Morals and the Evolution of Man

The fact so often observed, that man in many cases does that which he passionately desires to leave undone, and refrains from doing that which all his instincts urge him to do - this phenomenon of Morality is a generalization upon a huge scale of the above experiment on animals with the pane of glass in a tank. Jean Jacques Rousseau thought out a theoretical human being who was by nature good. Such a human being does not exist and has never existed. From Sheer annoyance at the provoking obliquity of vision which led the enthusiast of Geneva to develop such a theory, one is sorely tempted to go to the opposite extreme and declare that man is by nature fundamentally bad; but such an assertion is just as naive as Rousseau's contention. Good and bad are values which we can only learn to appreciate when we have felt the effect of the phenomenon of Morality. The concepts of good and evil are of much later origin than mankind, and can therefore no more constitute a fundamental Characteristic of man's original nature than, for instance, the cut and colour of 1118 clothes.