Abstract
THE aim of this little book is to throw some light on the effects in life and literature of two different points of view, the literary and the scientific. The first chapter lays down some “guiding truths” on mind and matter; mind is regarded as the function or action of nerve matter, just as contractility is the action of living muscle. All the manifestations of life—morals, religion, laws—are based on quantities, states and changes of nerve-matter. “Matter” is used as meaning natural stuff of which we have some knowledge. The second chapter expounds some “guiding truths” on moral nerve. Morality need not be defined; we know what it is. In men and animals the moral sense is predominant; in both, the impulse to do right is stronger than the capacity to think clearly; few men can measure the planets, but every man strives to preserve from danger the lives of his fellows. How came men and animals to be first of all moral? Because they possess moral nerve-matter; morality is nothing more than the action of moral grey-matter, and the moral apparatus came into existence because it is a factor essential to life. A material moral apparatus exists somewhere and somehow within the skull, and there are grounds for believing that moral nerve is more or less separate nerve, freely communicating with all other varieties of nerve, but characterised by greater simplicity and directness. The next two chapters are devoted to Mr. Spencer and Huxley as moralists. Mr. Spencer underestimates the potency of nerve-organisation, and is wrong in putting the origin of the moral sense quite late in the course of evolutional time, the truth being that a certain bed-rock code is found wherever life is found. In common with literary thinkers, he fails to see that creeds, philosophies and moral codes are not the producers, but the products of living human nerve. Huxley is judged by his Romanes address on “Evolution and Ethics,” and the verdict is that the address is marked by not a little confusion, inconsistency and inaccuracy. The fifth chapter, on the principle of punishment, which concludes the first part of the book, introduces us to a fresh theory of the origin of morality; it now appears that the punishment of immorality is the one method by which morality originated. The chapter concludes with some interesting remarks on destructive anarchism and its remedies, but is marred by the grotesque suggestion that in order to effect a maximum of humiliation the assassin should, by way of punishment, be flogged by a woman!
Moral Nerve and the Error of Literary Verdicts.
By Furneaux Jordan Pp. xxiii + 141. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd., 1901.) Price 3s. 6d. net.
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Moral Nerve and the Error of Literary Verdicts . Nature 65, 365 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/065365b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/065365b0