5 1 -' THE AMERICAN JOURNAL Ofi SOCIOLOGY
which are supernatural and false. As a matter of fact, this moral philosophy, or " moral science," as in this scientific age it is pleased to call itself, is the successor to which theology handed her scepter as she lost her empire over souls. And the ideas that bear up this new rule, however innocent and even sanative they be, are beyond all doubt hollow and illusory.
A leading idea of this system is that actions have a moral quality irrespective of their consequences. In religious systems the standard of conduct is the will of God revealed or implanted. Ethics, on discarding this idea, might have announced the only sure and scientific criterion by which actions may be divided into good and bad, viz., Results. But such frankness would have been fatal. If society bade us look to the consequences of an act, whether promoting or injuring the general well-being, it would thereby place its welfare in the foolish hands of rash, short-sighted, and inexperienced people. How few are compe- tent to do their own social philosophizing ! In a maze of effects, how is the ordinary man, .with his little arc of experience, to judge the real trend of actions ? Like a wise parent who real- izes that some of his commands may not be placed on grounds of reason, but must rest on his sheer dictum, society refuses to let its members into its central secrets. Special systems of requirement military, clerical, or industrial discipline are avowed to rest on utility. But for its central requirements a surer criterion is claimed. They are not social; they are moral. Not their consequences, but their essential nature^ marks this class of actions as good, that class as bad. By thus registering its age-clarified, time-winnowed judgments as to what is good for it or bad for it in a Moral Code, society delivers its well- being from the hasty, biased judgments of the purblind many.
Another idea is that human nature is formed, divinely con- stituted, and intended for goodness ; that uprightness, self- sacrifice, and forgiveness are natural to us in a way that indirec- tion, selfishness, and resentment are not. On this point religion held otherwise. The idea of original sin thrown out by the Jahvehistic author of Genesis about 850 B. C. was neglected
