APPENDIX 423 



of the elementary principles of ethics and morality, principles which have 

 their roots in the biological and physical sciences. 



We must not accept Huxley's despairing assertions that "cosmic nature 

 is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature," 

 and that "the cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends." To do 

 so we should have wholly to ignore the manifest creative power in cosmic 

 action. We may surmise, from internal evidence, the irritation that pro- 

 voked Huxley's brilliant but unconvincing dialectics; and it should be said 

 that his point of view then, and the chief target of his attack, is not 

 ours now. 



And surely it is not for us "to fight the cosmic process" even under a 

 fighting Huxley; nor on the other hand need we accept the stoical philoso- 

 phy of protective mimicry and regard "living according to nature as the 

 whole duty of man"; nor need we be horrified at the thought of ethics 

 as "applied natural history." 



Rather is it our duty to understand nature-action and to cooperate with 

 it; to distinguish between the minor tactics of evolution and the grand 

 strategy of evolution, and with our own peculiar instruments be willing 

 and happy agents in its consummation. Man has but his animal organs, 

 his cultural implements, and his intelligence, or his knowledge of right 

 and wrong constructive ways to work with. The more those instruments 

 are augmented, the better he can direct nature's constructive agencies 

 to his own egoistic ends, and in so doing, man himself then unwittingly 

 becomes a new and better altruistic agent in evolution. 



We scientists, conscious of our purpose as constructive social agents, 

 have three broad fields of activity open to us, as already indicated in de- 

 fining the various functions and purposes of science. First, investigation, 

 or the discovery of nature's ways and means of creative action. This is the 

 ethical side of our work. Second, the constructive usage of these ways and 

 means, or their application to the growing demands of social life, and 

 their usage in the regulation of human conduct. This is the moral side. 

 And, third, the conservation of our ethical and moral gains through educa- 

 tion. The first two we may now ignore, for their significance is duly 

 appreciated and their future is promising. But the educational side of our 

 work is in a very serious condition, and it may even now be too late to 

 avoid disaster. It little matters how much we may develop either our 

 technique, or the spear-head of our research, if the so-called common 

 people still have the ghost-hunter's paleolithic mental attitude toward 

 natural phenomena, and their leaders a similar attitude toward social 

 problems. 



No social life can endure that is not under some common compulsion 

 to united action. With the growth of the spirit of freedom and democracy, 

 and the absence of any commonly recognized dictatorship in church or 

 state, that compulsion can come only through a common understanding of 

 the elemental necessities of social life, and through that sense of personal 

 benefit and personal ownership in social institutions which alone can create 

 the will to cherish and protect them. 



The compulsion of elemental intelligence, acting in social unison, can 

 alone provide the enduring directive and cohesive power essential to social 

 cooperation. Man's will to create can be steadfast in purpose only when 

 his intelligence becomes stabilized in its tropic attitudes, and rightly 

 oriented to elemental realities. Man, stumbling in ignorance, must be 

 bandaged with restrictions and propped up with crutches of force. A 

 nation, pricked by the poisoned shafts of a lying propaganda, will dissolve 

 in anarchy, though the armies and navies of the world have failed to 

 break it. 



In our education, we continually over-emphasized social rights and 



