Emile Zola - "The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Complete"

Sir Samuel White Baker - "In the Heart of Africa"

F. B. Tarbell - "A History Of Greek Art"

Jehudah Steinberg - "In Those Days"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: A Handbook of Ethical Theory

G >> George Stuart Fullerton >> A Handbook of Ethical Theory




And the behavior we expect from each is that appropriate to its kind. The
bee and the ant follow unswervingly their own law, and live their own
complicated community life. However the behavior of the brute may vary in
the presence of varying conditions, the degree of the variation seems to
be determined by rather narrow limits. These we recognize as the limits
of the nature of the creature. It dictates to itself, unconsciously, its
own law of action, and it follows that law simply and without revolt.

When we turn to man, "the crown and glory of the universe," as Darwin
calls him, we find him, too, endowed with a certain nature in an
analogous sense of the word. He has capacities for which we look in vain
elsewhere. The type of conduct we expect of him has its root in these
capacities. Human nature can definitely be expected to express itself in
a human life,--one lower or higher, but, in every case, distinguishable
from the life of the brute. It means something to speak of the physical
and mental constitution of man, that mysterious reservoir from which his
emotions and actions are supposed to flow. We feel that we have a right
to use the expression, even while admitting that the brain of man is, as
far as psychology is concerned, almost unexplored territory, and that the
relation of mind to brain is, and is long likely to remain, a subject of
dispute with philosophers and psychologists.

23. HOW DISCOVER MAN'S NATURE?--Nevertheless, in speaking of the nature
of any living creature, we are forced to remind ourselves that the
original endowment of the creature studied can never be isolated and
subjected to inspection independently of the setting in which the subject
of our study is found. Who, by an examination of the brain of a bee or of
an ant, could foresee the intricate organized industry of the hive or the
anthill? The seven ages of man are not stored ready-made in the little
body of the infant. At any rate, they are beyond the reach of the most
penetrating vision. In the case of the simple mechanisms which can be
constructed by man a forecast of future function is possible on the basis
of a general knowledge of mechanics. But there is no living being of
whose internal constitution we have a similar knowledge. From the
behavior of the creature we gather a knowledge of its nature; we do not
start with its nature as directly revealed and infer its behavior. That
there are differences in the internal constitution of beings which react
to the same environment in different ways, we have every reason to
believe. What those differences are in detail we cannot know. And our
knowledge of the capacities inherent in this or that constitution will be
limited by what we can observe of its reaction to environment.

Sometimes the reaction to environment is relatively simple and uniform.
In this case we feel that we can attain without great difficulty to what
may be regarded as a satisfactory knowledge of the nature of the creature
studied. The conception of that nature appears to be rather definite and
unequivocal. When it is once attained, we speak with some assurance of
the way in which the creature will act in this situation or in that. If,
however, the capacities are vastly more ample, and the environment to
which this creature is adjusted is greatly extended, the difficulty of
describing in any unequivocal way the nature of the creature becomes
indefinitely greater.

Is it possible to contemplate man without being struck with the breadth
and depth of the gulf which separates the primitive human being from the
finished product of civilization? What a difference in range of emotion,
in reach of intellect, in stored information, in freedom of action,
between man at his lowest and man at his highest! Can we describe in the
same terms what is natural to man everywhere and always?

For the filthy and ignorant savage, absorbed in satisfying his immediate
bodily needs, standing in the simplest of social relations, taking
literally no thought for the morrow, profoundly ignorant of the world in
which he finds himself, possessing over nature no control worthy of the
name, the sport and slave of his environment, it is natural to act in one
way. For enlightened humanity, acquainted with the past and forecasting
the future, developed in intellect and refined in feeling, rich in the
possession of arts and sciences, intelligently controlling and directing
the forces of nature, socially organized in highly complicated ways, it
is natural to act in another way. And to each of the intermediate stages
in the evolution of civilization some type of conduct appears to be
appropriate and natural.

Whither, then, shall we turn for our conception of man's nature? Shall we
merely draw up a list of the instincts and impulses which may be
observable in all men? Shall we say no more than that man is gifted with
an intelligence superior to that of the brutes? To do this is, to be
sure, to give some vague indication of man's original endowment. But it
can give us little indication of what it is possible for man, with such
an endowment, and in such an environment as makes his setting, to become.
And what man becomes, that he is.

If man's nature can be revealed only through the development of his
capacities, it is futile to seek it in a return to undeveloped man. The
nature of the chicken is not best revealed in the egg. And, as man can
develop only in interaction with his environment, we must, to understand
him, study his environment also.




CHAPTER IX

MAN'S MATERIAL ENVIRONMENT


24. THE STRUGGLE WITH NATURE.--It is not possible to disentangle from
each other and to consider quite separately the diverse elements which
enter into the environment of man and which influence his development.
His environment is two-fold, material and social; but his material
setting may affect his social relations, and it is social man, not the
individual as such, that achieves a conquest over nature. However, it is
possible, and it is convenient, to direct attention successively upon the
one and the other aspect of his environment.

At every stage of his development, man must have food, shelter, some
means of defense. If they are not easily obtainable, he must strain every
nerve to attain them. Are his powers feeble and his intelligence
undeveloped, it may tax all his efforts to keep himself alive and to
continue the race in any fashion. The rules which determine his conduct
seem rather the dictates of a stern necessity than the products of
anything resembling free choice.

He who is lashed by hunger and haunted by fear, who cannot provide for
the remote future, but must accept good or ill fortune as the accident of
the day precipitates his lot upon him, lives and must live a life at but
one remove from that of the brute. In such a life the instincts of man
attain to a certain expression, but intelligence plays a feeble part. The
man remains a slave, under dictation, and moved by the dread of immediate
disaster. For an interest in what is remote in time and place, for the
extension of knowledge for its own sake, for the development of
activities which have no direct bearing upon the problem of keeping him
alive and fed, there can be little place. One must be assured that one
can live, and live in reasonable security and physical well-being, before
the problem of enriching and embellishing life can fairly present itself
as an important problem. One must be set free before one can deliberately
set out to shape one's life after an ideal.

Not that a severe struggle with physical nature is necessarily and of
itself a curse. It may call out man's powers, stimulate to action, and
result in growth and development. Where a prodigal nature amply provides
for man's bodily necessities without much effort on his part, the result
may be, in the absence of other stimulating influences giving rise to new
wants, a paralyzing slothfulness, an animal passivity and content. This
may be observed in whole peoples highly favored by soil and climate, and
protected by their situation from external dangers. It may be observed in
certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous
effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of
civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of
necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In
the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best
intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain unaffected by it,
incapable of effort, unintelligent, slothful, the weak and passive
recipients of what is brought to them by the labor of others.

But the struggle with physical nature, sometimes a spur to progress and
issuing in triumph, may also issue in defeat. Nature may be too strong
for man, or, at least, for man at an early stage of his development. She
may thwart his efforts and dwarf his life. It was through no accident
that the Athenian state rose and flourished upon the shores of the
Aegean; no such efflorescence of civilization could be looked for among
the Esquimaux of the frozen North.

25. THE CONQUESTS OF THE MIND.--Physical environment counts for much, but
the physical environment of man is the same as that of the creatures
below him who seem incapable of progress. It is as an intelligent being
that he succeeds in bringing about ever new and more complicated
adjustments to his environment.

From the point of view of his animal life in many respects inferior to
other creatures--less strong, less swift, less adequately provided with
natural means of defense, less protected by nature against cold, heat and
the inclemencies of the weather, endowed with instincts less unerring,
less prolific, through a long period of infancy helpless and dependent--
man nevertheless survives and prospers.

He has conquered the strong, overtaken the swift, called upon his
ingenuity to furnish him with means of defence. He has defied cold and
heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully
combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the torrid sun of the tropics.
Intelligence has supplemented instinct and has guaranteed the survival of
the individual and of the race.

It has even protected man against himself, against the very dangers
arising out of his immunity from other dangers. A gregarious creature,
increasing and multiplying, he would be threatened with starvation did
not his intelligent control over nature furnish him with a food-supply
which makes it possible for vast numbers of human beings to live and
thrive on a territory of limited extent. Moreover, he has compassed those
complicated forms of social organization which reveal themselves in
cities and states, solving problems of production, transportation and
distribution before which undeveloped man would stand helpless.

And from the problem of living at all he has passed to that of living
well. He has created new wants and has satisfied them. He has built up
for himself a rich and diversified life, many of the activities of which
appear to have the remotest of bearings upon the mere struggle for
existence, but the exercise of which gives him satisfaction. Thus, the
primitive instinct of curiosity, once relatively aimless and
insignificant, has developed into the passion for systematic knowledge
and the persistent search for truth; the rudimentary aesthetic feeling
which is revealed in primitive man, and traces of which are recognizable
in creatures far lower in the scale, has blossomed out in those elaborate
creations, which, at an enormous expense of labor and ingenuity, have
come to enrich the domains of literature, music, painting, sculpture,
architecture. Civilized man is to a great extent occupied with the
production of what he does not need, if need be measured by what his
wants are at a lower stage of his development. But these same things he
needs imperatively, if we measure his need by his desires when they have
been multiplied and their scope indefinitely widened.

26. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE AND THE WELL-BEING OF MAN.--It is evident that
the successful exploitation of the resources of material nature is of
enormous significance to the life of man. It may bring emancipation; it
offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to
reflect, that the development of the arts and sciences, the increase of
wealth and of knowledge, must in the nature of things increase human
happiness.

One is tempted, further, to maintain that an advance in civilization must
imply an advance in moralization. Man has a moral nature which exhibits
itself to some degree at every stage of his development. What more
natural to conclude than that, with the progressive unfolding of his
intelligence, with increase in knowledge, with some relaxation of the
struggle for existence which pits man against his fellow-man, and
subordinates all other considerations to the inexorable law of self-
preservation, his moral nature would have the opportunity to show itself
in a fuller measure?

When we compare man at his very lowest with man at his highest such
judgments appear to be justified. But man is to be found at all sorts of
intermediate stages.

His knowledge may be limited, the development of the arts not far
advanced, his control over nature far from complete, and yet he may live
in comparative security and with such wants as he has reasonably well
satisfied. His competition with his fellows may not be bitter and
absorbing. The simple life is not necessarily an unhappy life, if the
simplicity which characterizes it be not too extreme. In judging broadly
of the significance for human life of the control over nature which is
implied in the advance of civilization, one must take into consideration
several points of capital importance:

(1) The multiplication of man's wants results, not in happiness, but in
unhappiness, unless the satisfaction of those wants can be adequately
provided for.

(2) The effort to satisfy the new wants which have been called into being
may be accompanied by an enormous expenditure of effort. Where the effort
is excessive man becomes again the slave of his environment. His task is
set for him, and he fulfills it under the lash of an imperious necessity.
The higher standard may become as inexorable a task-master as was the
lower.

(3) It does not follow that, because a given community is set free from
the bondage of the daily anxiety touching the problem of living at all,
and may address itself deliberately to the problem of living well, it
will necessarily take up into its ideal of what constitutes living well
all those goods upon which developed man is apt to set a value. A
civilization may be a grossly material one, even when endowed with no
little wealth. With wealth comes the opportunity for the development of
the arts which embellish life, but that opportunity may not be embraced.
Man may be materially rich and spiritually poor; he may allow some of his
faculties to lie dormant, and may lose the enjoyments which would have
been his had they been developed. The Athenian citizen two millenniums
ago had no such mastery over the forces of nature as we possess today.
Nevertheless, he was enabled to live a many-sided life beside which the
life of the modern man may appear poor and bare. It is by no means self-
evident that the good of man consists in the multitude of the material
things which he can compel to his service.

(4) Moreover, it does not follow that, because the sum of man's
activities, his behavior, broadly taken, is vastly altered, by an
increase in his control over his material environment, the result is an
advance in moralization. An advance in civilization--in knowledge, in the
control over nature's resources, in the evolution of the industrial and
even of the fine arts--does not necessarily imply a corresponding ethical
advance on the part of a given community. New conditions, brought about
by an increase of knowledge, of wealth, of power, may result in ethical
degeneration.

What constitutes the moral in human behavior, what marks out right or
wrong conduct from conduct ethically indifferent, we have not yet
considered. But no man is wholly without information in the field of
morals, and we may here fall back upon such conceptions as men generally
possess before they have evolved a science of morals. In the light of
such conceptions a simple and comparatively undeveloped culture may
compare very favorably with one much higher in the scale of civilization.

In the simplest groups of human beings, justice, veracity and a regard to
common good may be conspicuous; the claim of each man upon his fellow-man
may be generally acknowledged. In communities more advanced, the growth
of class distinctions and the inequalities due to the amassing of wealth
on the part of individuals may go far to nullify the advantage to the
individual of any advance made by the community as a whole. The social
bonds which have obtained between members of the same group may be
relaxed; the devotion to the common good may be replaced by the selfish
calculation of profit to the individual; the exploitation of man by his
fellow-man may be accepted as natural and normal. It is not without its
significance that the most highly civilized of states have, under the
pressure of economic advance, come to adopt the institution of slavery in
its most degraded forms; that the problem of property and poverty may
present itself as most pressing and most difficult of solution where
national wealth has grown to enormous proportions. The body politic may
be most prosperous from a material point of view, and at the same time,
considered from the point of view of the moralist, thoroughly rotten in
its constitution.

It is well to remember that, even in the most advanced of modern
civilizations, whatever the degree of enlightenment and the power enjoyed
by the community as a whole, it is quite possible for the individual to
be condemned to a life little different in essentials from that of the
lowest savage. He whose feverish existence is devoted to the nerve-
racking occupation of gambling in stocks, who goes to his bed at night
scheming how he may with impunity exploit his fellow-man, and who rises
in the morning with a strained consciousness of possible fluctuations in
the market which may overwhelm him in irretrievable disaster, lives in
perils which easily bear comparison with those which threaten the
precarious existence of primitive man. To masses of men in civilized
communities the problem of the food supply is all-absorbing, and may
exclude all other and broader interests. The factory-worker, with a mind
stupefied by the mechanical repetition of some few simple physical
movements of no possible interest to him except as resulting in the wage
that keeps him alive, has no share in such light as may be scattered
about him.

The control of the forces of nature brings about great changes in human
societies, but it may leave the individual, whether rich or poor, a prey
to dangers and anxieties, engaged in an unequal combat with his
environment, absorbed in the satisfaction of material needs, undeveloped,
unreflective and most restricted in his outlook. Of emancipation there
can here be no question.

And a civilization in which the control of the forces of nature has been
carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to
the darkest of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous
indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked
and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such
passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken
up from their environment the habit of dining in evening dress, is to the
moralist a relatively insignificant detail. He looks at the man, and he
finds him in each case essentially the same--a primitive and undeveloped
creature who has not come into his rightful heritage.




CHAPTER X

MAN'S SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT


27. MAN IS ASSIGNED HIS PLACE.--The old fable of a social contract, by
virtue of which man becomes a member of a society, agreeing to renounce
certain rights he might exercise if wholly independent, and to receive in
exchange legal rights which guarantee to the individual the protection of
life and property and the manifold advantages to be derived from
cooperative effort, points a moral, like other fables.

The contract in question never had an existence, but neither did the
conversation between the grasshopper and the ant. In each case, a truth
is illustrated by a play of the imagination. Contracts there have been in
plenty, between individuals, between families, between social classes,
between nations; but they have all been contracts between men already in
a social state of some sort, capable of choice and merely desirous of
modifying in some particular some aspect of that social state. The notion
of an original contract, lying at the base of all association of man with
man, is no more than a fiction which serves to illustrate the truth that
the desires and wills of men are a significant factor in determining the
particular forms under which that association reveals itself.

No man enters into a contract to be born, or to be born a Kaffir, a
Malay, a Hindoo, an Englishman or an American. He enters the world
without his own consent, and without his own connivance he is assigned a
place in a social state of some sort. The reception which is accorded to
him is of the utmost moment to him. He may be rejected utterly by the
social forces presiding over his birth. In which case he does not start
life independently, but is snuffed out as is a candle-flame by the wind.
And if accepted, as he usually is in civilized communities, he takes his
place in the definite social order into which he is born, and becomes the
subject of education and training as a member of that particular
community.

28. VARIETIES OF THE SOCIAL ORDER.--The social order into which he is
thus ushered may be most varied in character. He may find himself a
member of a small and primitive group of human beings, a family standing
in more or less loose relations to a limited number of other families; he
may belong to a clan in which family relationship still serves as a real
or fictive bond; his clan may have its place in a confederation; or the
body politic in which he is a unit may be a nation, or an empire
including many nationalities.

His relations to his fellow-man will naturally present themselves to him
in a different light according to the different nature of the social
environment in which he finds himself. The community of feeling and of
interests which defines rights, determines expectations, and prescribes
duties, cannot be the same under differing conditions. Social life
implies cooperation, but the limits of possible cooperation are very
differently estimated by man at different stages of his development. To a
few human beings each man is bound closely at every stage of his
evolution. The family bond is everywhere recognized. But, beyond that,
there are wider and looser relationships recognized in very diverse
degrees, as intelligence expands, as economic advance and political
enlightenment make possible a community life on a larger scale, as
sympathy becomes less narrow and exclusive.

It is not easy for a member of a community at a given stage of its
development even to conceive the possibility of such communities as may
come into existence under widely different conditions. The simple,
communistic savage, limited in his outlook, thinks in terms of small
numbers. A handful of individuals enjoy membership in his group; he
recognizes certain relations, more or less loose, to other groups, with
which his group comes into contact; beyond is the stranger, the natural
enemy, upon whom he has no claim and to whom he owes no duty.

At a higher level there comes into being the state, including a greater
number of individuals and internally organized as the simpler society is
not. But even in a highly civilized state much the same attitude towards
different classes of human beings may seem natural and inevitable. To
Plato there remained the strongly marked distinctions between the
Athenian, the citizen of another Hellenic community, and the barbarian.
War, when waged against the last, might justifiably be merciless; not so,
when it was war between Greek states. [Footnote: Republic, Book V.] Into
such conceptions of rights and duties men are born; they take them up
with the very air that they breathe, and they may never feel impelled to
subject them to the test of criticism.

It is instructive to remark that neither the speculative genius of a
Plato nor the acute intelligence of an Aristotle could rise to the
conception of an organized, self-governing community on a great scale. To
each it seemed evident that the group proper must remain a comparatively
small one. Plato finds it necessary to provide in his "Laws" that the
number of households in the State shall be limited to five thousand and
forty. Aristotle, less arbitrarily exact, allows a variation within
rather broad limits, holding that a political community should not
comprise a number of citizens smaller than ten, nor one greater than one
hundred thousand. [FOOTNOTE: PLATO, _Laws_, v. ARISTOTLE,
_Ethics_, ix, 10.] That a highly organized state, a state not
composed of a horde of subjects under autocratic control, but one in
which the citizens are, in theory, self-governing, should spread over
half a continent and include a hundred millions of souls, would have
seemed to these men of genius the wildest of dreams. Yet such a dream has
been realized.