464 Living in a World of Change 



the emotional accompaniments, there is nothing essentially 

 moral in the whole procedure, except as it expresses a decent 

 regard for the feelings of the living and consideration for 

 their convenience and comfort as occupants of the earth. 

 There is nothing righteous about burial as against cremation. 

 There is nothing sacrilegious about an autopsy. There is 

 nothing sacred about wax candles as against paraffin. There 

 is much in our daily lives that is neither right nor wrong, 

 but thinking makes it so. 



Ethics in Evolution 



Considered as a question of survival of the fittest, the 

 evolution of ethics has also been interpreted as a progressive 

 advance in values. Man can project his imagination beyond 

 the concrete and thus come to be influenced by remote and 

 ideal ends. These ideals and aspirations, while emerging 

 from his experience and intellect and so related to them, are 

 in a sense untrammeled. Are we then free to pursue ideal 

 ends? This is not a question of absolute freedom or absolute 

 determinism. It is a question of how far man is capable of 

 selecting attainable ends, or how skillfully he can adapt his 

 resources to the task which he sets himself. There is an 

 evolution of ideals and values, out of experience and out 

 of the influence of the exceptional men who from time to 

 time blaze forth new illuminations upon the higher levels of 

 human activity. The struggle for existence may then be 

 conceived to be the rivalry of conflicting appeals to mankind's 

 idealism. Here again the values are not absolute. In the 

 same culture a mountebank and a sincere poet may both 

 attain a following. In the individual the struggle is for the 

 highest attainable values. We all experience the conflict of 

 diverging desires and aspirations, of impulse with principle. 

 To describe the conflict as a mechanism of determination 

 does not depreciate either the combatants or the outcome. 

 This is the scientist's way of looking behind the returns for 

 the essential factors in the process. 



