THE MORAL STANDARD. 9 



which ceremony, law, religion, morality, have all tended, men 

 have come slowly to understand that in the recognition of con- 

 duct and consequence as everlastingly united in the category of 

 cause and effect lies in all questions of action the one valid, 

 authoritative, and final court of appeal. 



" Might till Right is ready," said Matthew Arnold, and in the 

 civilization of the race the might of the outward authority 

 supernatural, political, social has gone before and has prepared 

 the way for the right of the inward authority we describe as 

 moral. Men have been trained to the self- compulsion of the 

 moral motive by enforced obedience to the external compulsions 

 of ceremony, religion, law. The strong hand of the earthly des- 

 pot, only gradually relaxed as the education for freedom went 

 on ; the binding power of tyrannic custom, following life into the 

 minutest recesses of its daily routine ; the drastic force of super- 

 natural pleasures and pains, meted out by a personal but omnis- 

 cient deity who exacted unquestioning allegiance and punished 

 every infraction of his commands all these elements were re- 

 quired as formative factors in the moral development of man- 

 kind. The condition of heteronomy must in the nature of things 

 precede the condition of autonomy, and we only pass from gen- 

 eral principle to particular illustration when we say that the out- 

 ward authorities above dealt with were inevitable prerequisites 

 to the inner authority of morality in the order of the evolution of 

 human life. 



Yet it must be remembered that in an indistinct form the 

 moral sanction proper very early began to emerge as an influence 

 in social growth. Natural selection was from the beginning con- 

 cerned in the picking out and perpetuation of certain qualities 

 egoistic and altruistic making for the welfare and expansion of 

 society ; and unconsciously at the outset such qualities naturally 

 came to be registered and emphasized in the ceremonial, religious, 

 and legal codes. Among moral characteristics thus nurtured in 

 the primitive stages of political consolidation may be mentioned 

 loyalty, courage, obedience, without which no successful tribal 

 warfare could be carried on, together with a rudimentary form of 

 justice, veracity, and general sympathy, without which the group 

 could never survive in the face of antagonistic tribes whose social 

 feelings were more highly evolved. As the struggle for exist- 

 ence has all along been a struggle among groups as well as among 

 individuals, a premium was laid from the very start upon what- 

 ever qualities, altruistic no less than egoistic, would make for 

 social strength and efficiency. These qualities were early caught 

 up in the life and feeling of each developing group; an ideal 

 answering in its larger aspects to the fundamental needs of the 

 tribe was thrown up ; and the vague encouragement yielded by 



VOL. L. 2 



