The idea of good and evil exists within humanity

itself.  Man, whatever degree of intellectual development

he may  have attained, however his ideas may be obscured

by prejudices and personal interest in general, considers

as good that  which is useful to the society wherein he

lives, and as evil that which is hurtful to it.

	 But whence comes this conception, often so vague

that  it can scarcely be distinguished from a feeling? There

are  millions and millions of human beings who have

never reflected about the human race. They know for the

most  part only the clan or family, rarely the nation, still

more  rarely mankind. How can it be that they should

consider  what is useful for the human race as good, or

even attain a  feeling of solidarity with their clan, in spite

of all their narrow, selfish interests?

	 This fact has greatly occupied thinkers at all times,

and it  continues to occupy them still. We are going in our

turn  to give our view of the matter. But let us remark in

passing that though the explanations of the fact may vary,

the  fact itself remains none the less incontestable. And

should our  explanation not be the true one, or should it

be incomplete,  the fact with its consequences to humanity

will still remain.  We may not be able fully to explain the

origin of the planets revolving round the sun, but the

planets revolve none the  less, and one of them carries us

with it in space.

	 We have already spoken of the religious

explanation. If  man distinguishes between good and evil,

say theologians, it  is God who has inspired him with this

idea. Useful or hurtful is not for him to inquire; he must

merely obey the fiat of his creator. We will not stop at this

explanation, fruit of  the ignorance and terrors of the

savage. We pass on.

	 Others have tried to explain the fact by law. It must

have  been law that developed in man the sense of just and

unjust,  right and wrong. Our readers may judge of this

explanation for themselves. They know that law has

merely utilized  the social feelings of man, to slip in,

among the moral precepts he accepts, various mandates

useful to an exploiting  minority, to which his nature

refuses obedience. Law has  perverted the feeling of

justice instead of developing it.  Again let us pass on.

 	Neither let us pause at the explanation of the

Utilitarians.  They will have it that man acts morally from

self-interest, and they forget his feelings of solidarity with

the whole race, which exist, whatever be their origin.

There is some truth  in the Utilitarian explanation. But it is

not the whole truth.  Therefore, let us go further.

	 It is again to the thinkers of the eighteenth century

that  we are indebted for having guessed, in part at all

events, the  origin of the moral sentiment.

	 In a fine work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, left

to  slumber in silence by religious prejudice, and indeed

but little known even among anti-religious thinkers,

Adam Smith has  laid his finger on the true origin of the

moral sentiment. He  does not seek it in mystic religious

feelings; he finds it simply  in the feeling of sympathy.

	 You see a man beat a child. You know that the

beaten  child suffers. Your imagination causes you

yourself to suffer  the pain inflicted upon the child; or

perhaps its tears, its little  suffering face tell you. And if

you are not a coward, you  rush at the brute who is

beating it and rescue it from him.

	 This example by itself explains almost all the moral

sentiments. The more powerful your imagination, the

better you  can picture to yourself what any being feels

when it is made  to suffer, and the more intense and

delicate will your moral  sense be. The more you are

drawn to put yourself in the  place of the other person, the

more you feel the pain inflicted  upon him, the insult

offered him, the injustice of which he  is a victim, the more

will you be urged to act so that you  may prevent the pain,

insult, or injustice. And the more  you are accustomed by

circumstances, by those surrounding  you, or by the

intensity of your own thought and your own  imagination,

to act as your thought and imagination urge, the more will

the moral sentiment grow in you, the more will  it become

habitual.

 	This is what Adam Smith develops with a wealth of

examples. He was young when he wrote this book which is 

far superior to the work of his old age upon political econ-

omy. Free from religious prejudice, he sought the

explanation of morality in a physical fact of human nature,

and this is why official and non-official theological

prejudice has  put the treatise on the Black List for a

century.

	 Adam Smith's only mistake was not to have

understood  that this same feeling of sympathy in its

habitual stage  exists among animals as well as among

men.

	 The feeling of solidarity is the leading

characteristic of  all animals living in society. The eagle

devours the sparrow,  the wolf devours the marmot. But

the eagles and the wolves  respectively aid each other in

hunting, the sparrow and the  marmot unite among

themselves against the beasts and birds  of prey so

effectually that only the very clumsy ones are  caught. In

all animal societies solidarity is a natural law of far greater

importance than that struggle for existence,  the virtue of

which is sung by the ruling classes in every strain that may

best serve to stultify us.

 	When we study the animal world and try to explain

to  ourselves that struggle for existence maintained by

each living being against adverse circumstances and

against its enemies, we realize that the more the principles

of solidarity and  equality are developed in an animal

society and have become  habitual to it, the more chance

has it of surviving and coming triumphantly out of the

struggle against hardships and  foes. The more thoroughly

each member of the society feels  his solidarity with each

other member of the society, the  more completely are

developed in all of them those two qualities which are the

main factors of all progress: courage on  the one hand, md

on the other, free individual initiative.  And on the

contrary, the more any animal society or little  group of

animals loses this feeling of solidarity --which may  chance

as the result of exceptional scarcity or else of exceptional

plenty-- the more do the two other factors of progress 

courage and individual initiative, diminish. In the end

they  disappear, and the society falls into decay and sinks

before  its foes. Without mutual confidence no struggle is

possible;  there is no courage, no initiative, no solidarity--

and no victory! Defeat is certain.

	 We can prove with a wealth of examples how in the

animal  and human worlds the law of mutual aid is the

law of  progress, and how mutual aid with the courage

and individual  initiative which follow from it secures

victory to the species  most capable of practicing it.

 Now let us imagine this feeling of solidarity acting dur-

ing the millions of ages which have succeeded one another 

since the first beginnings of animal life appeared upon the 

globe. Let us imagine how this feeling little by little

became  a habit, and was transmitted by heredity from the

simplest  microscopic organism to its descendants --

insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, man-- and we shall

comprehend the origin  of the moral sentiment, which is a

necessity to the animal  like food or the organ for

digesting it.

	 Without going further back and speaking of

complex animals springing from colonies of extremely

simple little beings,  here is the origin of the moral

sentiment. We have been  obliged to be extremely brief in

order to compress this  great question within the limits of

a few pages, but enough has already been said to show

that there is nothing mysterious  or sentimental about it.

Without this solidarity of the individual with the species,

the animal kingdom would never  have developed or

reached its present perfection. The most  advanced being

upon the earth would still be one of those  tiny specks

swimming in the water and scarcely perceptible  under a

microscope. Would even this exist? For are not the

earliest aggregations of cellules themselves an instance of 

association in the struggle?