts of the moral life of the race as a true reading of history. To him not only does moral progress constitute the very essence of the historic movement, but the ethical motive presents itself as the most constant and regulative force in the evolution of humanity. His chief interest in all the other factors of the historical evolution is in noting in what way and in what measure they have contributed to the growth and enrichment of the moral life of mankind.

Thus the historian of morals is deeply interested in the growth of political institutions among men, but chiefly in observing in what way these institutions have affected for good or for evil the moral life of the nation. Particularly is the progress of the world toward political unity a matter of profound concern to him, not because he regards the establishment of the world state as an end in itself, but because the universal state alone can furnish those conditions under which the moral life of humanity can most freely expatiate and find its noblest and truest expression.

It is the same with intellectual progress. The student of morals recognizes the fact that the progress of the race in morality is normally dependent upon its progress in knowledge—that conscience waits upon the intellect. But in opposition to Buckle and those of his school, he maintains that, so far from an advance in knowledge constituting the essence of a progressive civilization, this mental advance constitutes merely the condition precedent of real civilization, the distinctive characteristic of which must be a true morality. A civilization or culture which does not include this is doomed to quick retrogression and decay. As Benjamin Kidd truly observes, “When the intellectual development of any section of the race, for the time being, outruns the ethical development, natural selection has apparently weeded it out like any other unsuitable product.”

As with the political and intellectual elements of civilization so is it with the economic. The outward forms of the moral life are, it is true, largely determined by the industry of a people; but the informing spirit of morality is the expression of an implanted faculty. It is elicited but not created by environment. No industrial order from which it is lacking can long endure. Natural selection condemns it as unfit. And this we are beginning to recognize—that economics and ethics cannot be divorced, that every great industrial problem is at bottom a moral problem. To the student of the ethical phase of history all social reformers from the old Hebrew prophets down to Karl Marx and Henry George are primarily moralists pleading for social justice, equity, and righteousness.