TERMITES
mal's way of living." And still, our morality will analyze into the same two elements; our acts are right or wrong according as they are appropriate or non-appropriate to our way of living.
The difference between human actions and those of other animals is not essentially in the acts themselves, but in the methods by which they are brought about. Animals are controlled by instincts, mostly; man is controlled by a conscious feeling that he should do this or that—"conscience," we call it—and his specific actions are the result of his reasoning or teaching as to what is right and what is wrong, excepting, of course, the acts of perverted individuals who lack either a functional conscience or a well-adjusted power of reason, or of individuals in whom the instincts of an earlier way of living are still strong. The general truth is clear, however, that in behavior, as in physiology, there is not just one way of arriving at a common result, and that nature may employ quite different means for determining and activating conduct in her creatures.
Since right and wrong, then, are not abstract properties, but are terms expressing fitness or non-fitness, judged according to circumstances, or an animal's way of living, it is evident that the quality of actions will differ much according to how a species lives. Particularly will there be a difference in the necessary behavior of species that live as individuals and of those that live as groups of individuals. In other words, that which may be right for an individualistic species may be wrong for a communal species; for, with the latter, the group replaces the individual, and relations are now established within the group, or pertaining to the group as a whole, that before applied to the individual, while relations that formerly existed between individuals become now relations between groups.
The majority of animals live as individuals, each wandering here and there, wherever its fancy leads or
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