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History records many such dominations, ancient and modern, civilised or barbaric; and though education and culture may modify, they cannot change their predominant characteristics a continual subordination of justice to expediency, an indifference to suffering, a disdain of ethical principles, a laxity of morals, and a complete ignorance of economics.
From this we learn that the Yamato monono-fu believed himself to have inherited the duty of dying for his sovereign if occasion required. In that cause he must be prepared at all times to find a grave, whether upon the desolate moor or in the stormy sea. The dictates of filial piety ranked next in the ethical scale.
The Protestant desires to show his gratitude to Christ by leading a correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired Church, he is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired Bible.
The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous endowment.
And when his ethical perceptions awake, he has another experience of a similar character. His father and mother stand to him for the very moral order itself! To his mind, it is inconceivable that they should ever err, and the bare suggestion that those august and venerable beings can really sin, fills him with horror and incredulity.
This passage, which I have thought it worth while to quote at length, exhibits, with sufficient clearness, the respective provinces of reason and feeling in the ethical estimation of action.
W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the complete antithesis of the way of the Cross. "How can people be so blind?" he cries. "Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of so little depth that this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, this treacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?"
The whole conception rests on the social instinct's inhibitions of the acquisitive instinct and in the growth and strength of feelings of conscience and duty as previously described. Social heredity and tradition operate very powerfully in the matter of this kind of honesty; to steal, as we see it, from neighboring tribes is ethical for savage races, and even to steal such property as women.
How then do we employ the word "good"? I do not ask how we ought to employ it, but how we do. For the present we shall be engaged in a psychological inquiry, not an ethical one. We need to get at the plain facts of usage. I will therefore ask each reader to look into his own mind, see on what occasions he uses the word, and decide what meaning he attaches to it.
Russell's ethical fervour and practical energetic bent of mind divided him sharply from politicians who lived from hand to mouth, and were never consumed by a zeal for reform in one direction or another; and these qualities sometimes threw him into a position of singular isolation.
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