They took the living man as he is. From simple observations of common facts like these, they gradually attained to the broadest generalizations. The merit of such a treatment is self-evident. When the thinkers of the eighteenth century turned from the realm of stars and physical phenomena to the world of chemical changes, or from physics and chemistry to the study of plants and animals, or from botany and zoology to the development of economical and political forms of social life and to religions among men, — they never thought of changing their method of investigation.
To all branches of knowledge they applied that same inductive method. And nowhere, not even in the domain of moral concepts, did they come upon any point where this method proved inadequate. They thus endeavored to explain the whole world — all its phenomena — in the same natural-scientific way. In short, there was no branch of science which the thinkers of the eighteenth century had not begun to treat on the basis of material phenomena — and all by that same inductive method. Of course, some palpable blunders were made in this daring attempt.
Where knowledge was lacking, hypotheses — often very bold, but sometimes entirely erroneous — were put forth. But a new method was being applied to the development of all branches of science, and, thanks to it, these very mistakes were subsequently readily detected and pointed out. And at the same time a means of investigation was handed down to our nineteenth century which has enabled us to build up our entire conception of the world upon scientific bases, having freed it alike from the superstitions bequeathed to us and from the habit of disposing of scientific questions by resorting to mere verbiage.
However, after the defeat of the French Revolution, a general reaction set in — in politics, in science and in philosophy. Of course the fundamental principles of the great Revolution did not die out. The emancipation of the peasants and townspeople, from feudal servitude, equality before the law, and representative constitutional government, proclaimed by the Revolution, slowly gained ground in and out of France.
After the Revolution , which had proclaimed the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, a slow evolution began — that is, a gradual reorganization which introduced into life and law the principles marked out, but only partly realized, by the Revolution. Such a realization through evolution of principles proclaimed by the preceding revolution, may even be regarded as a general law of social development. It is true that the feudal obligations abolished by the republican armies of Italy and Spain were again restored in these countries, and that even the inquisition itself was revived.
But a mortal blow had already been dealt them — and their doom was sealed. The wave of emancipation from the feudal yoke reached, first, Western, and then Eastern Germany, and spread over the peninsulas. Slowly moving eastward, it reached Prussia in , Russia in , and the Balkans in Slavery disappeared in America in At the same time the ideas of the equality of all citizens before the law, and of representative government were also spreading from west to east, and by the end of the century Russia alone remained under the yoke of autocracy, already much impaired.
On the other hand, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, the ideas of economic emancipation had already been proclaimed. Then, developing the principles already laid down in the eighteenth century, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen came forward as the three founders of modern socialism in its three chief schools; and in the forties Proudhon, unacquainted with the work of Godwin, laid down anew the bases of Anarchism. The scientific foundations of both governmental and non-governmental socialism were thus laid down at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a thoroughness wholly unappreciated by our contemporaries.
Only in two respects, doubtless very important ones, has modern socialism materially advanced. It has become revolutionary, and has severed all connection with the Christian religion. And it ceased to confuse its views with the optimist reforming tendencies of the Christian religion. But this latter step had already been taken by Godwin and R. Of the influence which the reaction that set in after the Great Revolution has had upon the development of the sciences, it would be difficult to speak in this essay. The mechanical theory of heat and the indestructibility of motion the conservation of energy ; the modification of species by the action of environment; physiological psychology; the anthropological view of history, religion, and legislation; the laws of development of thought — in short, the whole mechanical conception of the world and all the elements of a synthetic philosophy a philosophy which embraces all physical, chemical living and social phenomena , — were already outlined and partly formulated in the preceding century.
But, owning to the reaction which set in, these discoveries were kept in the background during a full half-century. Only on consulting the history of the exact sciences can one fully understand the forces of reaction which then swept over Europe.
Modern Science and Anarchy
The curtain was suddenly rent at the end of the fifties, when that liberal, intellectual movement began in Western Europe which led in Russia to the abolition of serfdom, and deposed Schelling and Hegel in philosophy, while in life it called forth the bold negation of intellectual slavery and submission to habit and authority, which is known under the name of Nihilism. It is interesting to note in this connection the extent to which the socialist teachings of the thirties and forties, and also the revolution of , have helped science to throw off the fetters placed upon it by the post-revolutionary reaction.
Wallace, was in his younger days an enthusi-astic follower of Robert Owen; that Auguste Comte was a Saint-Simonist, and Ricardo and Bentham were Owenists; and that the materialists Charles Vogt and George Lewis, as well as Grove, Mill, Spencer, and many others, had lived under the influence of the radical socialistic movement of the thirties and forties. It was to this very influence that they owed their scientific boldness.
The simultaneous appearance of the works of Grove, Joule, Berthollet and Helmholtz; of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Moleschott and Vogt; of Lyell, Bain, Mill and Burnouf — all in the brief space of five or six years — , — radically changed the most fundamental views of science. Science suddenly started upon a new path. Entirely new fields of investigation were opened with amazing rapidity. The science of life Biology , of human institutions Anthropology , of reason, will and emotions Psychology , of the history of rights and religions, and so on — grew up under our very eyes, staggering the mind with the boldness of their generalizations and the audacity of their deductions.
What in the preceding century was only an ingenious guess, now came forth proved by the scales and the microscope, verified by thousands of applications. The very manner of writing changed, and science returned to the clearness, the precision, and the beauty of exposition which are peculiar to the inductive method and which characterized those of the thinkers of the eighteenth century who had broken away from metaphysics.
To predict what direction science will take in its further development is, evidently, impossible. As long as men of science depend upon the rich and the governments, so long will they of necessity remain subject to influence from this quarter; and this, of course, can again arrest for a time the development of science. But one thing is certain: Mechanical phenomena, in their ever-increasing complexity, suffice for the explanation of nature and the whole of organic and social life.
There is much, very much, in the world that is still unknown to us — much that is dark and incomprehensible; and of such unexplained gaps new ones will always be disclosed as soon as the old ones have been filled up. But we do not know of, and do not see the possibility of discovering, any domain in which the phenomena observed in the fall of a stone, or in the impact of two billiard balls, or in a chemical reaction — that is, mechanical phenomena-should prove inadequate to the necessary explanations.
Such attempts at a constructive synthetic philosophy were made several times during the nineteenth century, the chief of them being those of Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer. On these two we shall have to dwell. The need of such a philosophy as this was admitted already in the eighteenth century-by the philosopher and economist Turgot and, subsequently, even more clearly by Saint-Simon.
In a more rigorous, scientific form which would satisfy the requirements of the exact sciences, it was now undertaken by Auguste Comte. It is well known that Comte acquitted himself very ably of his task so far as the exact sciences were concerned. He was quite right in including the science of life Biology and that of human societies Sociology in the circle of sciences compassed by his positive philosophy; and his philosophy has had a great influence upon all scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century.
This is the question which most admirers of Comte have asked themselves. How could such a broad and strong mind come to the religion which Comte preached in the closing years of his life? He was bound to account for the origin of this principle, to explain it by the same phenomena by which he had explained life in general, and to show why man feels the necessity of obeying his moral sense, or, at least, of reckoning with it. But for this he was lacking in knowledge at the time he wrote this was quite natural as well as in boldness.
So, in lieu of the God of all religions, whom man must worship and to whom he must appeal in order to be virtuous, he placed Humanity , writ large. To this new idol he ordered us to pray that we might develop in ourselves the moral concept. But once this step had been taken — once it was found necessary to pay homage to something standing outside of and higher than the individual in order to retain man on the moral path — all the rest followed naturally.
Once Comte would not admit that everything that is moral in man grew out of observation of nature and from the very conditions of men living in societies, — this step was necessary. He did not see that the moral sentiment in man is as deeply rooted as all the rest of his physical constitution inherited by him from his slow evolution; that the moral concept in man had made its first appearance in the animal societies which existed long before man had appeared upon earth; and that, consequently, whatever may be the inclinations of separate individuals, this concept must persist in mankind as long as the human species does not begin to deteriorate, — the anti-moral activity of separate men inevitably calling forth a counter-activity on the part of those who surround them, just as action causes reaction in the physical world.
Comte did not understand this, and therefore he was compelled to invent a new idol — Humanity — in order that it should constantly recall man to the moral path. Like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and almost all his other contemporaries, Comte thus paid his tribute to the Christian education he had received.
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And Comte, dominated from childhood by this Christian idea, reverted to it as soon as he found himself face to face with the question of morality and the means of fortifying it in the heart of man. But it must not be forgotten that Comte wrote his Positivist Philosophy long before the years —, which, as stated above, suddenly widened the horizon of science and the world-concept of every educated man.
The works which appeared in these five or six years have wrought so complete a change in the views on nature, on life in general, and on the life of human societies, that it has no parallel in the whole history of science for the past two thousand years. Let us, then, dwell a little longer upon the results obtained in these years, that we may better appreciate the next attempt at a synthetic philosophy, which was made by Herbert Spencer. Grove, Clausius, Helmholtz, joule, and a whole group of physicists and astronomers, as also Kirchhoff, who discovered the spectroscopic analysis and gave us the means of determining the composition of the most distant stars, — these, in rapid succession at the end of the fifties, proved the unity of nature throughout the inorganic world To talk of certain mysterious, imponderable fluids — calorific, magnetic, electrical — at once became impossible.
It was shown that the mechanical motion of molecules which takes place in the waves of the sea or in the vibrations of a bell or a tuning fork, was adequate to the explanation of all the phenomena of heat, light, electricity and magnetism; that we can measure them and weigh their energy. Nay, the mass movements of the heavenly bodies themselves, which run through space according to the laws of universal gravitation, represent, in all likelihood, nothing else than the resultants of these vibrations of light and electricity, transmitted for billions and trillions of miles through interstellar space.
The same calorific and electrical vibrations of molecules of matter proved also adequate to explain all chemical phenomena. And then, the very life of plants and animals, in its infinitely varied manifestations, has been found to be nothing else than a continually going on exchange of molecules in that wide range of very complex, and hence unstable and easily decomposed, chemical compounds from which are built the tissues of every living being.
Then, already during those years it was understood — and for the past ten years it has been still more firmly established — that the life of the cells of the nervous system and their property of transmitting vibrations from one to the other, afforded a mechanical explanation of the nervous life of animals. Owing to these investigations, we can now understand, without leaving the domain of purely physiological observations, how impressions and images are produced and retained in the brain, how their mutual effects result in the association of ideas every new impression awakening impressions previously stored up , and hence also — in thought.
Of course, very much still remains to be done and to be discovered in this vast domain; science, scarcely freed yet from the metaphysics which so long hampered it, is only now beginning to explore the wide field of physical psychology. But the start has already been made, and a solid foundation is laid for further labors. And to the question once asked by the Russian physiologist, Setchenov: In this, its chief stronghold, metaphysics was thus worsted. The field in which it considered itself invincible has now been taken possession of by natural science and materialist philosophy, and these two are promoting the growth of knowledge in this direction faster than centuries of metaphysical speculation have done.
In these same years another important step was made. The very fact of family likeness which exists between groups of forms — Lamarck pointed out — is a proof of their common descent from a common ancestry. Thus, for example, the various forms of meadow buttercups, water buttercups, and all other buttercups which we see on our meadows and swamps, must have been produced by the action of environment upon descendants from one common type of ancestors.
Likewise, the present species of wolves, dogs, jackals and foxes did not exist in a remote past, but there was in their stead one kind of animals out of which, under various conditions, the wolves, the dogs, the jackals and the foxes have gradually evolved. But in the eighteenth century such heresies as these had to be uttered with great circumspection. Now, however, Darwin and A. Wallace could boldly maintain so great a heresy. It was a fierce battle, but, owing to the support of the masses of the public, the victory was won, nevertheless, by the Darwinians; and the result was that an entirely new and extremely important science — Biology, the science of life in all its manifestations — has grown up under our very eyes during the last forty years.
It opened up a new road for their investigation. The idea of a continuous development evolution and of a continual adaptation to changing environment, found a much wider application than the origin of species. It was applied to the study of all nature, as well as to men and their social institutions, and it disclosed in these branches entirely unknown horizons, giving explanations of facts which hitherto had seemed quite inexplicable.
Owing, on the one hand, to the labors of the naturalists, and, on the other, to those of Henry Maine and his followers, who applied the same inductive method to the study of primitive customs and laws that have grown out of them, it became possible in recent years to place the history of the origin and development of human institutions upon as firm a basis as that of the development of any form of plants or animals.
But to obtain correct, scientific deductions from all this mass of work became possible only when the scientists could look upon the established facts in the same way as the naturalist regards the continuous development of the organs of a plant or of a new species. Especially did they stimulate the slumbering thought, disturbing it by their vague hints as to the unity of life in nature. But those generalizations were established either by means of the dialectic method or by means of a semi-conscious induction, and, therefore, were always characterized by a hopeless indefiniteness.
As to the semi-conscious inductions which were made here and there, they were based upon a very limited circle of observations — similar to the broad but unwarranted generalization of Weissmann, which have recently created some sensation. The fact is that, having reached in his analysis the psychology of societies, Spencer did not remain true to his rigorously scientific method, and failed to accept all the conclusions to which it had led him. Thus, for example, Spencer admits that the land ought not to become the property of individuals, who, in consequence of their right to raise rents, would hinder others from extracting from the soil all that could be extracted from it under improved methods of cultivation; or would even simply keep it out of use in the expectation that its market price will be raised by the labor of others.
An arrangement such as this he considers inexpedient and full of dangers for society. But, while admitting this in the case of land, he did not venture to extend this conclusion to all other forms of accumulated wealth — for example, to mines, harbors, and factories. In consequence of this, Spencer, like Comte, did not take up the investigation of these institutions by themselves , without preconceived conclusions. Moreover, as soon as he came in his work to social philosophy — to Sociology — he began to make use of a new method, a most unreliable one — the method of analogies — which he, of course, never resorted to in the study of physical phenomena.
This new method permitted him to justify a whole series of preconceived theories. Consequently, we do not possess as yet a philosophy constructed in both its parts — natural sciences and sociology — with the aid of the same scientific method. Then, Spencer, it must also be added, is the man least suited for the study of primitive institutions. In this respect he is distinguished even among the English, who generally do not enter readily into foreign modes of life and thought.
How far Darwin himself was to blame for this misunderstanding of the real meaning of the struggle for existence, we cannot discuss here. But it passed unnoticed. Only in do we find, in a lecture by the Russian zoologist Kessler, a clear understanding of mutual aid and the struggle for life. If we turn our minds to a close observation of nature and to an unprejudiced history of human institutions, we soon discover that Mutual Aid really appears, not only as the most powerful weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of nature and all other enemies, but also as the chief factor of progressive evolution.
To the weakest animals it assures longevity and hence an accumulation of mental experience , the possibility of rearing its progeny, and intellectual progress. And those animal species among which Mutual Aid is practiced most, not only succeed best in getting their livelihood, but also stand at the head of their respective class of insects, birds, mammals as regards the superiority of their physical and mental development.
This fundamental fact of nature Spencer did not perceive. Only in recent years did he begin in some degree to understand the meaning of mutual aid in the animal world, and to collect notes and make experiments in this direction.
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But even then he still thought of primitive man as of a beast who lived only by snatching, with tooth and claw, the last morsel of food from the mouth of his fellowmen. Of course, having based the sociological part of his philosophy on so false a premise, Spencer was no longer able to build up the sociological part of his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series of errors.
In these erroneous views, however, Spencer does not stand alone. Following Hobbes, all the philosophy of the nineteenth century continues to look upon the savages as upon bands of wild beasts which lived an isolated life and fought among themselves over food and wives, until some benevolent authority appeared among them and forced them to keep the peace. Such is the power of deep-rooted prejudice. Were we, however, to trace the history of this prejudice, it would not be difficult to convince ourselves that it originated chiefly in religions and among their representatives. The secret leagues of sorcerers, rain-makers, and so on, among primitive clans, and later on, the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Indian, Hebrew and other priesthoods, and later still the Christian priests, have always been endeavoring to persuade men that they lay deep in sin, and that only the intercession of the shaman, the magician, and the priest can keep the evil spirit from assuming control over man, or can prevail with a revengeful God not to visit upon man his retribution for sin.
In this belief an enormous majority of our children are being brought up to this very day. At the same time the State, in its schools and universities, countenances the same belief in the innate perversity of man. Because, the moment people come to doubt the necessity and possibility of such an inoculation of morality, they will begin to doubt the higher mission of their rulers as well. In this way everything — our religious, our historical, our legal, and our social education — is imbued with the idea that man, left to himself, would soon turn into a beast. We laugh at a certain king who, on going into exile in , said: And yet, a scientific study of the development of human society and institutions leads to an entirely different conclusion.
Even in the remotest antiquity, which is lost in the darkness of the stone age, men already lived in societies. In these societies was already developed a whole network of customs and sacred, religiously-respected institutions of the communal regime or of the clan which rendered social life possible. On the other hand, modern science has proved conclusively that Law — whether proclaimed as the voice of a divine being or proceeding from the wisdom of a lawgiver — never did anything else than prescribe already existing, useful habits and customs, and thereby hardened them into unchangeable, crystallized forms.
The Barbarian codes converted into law an undoubtedly excellent custom which was then in the process of formation: But at the same time they also legalized and perpetuated the division of freemen into classes — a division which only then began to appear. They exacted from the offender varying compensations, according as the person killed or wounded was a freeman, a military man, or a king the penalty in the last case being equivalent to life-long servitude.
But the law, by restating the custom, legalized for all time the division of people into classes — and so legalized it that up to the present, a thousand years since, we have not got rid of it. And this happened with the legislation of every age, down to our own time. The oppression of the preceding epoch was thus transmitted by law from the old society to the new, which grew upon the ruins of the old.
While all the laws of every age, down to our own, always consisted of the same two elements: So, at any rate, we are led to conclude by the scientific study of the development of human society, upon which for the last thirty years not a few conscientious men of science have labored. They themselves, it is true, seldom venture to express such heretical conclusions as those stated above.
But the thoughtful reader inevitably comes to them on reading their works. What position, then, does Anarchism occupy in the great intellectual movement of the nineteenth century? The answer to this question has already been partly formulated in the preceding pages. Anarchism is a world-concept based upon a mechanical explanation of all phenomena, [6] embracing the whole of Nature — that is, including in it the life of human societies and their economic, political, and moral problems.
Its method of investigation is that of the exact natural sciences, by which every scientific conclusion must be verified. Its aim is to construct a synthetic philosophy comprehending in one generalization all the phenomena of Nature — and therefore also the life of societies, — avoiding, however, the errors mentioned above into which, for the reasons there given, Comte and Spencer had fallen. It is therefore natural that to most of the questions of modern life Anarchism should give new answers, and hold with regard to them a position differing from those of all political and, to a certain extent, of all socialistic parties, which have not yet freed themselves from the metaphysical fictions of old.
Of course, the elaboration of a complete mechanical world-conception has hardly been begun in its sociological part — in that part, that is, which deals with the life and the evolution of societies. But the little that has been done undoubtedly bears a marked — though often not fully conscious — character. In the domain of philosophy of law, in the theory of morality, in political economy, in history, both of nations and institutions , Anarchism has already shown that it will not content itself with metaphysical conclusions, but will seek, in every case a natural-scientific basis. It rejects the metaphysics of Hegel, of Schelling, and of Kant; it disowns the commentators of Roman and Canon Law, together with the learned apologists of the State; it does not consider metaphysical political economy a science; and it endeavors to gain a clear comprehension of every question raised in these branches of knowledge, basing its investigations upon the numerous researches that have been made during the last thirty or forty years from a naturalist point of view.
Here also we try to sweep away the metaphysical cobwebs, and to see what embryos of generalizations — if any — may have been concealed beneath all sorts of misty words. He endeavors to discover the natural laws on which they are based. High-flown words do not scare the Anarchists, because they know that these words simply conceal ignorance — that is, uncompleted investigation — or, what is much worse, mere superstition.
They therefore pass on and continue their study of past and present social ideas and institutions according to the scientific method of induction. Such a method we do not recognize, neither would the modern natural sciences have anything to do with it. The discoveries of the nineteenth century in mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, physical psychology, anthropology, psychology of nations, etc.
The inductive-deductive method has proved its merits so well, in that the nineteenth century, which has applied it, has caused science to advance more in a hundred years than it had advanced during the two thousand years that went before. They were just as unscientific as, for instance, the assertion that the inequality of wealth is a law of nature, or that capitalism is the most convenient form of social life calculated to promote progress.
Moreover, every investigation only bears fruit when it has a definite aim — when it is undertaken for the purpose of obtaining an answer to a definite and clearly worded question. And it is the more fruitful the more clearly the observer sees the connect that exists between his problem and his general concept of the universe — the place which the former occupies in the latter. The better he understands the importance of the problem in the general concept, the easier will the answer be. The question, then, which Anarchism puts to itself may be stated thus: The desire to promote evolution in this direction determines the scientific as well as the social and artistic activity of the Anarchist.
At the time of the great French Revolution of —, Godwin had the opportunity of himself seeing how the governmental authority created during the revolution itself acted as a retarding force upon the revolutionary movement. The theorist of Anarchism who followed Godwin, Proudhon, had himself lived through the Revolution of and had seen with his own eyes the crime perpetrated by the revolutionary republican government, and the inapplicability of the state socialism of Louis Blanc.
A few months later, the resolution passed by the same general Council of the Association, at a secret conference held in London in instead of an annual congress, proved still more the inconvenience of having a government in the International. By this dire resolution they decided to turn the entire labor movement into another channel and convert it from an economic revolutionary movement — into an elective parliamentary and political movement.
This decision led to open revolt on the part of the Italian, Spanish, Swiss, and partly also of the Belgian, Federations against the London General Council, out of which movement modern Anarchism subsequently developed. Every time, then, the anarchist movement sprang up in response to the lessons of actual life and originated from the practical tendencies of events. And, under the impulse thus given it, Anarchism set to work out its theoretic, scientific basis. No struggle can be successful if it is an unconscious one, and if it does not render itself a clear and concise account of its aim.
Kropotkin’s "Modern Science and Anarchy" published | Anarchist Writers
No destruction of the existing order is possible, if at the time of the overthrow, or of the struggle leading to the overthrow, the idea of what is to take place of what is to be destroyed is not always present in the mind. Even the theoretical criticism of the existing conditions is impossible, unless the critic has in his mind a more or less distinct picture of what he would have in place of the existing state.
Consciously or unconsciously, the ideal of something better is forming in the mind of every one who criticizes social institutions. This is even more the case with a man of action. And power is never created by deception. The very man who speaks thus surely has some idea of what will take the place of the institutions destroyed. Every party thus has its ideal of the future, which serves it as a criterion in all events of political and economic life, as well as a basis for determining its proper modes of action. Anarchism, too, has conceived its own ideal; and this very ideal has led it to find its own immediate aims and its own methods of action different from those of the socialist parties, which have retained the old Roman and ecclesiastic ideals of governmental organization.
This is not the place to enter into an exposition of Anarchism.
The present sketch has its own definite aim — that of indicating the relation of Anarchism to modern science, — while the fundamental views of Anarchism may be found stated in a number of other works. But two or three illustrations will help us to define the exact relation of our views to modern science and the modern social movement.
But they have taken a wrong path; and hence we see in these high-flown sentences mere attempts at unconscious generalization, based upon inadequate foundations and confused, moreover, by words of hypnotic power.
Modern Science and Anarchism (1908)
And, availing ourselves of the results obtained by the anthropological school, we take up the study of social customs, beginning with those of the primitive savages, and trace the origin and the development of laws at different epochs. In this way we come to the conclusion already expressed on a preceding page — namely, that all laws have a two-fold origin, and in this very respect differ from those institutions established by custom which are generally recognized as the moral code of a given society.
Law confirms and crystallizes these customs, but, while doing so, it takes advantage of this fact to establish for the most part in a disguised form the germs of slavery and class distinction, the authority of priest and warrior, serfdom and various other institutions, in the interest of the armed and would be ruling minority. In this way a yoke has imperceptibly been placed upon man, of which he could only rid himself by means of subsequent bloody revolutions.
And this will continue to be so as long as one portion of society goes on framing laws for all society, and thereby strengthens the power of the State, which forms the chief support of Capitalism. It is plain, therefore, why Anarchism — which aspires to Justice a term synonymous with equality more than any other lawgiver in the world — has from the time of Godwin rejected all written laws.
In answer to this argument, we ask: Does he mean that there is in all men the conception that one ought not to do to another what he would not have done to himself — that it would be better even to return good for evil? If so, well and good. Let us, then, study as Adam Smith and Hutcheson have already studied the origin of these moral ideas in man, and their course of development.
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Let us extend our studies to pre-human times a thing Smith and Hutcheson could not do. Then, we may analyze the extent to which the idea of Justice implies that of Equailty. And then, if this observation of ours be correct, we shall wee whether it is at all possible to inculcate morality while teaching the doctrine of inequality. We shall finally analyze, as Mark Guyau did, the facts of self-sacrifice. And then we shall consider what has promoted the development in man of moral feelings — first, of those which are intimately connected with the idea of equality, and then of the others; and after this consideration we should be able to deduce from our study exactly what social conditions and what institutions promise the best results for the future.
Is this development promoted by religion, and to what extent? Is it promoted by inequality — economic and political — and by a division into classes? Is it promoted by law? Let us study all this in detail, and then only may we speak again of Morality and moralization by means of laws, law courts, jailers, spies, and police. But we had better give up using the sonorous words which only conceal the superficiality of our semi-learning. A Pierre Joseph-Proudhon Anthology.
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