556 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



fuller life and to inner content ; and he can not fail to desire to see the 

 social order conform to this type so far as possible. 



The ethics of the New Testament is generally and rightly thought 

 to attain its climax in the injunction: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." 

 One is nevertheless compelled to ask whether love can, in fact, be the 

 subject of a command or an injunction. Love, is it not the freest and 

 most personal thing there is? The natural philosopher must recognize 

 the existence of an incompatibility here and change the content of this 

 conception as science has changed the concept of law. A natural law 

 is not a prescript, but a transcript, a simple statement of how things 

 actually are. So, in the ethics of science, the doctrine of the conduct of 

 man toward man must have, not the character of a juridical law, but of 

 a natural one, one which shall inform us, which shall instruct us, as 

 men among men, how we can live a peaceable, efficient and happy life. 

 And if, perchance, on this path we meet love, it will come to us not as 

 a thing prescribed, but as an incident and as the most natural, inevitable 

 thing in the world. The road that leads from an insight to a senti- 

 ment is often long, but education helps, self-education in case of the 

 more competent; for the rest, education of the children's school type. 

 But by opening our eyes we can find love already present without either 

 command or education. First of all, self-love, in every living being. 

 Not by the most exacting ethics will self-love be objected to, so long as 

 each individual is isolated from the others. But under these conditions 

 there can be no ethics, in the widest sense. When the life lines of two 

 beings cross one another, conflict begins. It is the conflict for existence, 

 in which there is no ethical content whatever. On the contrary, it is the 

 direct source of that which we call evil in the world. Simultaneously 

 therewith good also begins to appear. 



Deep is the riddle that comes with life, for with life comes the 

 function of reproduction, so that through the activity of each indi- 

 vidual a second enters the field, which is to the first a competitor and 

 an enemy. To ensure perpetuation of the species, each being of the 

 species must, through its offspring, contribute to the keenness of the 

 competition which he himself must contend against. A strange situ- 

 ation ! 



Further, the functions involved in the perpetuation of the kind are 

 bound up with a complex of instincts and feelings that exceed in power 

 all others, even the love of life. In the simplest organism, consisting 

 of a single cell, reproduction takes place by division of the cell. There 

 are now two beings where there was one before, but it is impossible to 

 say which is parent and which the offspring. If they were self-con- 

 scious, we may well imagine that they would learn only by experience 

 that they had become two. Something of this sentiment of identity is 

 to be seen in the feelings of the mother toward the young, in the higher 



