Chapter XII/2
Moral Imagination
(Darwinism and Morality)
第十二章/2
道德想象
（达尔文主义与道德）
This view appears to contradict the fundamental doctrine of modern natural science known as the theory of evolution. But it only appears to do so.
世界
Evolution is understood to mean the physical development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws.
In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, they are bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but they should not allow that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it.
From this it follows for ethics that, though we may well see the connection between later moral concepts and those that came before, we cannot derive even a single new moral idea from earlier ones.
As a moral being, the individual produces their own content. For the student of ethics, the content thus produced is just as much a given thing as reptiles are a given thing for the naturalist.
Reptiles have developed out of proto-amniotes, but the naturalist cannot derive the concept of reptiles from the concept of the proto-amniotes. Later moral ideas evolve out of earlier ones, but the student of ethics cannot derive the moral concepts of a later civilisation from those of an earlier one.
In the process of evolution of the moral world order we accomplish something that, at a lower level, is accomplished by nature: we change something in the visible world. The ethical standard thus cannot start, like a law of nature, by being known, but only by being created. Only when it is there, can it become an object of knowledge.
But are we not then able to make the old a measure for the new? Is not every human being compelled to measure the products of their moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? For something that should reveal itself as morally productive, this would be just as absurd as to want to measure a new form in nature by an old one (...)
Haeckel's genealogical tree, from protozoa up to man as an organic being, ought to be capable of being continued without any interruption of natural law and without a break in the uniformity of evolution, up to the individual as a being that is moral in a definite sense. But on no account could the inner nature of a descendant species be deduced from the inner nature of an ancestral one.
However true it is that the moral ideas of the individual have perceptibly developed out of those of their ancestors, it is equally true that the individual is morally barren unless they have moral ideas of their own.
Just as monism has no need for supernatural creative thoughts in explaining living organisms, so it is equally impossible for it to derive the moral world order from causes which do not lie within the world of experience. It cannot accept that the moral nature of an act of will is fully accounted for by being traced back to a continuous supernatural influence upon moral life (divine rule of the world from the outside), or to an act of revelation at a particular moment in history (giving of the ten commandments), or to God's appearance on the earth (as Christ).
What happens to the human being, and in the human being, through all this, becomes a moral element only when it becomes the possession of an individual as their own experience.
For monism, moral processes are products of the world like everything else that exists, and their causes must be sought in the world, that is, in the human being, since the human being is the bearer of morality.
Ethical individualism, then, is the crowning feature of the edifice that Darwin and Haeckel have striven to build for natural science. It is a spiritualised theory of evolution carried over into moral life.
Anyone who, in a narrow-minded way, restricts the concept of the natural from the outset to an arbitrarily limited sphere may easily conclude that there is no room in it for free individual deeds. The evolutionist who would proceed consistently, cannot fall a prey to such narrow-mindedness.
They cannot let the natural course of evolution terminate with the ape, and allow the human being to have a 'supernatural' origin; in their very search for the natural progenitors of the human being, they are bound to seek the spirit in nature; again, they cannot stop short at the organic functions of the human being and take only these as natural, but must go on to regard the free moral life as the spiritual continuation of organic life.
If they are to keep to their fundamental principles, the evolutionist can state only that the present form of moral deed evolves from other forms of activity in the world; to characterise a deed as to whether it is a free one, must be left to the direct observation of that deed.
In fact, they maintain only that human beings have developed out of ancestors that were not yet human. What constitutes the human being must be determined by observation of human beings themselves.
Ethical individualism has nothing to fear from a natural science that understands itself: for observation shows that the perfect form of the human deed has freedom as its distinguishing quality.
This freedom must be ascribed to the human will, in so far as the will manifests purely ideal intuitions. For these intuitions are not the results of a necessity acting upon them from without, but rest on their own foundations.
When a human being finds that an action is the image of such an ideal intuition, then they feel it to be free. This characteristic is the hallmark of a free deed.
Freedom is impossible if anything other than myself (whether mechanical process or a merely inferred other worldly God) determines my moral ideas.
In other words, I am free only when I myself produce these mental pictures, not when I am merely able to carry out the motives which another being has implanted in me.
A free being is one who can want what it itself considers right. Whoever does anything other than what they want must be driven to it by motives which do not lie within them. Such a person is unfree in their action.
Under certain conditions a human being may be induced to abandon a particular action. To allow others to prescribe to them what they ought to do - in other words, to want what another, and not they themself, consider right - to this a human being will submit only to the extent that they do not feel free.
External powers may prevent me from doing as I will. Then they simply condemn me to do nothing or to be unfree. Only when they would enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and put their own motives in the place of mine, do they really aim at making me unfree.
For this reason the Church sets itself not only against the mere doing, but especially against the impure thoughts, that is, the motives of my action. The Church makes me unfree if it deems as impure all those motives it has not itself authorised.
It is particularly significant that the right to call an act of will free arises from the experience that an ideal intuition comes to realisation in the act of will. This experience can only be the result of an observation, and is so, in the sense that we observe our will on a path of development towards the goal where it becomes possible for an act of will to be sustained by purely ideal intuition.
This goal can be reached, because in the true intuition nothing else is at work but its own self-sustaining essence. When such an intuition is present in human consciousness, then it has not been developed out of the processes of the organism, but rather the organic activity has withdrawn to make room for the ideal activity. (...) The act of will is free.
This freedom of the will cannot be observed by anyone who is unable to see how the free act of will consists in the fact that, firstly, through the intuitive element, the activity ordinarily required of the human organism is checked and repressed, and then replaced by the spiritual activity of the idea-filled will. Only those who cannot make this observation of the twofold nature of a free act of will, believe that every act of will is unfree.
Those who can make this observation win through to the recognition that the human being is unfree in so far as they cannot complete the process of suppressing the organic activity; but that this unfreedom is moving towards freedom, and that this freedom is by no means an abstract ideal but is a guiding force inherent in human nature.
The human being is free to the extent that they are able to realise in their acts of will the same mood of soul that lives in them when they become conscious of the formation of purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions.
