English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    individual conscience (when conscience comes into work) will impose ; the possibility of its being exercised against the interest of the race does not appear logically excluded from the scheme; but the condition which assigns it an essential place in the ethics of Nature is obviously not to be understood as more than one part in a system. Side by side with the selfish condition, that indi- vidual egotism shall be a chief security for the life-interests of the race, is the not less essential altruistic condition, that each living generation of the race shall breed succession to itself, and shall minister to the early needs of its progeny; while also, in wide extent, Nature imposes the general altruistic condition that individuals of a race must be helpful to each other in the struggle which they severally wage for survival. The importance of the last named condition is very great, as qualifying what might otherwise seem to be the absoluteness of individual egotism in the system of Nature. When the two conditions are considered together, we see that Egotism and Altruism, exercised in due mutual control, and each of them with regard duly proportioned between immediate and ulterior interests, are to be the two equally indispensable joint- factors of progress, and that every prima-voce discord between them must sooner or later find its solution either in silence or in harmony. While man has constituted no exception to the general experience of living Nature, that they who would live must struggle, he has strikingly exemplified the further experience (which various recent writers have brought into important relief) that, in the struggle of different races for survival, the success of any given race greatly depends on the degree in which the individuals of the race combine for their struggle, and are helpful in it each to the other.* That each living thing tends first of all to struggle for its own life and satisfaction may be assumed as fundamental law ; but Nature teems with illustrations of the wide- spread second tendency—the tendency to exertions of individual effort for objects which are larger than those of the individual; and in the best-studied parts of the animal kingdom, the cases where individuals of a species accept ties of common duty, the frequent instances of kindness from individual to individual, and above all the care of parents for their offspring, are facts almost as well known as the readiness of individuals to combat for themselves. The conjunction of those two tendencies is a leading fact in the psychical constitu- tion of man, and has been all-powerful in determining his development. For human life, it is the function of what we term Morality to deliberate and determine how the two impulses may work with most concurrence for the common good, and may waste themselves least against each other ; and social institutions, developed in vast variety during successive ages of time, and under different conditions of stock and circumstance, have been the steps and forms of our slow experimental training in that great study. The aggregations of mankind which receive earliest mention in history may be deemed to have been essentially consanguineous ; that is to say, they were * The doctrine that mutual aid is as much a law of Nature as mutual struggle was set forth for English readers, with learning and vigorous thought, in a most interesting series of articles by Prince Kropotkin, in successive numbers of this Review from 1890 to 1892. He quotes La lutte pour I'existence, et I'association pour la lutte as the title of a lecture in which M. Lanessan, in 1882, taught to the effect of his title ; and he cites various earlier like teachings, as particularly those of M. Espinasse in his Societes Animates, 1877, and those of M. Kessler in an Address to the Society of Russian Naturalists, St. Petersburg, 1880.