Morals and the Evolution of Man

A very well-known experiment in animal psychology was once made by Möbius. An aquarium was divided into two compartments by means of a pane of glass; in one of these a pike was put and in the other a tench. Hardly had the former caught sight of his prey, when he rushed to the attack without noticing the transparent partition. He crashed with extreme violence again the obstacle and was hurled back stunned, with a badly battered nose. No sooner had he recovered from the blow than he again made an onslaught upon his neighbour--with the same result. He repeated his efforts a few times more, but succeeded only in badly hurting his head and mouth. At last a dim idea dawned upon his dull mind that some unknown and invisible power was protecting the tench, and that any attempt to devour it would be in vain; consequently from that moment he ceased from all further endeavours to molest his prey. Thereupon the pane of glass was removed from the tank, and pike and tench swam around together; the former took no notice whatever of his defenceless neighbour, who had become sacred to him. In the first instance the pike had not perceived the glass partition against which he had dashed his head; now he did not see that it had been taken away. All he knew was this: he must not attack this tench, otherwise he would fare badly. The pane of glass, though no longer actually there, surrounded the tench as with a coat of mail which effectually warded off the murderous attacks of the pike.

The fact so often observed, that man in many cases does that which he passionately desires to leave undone, and refrains from doing that which all his instincts urge him to do--this phenomenon of Morality is a generalization upon a huge scale of the above experiment on animals with the pane of glass in a tank.

Jean Jacques Rousseau thought out a theoretical human being who was by nature good. Such a human being does not exist and has never existed. From sheer annoyance at the provoking obliquity of vision which led the enthusiast of Geneva to develop such a theory, one is sorely tempted to go to the opposite extreme and declare that man is by nature fundamentally bad; but such an assertion is just as naïve as Rousseau's contention. Good and bad are values which we can only learn to appreciate when we have felt the effect of the phenomenon of Morality. The concepts of good and evil are of much later origin than mankind, and can therefore no more constitute a fundamental characteristic of man's original nature than, for instance, the cut and colour of his clothes; though it is open to wiseacres to maintain that man's nature to some extent actually finds expression in the cut and colour of his clothes--that is, in his choice of them. Anyone contemplating primitive man, man as he emerges from the hands of Nature, stripped of all the additions which he has acquired in the course of his historical development, is bound to admit that man is neither good nor bad; he is a living being acting according to the instincts implanted in his nature; just like the pike. But in most contingencies he does not obey these instincts, and if he reflects upon himself and his actions, he is astounded at realizing this, and asks: "Why do I refrain from revelling in the gratification of my desires?"