PROLEGOMENA 67 



XI. 



I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of 

 which the primitive bonds of human society are so 

 largely forged, into the organized and personified sym- 

 pathy we call conscience, the ethical process. 21 So far 

 as it tends to make any human society more efficient in 

 the struggle for existence with the state of nature, or 

 with other societies, it works in harmonious contrast 

 with the cosmic process. But it is none the less true 

 that, since law and morals are restraints upon the 

 struggle for existence between men in society, the ethi- 

 cal process is in opposition to the principle of the cos- 

 mic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities 

 best fitted for success in that struggle. 22 



It is further to be observed that, just as the self- 

 assertion, necessary to the maintenance of society against 

 the state of nature, will destroy that society if it is al- 

 lowed free operation within; so the self-restraint, the 

 essence of the ethical process, which is no less an es- 

 sential condition of the existence of every polity, may, 

 by excess, become ruinous to it. 



Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending only 

 to the relations of men towards one another in an ideal 

 society, have agreed upon the "golden rule," "Do as 



21 Worked out, in its essential features, chiefly by Hartley and 

 Adam Smith, long before the modern doctrine of evolution was 

 thought of. [T. H. H.] 



David Hartley (1705-1757) was an influential ethical phil- 

 osopher. In his Observations on Man, 1749, he set forth his 

 doctrine of the gradual development of pure benevolence from 

 the simpler passions. 



22 See the essay "On the Struggle for Existence in Human 

 Society," and Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 276, for Kant's recog- 

 nition of these facts. [T. H. H.] 



