Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
1894
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    n conduct. Ethics would thus become applied Natural History. In fact, a confused employment of the maxim, in this sen.se, has done immeasur- able mischief in later times. It has furnished an axiomatic foundation for the philosophy of philo- so]3hasters and for the moralizing of sentimentalists. But the Stoics were, at bottom, not merely noble, but sane, men; and if we look closely into what they really meant by this ill-used jdirase, it will be found to present no justification for the mis- chievous conclusions that have been deduced from it. In the language of the Stoa, ‘ Nature ’ was a word of many meanings. There was the ‘ Nature ’ of the cosmos and the ‘ Nature ’ of man. In the latter, the animal ‘nature,’ which man shares with a moiety of the living part of the cosmos, was distinguished from a higher ‘nature,’ Even in this higher nature there were grades of rank. The logical faculty is an instrument which may be turned to account for any purjDOse. The passions and the emotions are so closely tied to the lower nature that they may be considered to be patho- logical, rather than normal, phenomena. The one supreme, hegemonic, faculty, which constitutes the essential ‘ nature ’ of man, is most nearly repre- sented by that which, in the language of a later philosophy, has been called the pure reason. It is this ‘ nature ’ which holds up the ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute submission of