Chapter One
The Law of Human Nature
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but
however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They
say things like this: `How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - `That's my seat, I was there first'
- `Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - `Why should you shove in first?' - `Give me a bit of your orange,
I gave you a bit of mine' - `Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as
uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's
behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the
other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: `To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to
make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special
excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should
not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up
which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or
Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And
they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of
the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to
do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in
saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the `laws of
nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers
called the Law of Right and Wrong `the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that,
just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man
also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation
or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is
only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you
leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected
to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws
which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with
animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be
taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it,
just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they
thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were
not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong
unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had
had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have
blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because
different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything
like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians,
Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each
other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The
Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality
would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of
double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two
and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your
own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself
first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they
have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked .
(Continues.)
