Sociology and Ethics; The Facts of Social Life as the Source of Solutions for the Theoretical and Practical Problems of Ethics Book

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1921 Original Publisher: D. Appleton and Company Subjects: Sociology Ethics Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II THE RESIDUUM OF FAITH The most beautiful and ennobling creed that human speculation has evolved is not lightly cast aside by any man who comprehends the importance of ideas for life. Such a person is likely to feel that no calamities ever inflicted on the world by any war compare, as a catastrophe to mankind, with the loss of the creed of Divine companionship. Only one who has known its full effect in his own life is in position to estimate its value. Can that creed be retained? It is impossible to prove the truth of that conception of God, and of his relation to the unfolding life of our race, which is the essence of that creed. And it seems amazing that if God is so related to man this truth, so important to our welfare, should be beyond the compass of our rational powers. One may answer, though the answer is not a wholly satisfying or consoling one, that the human brain has been produced by biological evolution and therefore could not develop any powers save those that can be used to contribute to biological survival, and that such powers are necessarily inadequate for the discovery of absolute and ultimate truth. Some claim that instinct gives us a knowledge of God which reason cannot verify, and which reason may even call in question. But every instinct is as humbly biologi- cal in origin as reason. The universality, or approximate universality, among savage and barbarous peoples of notions about unseen personal powers seems to be adequately accounted for by students of social evolution without the assumption...Read More