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For the rest of us, however, outside of these two classes, it is our business to keep away from speculation whether in oil wells, flying machines, in new factories, or in real estate: in the long run, we cannot get something for nothing and money-making efforts that are ethically valid thus coincide with those that are selfishly desirable, namely, the efforts to obtain the payment, the profit, that arises from a valuable service performed or commodity produced.
When the image was regarded as the symbol of an ethically good Power, it was a reënforcement of pure religious feeling; when it was regarded as in itself a source of physical benefit, it was a degrading influence. This difference of effect exists in those Christian bodies that include images and pictures of the deity and of saints in their apparatus of worship.
+712+. The Egyptians, with their more advanced civilization, finally carried sun-worship to a very high point of perfection. The hymns to Ra, the sun-god, reached the verge of monotheism and are ethically high, yet traces of the physical side of the sun appear throughout. The same thing is true of the old Semitic sun-cult.
It is only during the last century that an ethically neutral psychology has grown up; and here too, ethical neutrality has been essential to scientific success. In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes, and have judged philosophies in relation to their wishes.
The practice of that which is ethically best what we call goodness or virtue involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint.
Then Hollis reappeared, holding in both hands a small leather box. He put it down gently on the table and looked at us with a queer gasp, we thought, as though he had from some cause become speechless for a moment, or were ethically uncertain about producing that box. But in an instant the insolent and unerring wisdom of his youth gave him the needed courage.
And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my dulled powers of apprehension.
One is that of a gentleman who knows that war is the same phenomenon, artistically, ethically, and socially, as a public-house riot with broken bottles caused by a dispute over one of those fundamental principles which are often challenged in such a place. Those riots are natural enough. They are caused by the nature of man.
Polytheism and image-worship lie under an unmerited stigma in Europe. We generally assume that to believe in one God is obviously better, intellectually and ethically, than to believe in many.
And how numerous are the prayers which reflection and an awakened moral sense rule out of court: prayers which ask God to do for us by special intervention what we ought to do for ourselves by our own effort and industry; prayer for success in dealings and enterprises which in themselves are ethically unjustifiable, and to which the only answer could be, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself"; prayers which carry the spirit of egoism, of competition, of bargaining even into our relations with the Most High; prayers of an imprecatory character such as meet and shock us in some of the psalms.
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