Or, if we look at the question from the side of the race development of mankind, we find, as I have argued at length in the volume referred to, that the repetitions of habitual performances by an organism would not give growth. In order to grow, to be better as an organism, merely, there must be constant violations or modifications of habit. So if we put the ethical sense only on the plane that some of the advocates of the habit theory claim for it,—i.e., an index of organic utility and development,—even then we must find in it more than the outcome of repeated habit. This is not the place to carry out this thought; but it is on the surface difficult to see how we could hold that departure from habit as such arouses the sense of wrong, if all through the course of organic and mental development it is by just such violations and modifications of old habits that new adaptations have been secured to the growth and evolution of the organism. There is a sense, it is true, in which the ethical sense may be said to represent a habit; but, as its statement below will show, it is quite different from the view developed by the associationists.[1]
In short, not to go into this theory further, we may say that the theory represents an attempt to found the moral sentiments upon one of the two selves which the social life—involves the self of habit.
And the other historical theory mentioned above does the reverse; it attempts to derive these feelings also from one of the two, but it takes the other. Sympathy, altruism,—which when reduced to its lowest terms means the retirement of the aggressive, self-seeking agent in man for a period, and in reference to a particular object,—sympathy is the watchword of the traditional English theory of the moral sentiments. Adam Smith, Darwin, Stephen, and many of the apostles of the natural-history conception in this realm, think that morality is a complex outcome of animal or social sympathy, which in its turn arose as a variation playing a successful rôle in the preservation of animal companies.
- ↑ Of course this is only one criticism of the habit views; another would be, that they do not account for reflective morality, since they do not consider the moral sense a function of the thought of self.
