384 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



8. The social structure at any given place and time, and 

 the moral system appertaining to it, is a partial organisa- 

 tion of many conflicting forces. The self-assertion of 

 individuals, the collective selfishness of families and other 

 minor groups are not subdued, but come to a kind of com- 

 promise with the necessities of social union, and the fighting 

 spirit is permanently maintained by the hostile or at best 

 unsocial and unorganised relations of society as a whole to 

 other societies. But from an early period the sense of a 

 tommon human nature makes itself felt above the limita- 

 tions of the ordinary workaday morality. There is, for 

 example, a certain chivalrousness towards enemies apparent 

 even at the level of barbarism, and the impulses of sympathy 

 and tenderness occasionally well up over all barriers of 

 ''class or race or creed. A moral revolution is introduced 

 as soon as the conception of common humanity becomes 

 recognised as the fundamental moral truth which is to be 

 thanked for such advances in social organisation as have 

 been already made. With the explicit recognition of this 

 principle begins the organisation of life on quite a different 

 , ^ scale and with altogether higher ends. 



The first and most striking effect of the humanitarian 

 principle is its levelling tendency. In the ancient world, 

 the Stoic doctrine of the fatherhood of God, and the con- 

 sequent brotherhood of man, was instrumental in breaking 

 down the barriers raised by differences of race, nationality, 

 and even caste against the universal application of moral 

 truth. The older morality of Greece and Rome was civic. 

 It was concerned with the reciprocal obligations and rights 

 of free men in a city state, and but faintly concerned itself 

 with duties to slaves or foreigners. 1 The Stoic doctrine was 

 better suited to be the ethical creed of the great denation- 

 alised Roman Empire. In proclaiming the moral equality 

 of the slave with his master, Stoicism overleapt class boun- 



1 Nevertheless the utter cynicism of Athens in the fifth century B.C. 

 shocked the Greek world, just as France at the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century, England at the end of it, and, above all, Germany in 1914, 

 have shocked the modern world. The Melian dialogue followed by the 

 dramatic retribution of the Sicilian catastrophe is Thucydides' testimony 

 to this feeling of his contemporaries. But Plato's conclusions (Rep. 

 469-571) show how narrow was the conception of humanitarian duties in 

 the fourth century. 



