ETHICAL.
Can biology be of any help in solving ethical problems? Biology cannot help a system of ethics which regards the body as a mere hindrance to ethical aspiration, or as a mere passive instrument wielded by a spiritual agent, or as a mere illusion of unrationalized sense. Nor will ethical self-determination admit of help from the fatalistic, mechanical view of vital activity, or a like-fatalistic primordially established evolution. Bichat divided the human body into two sets of organs, the heart, stomach, liver, and sexual organs, the biological entoderm, constituting the organic life; and the external organs, brain, sensory organs, and voluntary muscles, the animal life, the biological ectoderm. His central conception in interpreting human nature consists in regarding the ectoderm as existing solely to satisfy entodermic or appetitive needs. The organic life, and the external life as ministering to it, conduce to the attainment of the one end, perpetuation of life in self and offspring. If the gratification of hunger and lust is the chief concern in life, then life is ethically undesirable. Such ethical abhorrence, and consequent abnegation of our present life, forms the core of the highest religions. Life becomes futile, painful, and fundamentally wicked; and total abnegation becomes the rationally prescribed ethical end. By the ethically abhorrent means of struggle for life those best adapted to live in the present medium have survived, and the highest of these possesses an ethical consciousness. Has this last been developed ethically? If moral development has been the preconcerted aim of a power ordaining such evolution, then we must pronounce his means wasteful, ruthless, and unethical. If developed by organic beings in their own functioning in their environment, nothing can be called ethical till we come to man's moral consciousness. It is of decisive importance which we regard as subservient to the other, the internal or the external life. The writer holds that the fundamental and essential activity of life consists in the functional play of the organism with the medium at their surface of contact. The highest organs of animal life are all developed in the surface-layer, brain, sensory organs, and voluntary muscles. The organs of the life of outside relations instead of being mere tools for appetitive gratification, are themselves the essential embodiment of life. Hunger the
