J. Howard Moore Quotes (183 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous J. Howard Moore Quotes

“The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 128–129

“The chief activities of beings, both human and non-human, are put forth, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of procuring food. The suppression, entire or partial, of one being by another for nutritive purposes is, therefore, the form of the most frequent and excessive egoism. The lowly forms of life—the worms, echinoderms, mollusks, and the like—are, for the most part, vegetarians. So, also, are prevalently the insects, birds, rodents, and ungulates. These creatures are not, as a rule, aggressively harmful to each other, chiefly indifferent. But upon these inoffensive races feed with remorseless maw the reptilia, the insectivora, and the carnivora. These being-eaters cause to the earth-world its bloodiest experiences. It is their nature (established organically by long selection, or, as in the case of man, acquired tentatively) to subsist, not on the kingdom of the plant, the natural and primal storehouse of animal energy, but on the skeletons and sensibilities of their neighbors and friends. The serpent dines on the sparrow and the sparrow ingulfs the gnat; the tiger slays the jungle-fowl and the coyote plunders the lamb; the seal subsists on fish and the ursus maritimus subsists on seal; the ant enslaves the aphidae and man eats and enslaves what can not get away from him. Life riots on life—tooth and talon, beak and paw. It is a sickening contemplation, But life everywhere, in its aspect of activity, is largely made up of the struggle by one being against another for existence—of the effort by one being to circumvent, subjugate, or destroy another, and of the counter effort to reciprocate or escape.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 123–125

“All over the non-human world, with few exceptions, each being seeks the satisfaction of his own desires, if not with positive disregard for the happiness and misery of the rest of the universe, at least with sincere unconcern. There is no courtesy, sympathy, or amenity there—a cold, heartless, implacable world of strangers.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 123

“The sad and unmistakable thing one observes in looking out over the universe of conscious existence is the preponderance of egoism, the intense and almost maniacal regard with which beings, as a rule, act in behalf of themselves, and the lukewarm consideration, on the whole, allowed to others.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 122

“The evolution of consciousness, in its ethical import, means the extension in both space and time of the consciousness of similarity. Starting from individual egoism, consciousness has extended, vividly or vaguely, from individual self to family, and from family to clan, and from clan to tribe, and from tribe to nation, and from nation to race, and from race to species, and from species to kingdom. This amplification has gone on and is still going on in both space and time. Universal consciousness of similarity contemplates all the beings in space and all those to be in time.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 120–121

“Longitudinal or serial altruism, that is, altruism toward the generations in future time, arises, like lateral or space altruism, thru sympathy, that is, thru the imagination. The living sustain a vital relation to the unborn. Every one who recognizes and shows any regard for this relation, and there are very few who do, does so by putting himself in the place of the unborn billions, and by anticipation sharing their welfare and ill-fare.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 120

J. Howard Moore Quotes about space

“Where did these two elements in our nature, egoism and altruism, come from? Why have human beings and all other beings known to terrestrial intelligence these two elements, just as they are, in their natures? Why have they not all egoism or all altruism? Why have not the beings in the universe a tendency to act each for its own individual self without any particle of regard for others? Or why are they not so natured as to be oblivious of self and conscious only of those around them? These are profound questions and questions of superlative importance to the student of social culture. What the social scientist is attempting to do, or should be attempting to do, is to ameliorate the relation of associated beings, and this is to be accomplished by improving the conduct or modifying the modes of motion of these beings. And it is necessary in order to modify these modes of motion to know where and how these modes of motion have been acquired. It is impossible for a physician to prescribe rationally to a pathology whose causation he does not know.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 98–99

“The relations of living beings to each other observed among the races (especially the unconscious races) of the earth to-day, or as contemplated in the paleontologies of past evolutions, are not such, I assert, as to appeal with anything like eloquence to the ideal of any unbiased mind. I will assert further, that the principle that has operated in the development of life on this planet, the natural selection principle, and the relations prevalently established among living beings by the necessities of this principle, are irrational and barbarous—that the moral progress thus far made by civilized beings here on the earth has been made in spite of, and in opposition to, this principle—and finally, that the great task of reforming and regenerating the universe and of establishing right relations among its inhabitants consists in the elimination of those tendencies implanted in the natures of living beings by the struggle and survival principle.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 90–91

“Disease is contagious, and death an unavoidable necessity. Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is everywhere interpolated with pain. Droughts, darknesses, floods, pestilences, storms, and scourges harrow the earth from one pole of it to the other. The earth is, and always has been, peopled by deformities—creatures so defective in their natures that they visit upon each other without hesitancy crimes and barbarities of the most horrible hue. These wretches are compelled to pass their lives in the midst of a universe so mysterious and mighty that the most arrogant of us are helpless in the crash and melee of its tendencies. Yet human contemplators look out over this dark and contentious chaos and declare it to be without spot or blemish.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 87–88

“The tradition that the universe was originally constructed and has ever since been, and is to-day, guided by the cerebral processes of an all-wise brain, is responsible for it all. Blinded by this inheritance, human beings condone the most palpable defects in the economies of the universe—limitations which, it is not violent to say, if possessed by a fellow human being, would be characterized as those of an imbecile.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, p. 87

“Each living being of the universe, therefore, sustains to every other living being the relation of possible right and wrong, but to the insentient universe no such relation exists. Right is that relation which is conducive to happiness, or welfare, or complete living, or whatever synonym is preferred. Wrong is that which conduces to the opposite of happiness—misery, ill-fare, maladaptation.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 79–80

“The inanimate universe is related to the animate as means to end.”

J. Howard Moore

We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 78–79

J. Howard Moore: Trending quotes

“All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror.”

J. Howard Moore

"Modern Ethics", pp. 270–271
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

History

“Our competitive system of industry is a vestigial institution. It is a survival from the militant ages of the past. It is a form of warfare. It is unsuited to a world of co-operation and division of labor. Higher men are beings of sympathy. They have the natures to put themselves in the places of others. Their ideal is the Golden Rule. But our system of industry compels us to fight each other. It is a heart-hardener. It is a system of cannibalism. Instead of instilling the feeling of brotherhood, it compels us to eat each other. It will pass away. It is already far advanced in its transition to a system based on sympathy and systematic co-operation.”

J. Howard Moore

"Vestigial Customs and Institutions, pp. 190–191
Savage Survivals (1916), Savage Survivals in Higher Peoples (Continued)

Past , Heart , Nature , Fight

“Humanitarianism is the name commonly given to that higher humanity which embraces the whole animal kingdom, or as much of it as gives evidence of feeling. Humanitarianism is the final goal of human sympathy. Starting with the tribe (or the family, or even the individual), the instinct of sympathy has spread from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to nation, from nation to race, and from race to species. It is constantly growing and deepening among the sub-divisions of the human species and is as constantly extending to the non-human populations of the earth. It is destined finally to reach the remotest shores of the Great Ocean of Feeling. Wherever there are bodies that bleed and souls that mourn, there human sympathy should go, angel-like, with its sweetness and healing down even to those lowly and overlooked but suffering-and-enjoying civilizations beneath our feet, in the grasses and grounds and the crystal deeps.”

J. Howard Moore

"Some Newer Instincts", pp. 182–183
Savage Survivals (1916), Savage Survivals in Higher Peoples (Continued)

Family , Soul , Grass , Suffering

J. Howard Moore Quotes

“Progress is not natural. We are geared to go round and round. The reformer should not expect too much. We are only as far along as we are. It is the nature of granite to be hard. And it is the nature of man to be mechanical.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Imitative Instinct", p. 158
Savage Survivals (1916), Savage Survivals in Higher Peoples (Continued)

Nature

“Human beings are not children of the sun. They are children of the jungle. We have in our natures many things that we would be a great deal better off without instincts and ways of acting which we would never have included in ourselves in the world if we had had the privilege of choosing just what was to go into our natures. These instincts and ways of acting are vestigial. They were useful to our ancestors, but owing to changes in surroundings they are not useful to us.”

J. Howard Moore

"Vestigial Instincts in Man", pp. 127–128
Savage Survivals (1916), Savage Survivals in Higher Peoples (Continued)

Sun , Children , Nature , Way

“Young sheep and goats leap and gambol in their play. I have noticed young goats that were being led along the streets keep up an occasional jumping as they went along, leaping first one way then another, sometimes straight up into the air, as if they were worked by some unseen spring that went off suddenly inside of them. How strange such conduct must have seemed to the pre-Darwinians. But to the evolutionists it is as plain as day.”

J. Howard Moore

"The School of Nature", p. 67
Savage Survivals (1916), Wild Survivals in Domesticated Animals

Way , Spring

“Mother love is not a human invention. It has been inherited. It is older than the Rocky Mountains. Mother love in man came from the same source as the backbone in man from pre-human forms. Mother love among men is the same thing exactly as mother love among birds and quadrupeds. The mother monkey loves her child with almost the same tenderness as the human mother. When a monkey child dies, the mother carries the little corpse around with her for clays, refuses to eat, and sits often in silence and grief. Mother birds will risk their very lives for their young. So will mother bears, and lions, and whales, and the females of many other species.”

J. Howard Moore

"Mother Love", p. 61
Savage Survivals (1916), Wild Survivals in Domesticated Animals

Mountain , Silence , Bird , Love

“These races of beings which man has associated with himself are living beings. They eat and drink and breathe, they suffer and enjoy, reproduce their kind and love their young, much as human beings do. They have been taken from their natural surroundings and forced to adopt ways of living that are often cruel, or even horrible. There is nothing much more certain than that men and women of the far future will recognize their kinship with these races, and will treat them in an entirely different way from what we do.”

J. Howard Moore

"Summary and Conclusion", p. 37
Savage Survivals (1916), Domesticated and Wild Animals

Drink , Future , Suffering , Nature

“This is a wintry world. Low temperatures prevail in the hearts of men. Altruism is scarce. Gaunt but blessed hands stretch up to us everywhere for bread. They are the holy hands of Truth.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 150

World , Truth , Heart , Men

“Sometimes, in our littleness, we boast of the progress we have made, and of the knowledge, culture, and art which we as a race to-day display. But, O, it is the vanity of Adolescence. What will the knowledge, culture, and art of to-day amount to fifty or a hundred thousand years from now?—or a million years from now?”

J. Howard Moore

Nothing! This sphere, with its clinging tenantry, will still be here then and will still be making its annual journeys round the sun, as now. But, O, what mighty and ineffable changes! The things of to-day will be so rude and childish and so far away that they will not even be considered.
Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 149

Knowledge , Art

“The next hundred years will witness the greatest improvement in moral practice and understanding this world has ever seen. Nothing to compare with it has ever taken place in the evolution of ethics. The twentieth century is going to be a humanitarian century. The twenty-first century will dawn on a very different condition of things from that which we see around us to-day. Men are going to be Brothers, as certainly as the stars rise in the east. The marching and counter-marching going on in the industrial world to-day will end in a new order of society based on Mutualism, in which there will be not only division of labour but division of the products of labour as well. And along with the recognition of human brotherhood will come, is bound to come, the corollary recognition of the brotherhood of all those that feel.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 147

Understanding , Star , World , Feeling

“The Doctrine of Evolution is the greatest discovery ever made by the human mind. We are in the act of understanding it now, and hence are not able to appraise it at its true value. But v)^hen time has passed and we are able to look upon it historically and to realize its full significance, it will be recognized as being incomparably more epoch-making even than the prodigious contributions of Newton and Copernicus. It is more than a theory. It is a new point of view. It has necessitated an entirely new revaluation of everything in the universe.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 144

Universe , Time , Understanding , Making love

“The doctrine of anthropocentricism has now vanished from intelligent minds, and is in the act of vanishing from unintelligent minds. It is destined to continue to fade until there is not a particle of it left. It is rank imposture. It is too silly and childish even for simpletons. Man is not a being apart. He is not a favorite of the gods, nor the subject of celestial anxiety. Nothing revolves about him or exists for him. Like all the other inhabitants of this world, he is a mere by-product of the play of cosmic forces—forces which grind on without eyes, without anxiety, and without end.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 143

World , God , Intelligence

“The earth has been headquarters for bigots from time immemorial. I suspect that if we had information from the stars and were able to judge the spheres of space comparatively, we would find that the earth is head and shoulders above every other world within the sweep of the telescope in the enormous output of its assurance.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 124

World , Star , Time

“Civilisation is not an appeal to nature. It is a revolt against nature—against nature as it has been represented in man in the past. It is supernatural. Civilization is an attempt to subordinate and control those primitive impulses which have reigned in human nature in the less gracious and less rational times gone by—impulses which we have ourselves to-day to a considerable extent inherited.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Biology of Child Nature, p. 135

Past , Time , Nature

“The Law of the Larger Self means Universal Mutualism. It means a widening and promotion of the ambitions. It means a transfer of emphasis from a Part to the Whole. Instead of striving for the happiness and well-being of a Fraction, we strive for the happiness and well-being of All.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Larger Self, p. 59

Universe , Self-confidence , Law , Parting

“Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self is, it seems to me, the plainest and truest and the most comprehensive and useful rule of conduct ever formulated on this earth. It is the expression of balanced egoism and altruism. It is the soul of sympathy and oneness. It may be called the Law of the Larger Self.”

J. Howard Moore

It is the extension of the regard which we have for ourselves to those below, above, and around us. It is simply the law of the individual organism widened to apply to the Sentient Organism. It is the message which is destined in time to come to redeem this world from the primal curse of selfishness. It is the dream which has been dreamed by the great teachers of the past independently of each other, merely by observing the actions of men and thinking what rule if followed would cure the wrongs and sufferings of this world.
Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Larger Self, pp. 58–59

Parting , Self-confidence , Soul , Law

“Ethics is the most vital and important of all sciences. It has both its theoretical and applied aspects. Its mission is nothing less than the establishment of harmony among the inhabitants of the earth and the transformation of world-wide contention into peace and happiness.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, pp. 56–57

World , Science , Peace , Happiness

“The well being of others is on an average as important as our own, and should as a general thing be appraised at the same value. If a certain amount of happiness is scheduled to fall to the lot of the earth, it makes absolutely no difference whether it falls on me, or on you, or on somebody a thousand miles away. It would serve the ends of absolute ethics quite as well if it fell on an insect or a horse as if it fell on a man. The only important thing from the standpoint of universal good is that the pleasure be experienced. It is not important what particular individual or species is the beneficiary. It might even go to another world, and be just as satisfactory to a universal well-wisher, who looked at Cosmos from the serene altitudes of pure reason, without any prejudices whatever one way or another in the matter. This is the ideal. It is a long, long way from our natures. But only in so far as we approximate this ideal do we rise above those imperfections of our being which have been ground out by the methods that have operated in the development of life on earth.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, pp. 54–55

Nature , Pleasure , Universe , Horse

“Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, p. 53

Pain , Bad luck , Help , Pleasure

“The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, pp. 52–53

Pain , Time , Penalty , Pleasure

“These wider relations and obligations implied by evolution should be included in every program designed for the amelioration of the world. To ignore them is to classify ourselves as incompetents. No one but an inferior can any longer maintain that kindness, justice, sympathy, love, honesty, humanity, and charity are not as good for dogs, horses, and fishes as they are for men; or that cruelty, hatred, and inhumanity are not he same damning things wherever they fall on living souls.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, pp. 42–43

Soul , Justice , Dogs , Horse

“Let us be alive. Let us be liquid. Let us be Young. The Old atrophy, because they cease to flow. Let us be loyal for ever to those heavenly banners that flutter everywhere in the airs of this age—the banners of those who strive for a Better World.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 150

World , Age

“Ethical culture should do for human character what physical culture should do for the body. It should produce a race of kind, honest, courageous, public-spirited, and justice-loving men and women. It is all so perfectly plain. Men are moral invalids. They come into the world bearing the curse of their animal origin. They are unfit for a life of love and co-operation. The defects of human character are as well known and as well understood as the defects of the human body. They are the cause of more unhappiness to mankind than any other one thing. They can be corrected by the application of the same remedies that have proved so efficacious in the case of mental and physical defects. The school should be the mental, physical, and moral infirmary of society.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, p. 38–39

School , Courage , Justice , Animals

“Human institutions are inventions. They are devices to aid in the promotion of human welfare. They should be judged by the same standards of utility as agricultural implements and everything else. Whenever they can be made over to advantage, they should be made over. And whenever they can be rendered useless by something better to take their place, they should be sent without sighs or lamentations to the junkpile. Nothing is too sacred to he improved.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Call of the Past, pp. 9–10

“If it could be brought about that all the billions of beings who inhabit this sphere would refrain from all acts which would in any way mar the happiness of others, that moment the earth would be transformed. We have thousands of theories as to how to make the world better, and we struggle day and night to understand and control the great natural forces about us; but if we could only get inside of ourselves once and set ourselves to working right, the biggest step toward the Millennium would be taken.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Importance of Ethical Culture, p. 6

Night , Understanding , Nature , Way

“We know more about human heredity to-day than we did loo years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign-boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body.”

J. Howard Moore

Ethics and Education (1912), Preface

School , Understanding , Nature , Way

“Oh, the hope of the centuries and the centuries and centuries to come! It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a million years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes Justice and Brotherhood to every being that feels.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 215

Time , Justice , Hope , Age

“It ought to be perfectly clear by this time that the popularity and unpopularity of propositions in no way coincide with their truth and falsity. It makes no difference how true a proposition may be or how unreservedly it may finally be accepted by mankind, there is always a period in its early life when it is stoned and misunderstood. It has been so throughout the ages of the past; it is true to-day; and it will continue to be true as long as disparities in heroism and originality exist among men.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 211

Time , Past , Truth , Age

“Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The beings below and around us have had the same origin as we have. They have the same general architecture of both body and mind, and are footballed by the same antithetical impulses of pleasure and pain. Whatever the beings of this world have been in the past, they can never again be anything but a family.”

J. Howard Moore

Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling.
Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, p. 42

Family , Pain , Past , Pleasure

“Socialism is inevitable. It is right. It is in the line of least resistance. It is on the way to the highlands—on the way to Real Civilisation, not the starched, hypocritical, supposititious, so-called kind palmed off by pietists and pickpockets, such as we are called upon to contemplate and endure around us to-day, but a civilisation based on the shining and imperishable foundations of Brotherhood and Mutual Love.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Flashlights on Human Progress, p. 198

Way , Love , Making love

“The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it.”

J. Howard Moore

We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us [...] The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.
Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 169

Life , Feeling , Question

“In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 167

Pain , Suffering , Universe , World

“Nature is the universe, including ourselves. And are we not all the time tinkering at the universe, especially the garden patch that is next to us—the earth? Every time we dig a ditch or plant a field, dam a river or build a town, form a government or gut a mountain, slay a forest or form a new resolution, or do anything else almost, do we not change and reform Nature, make it over again and make it more acceptable than it was before? Have we not been working hard for thousands of years, and do our poor hearts not almost faint sometimes when we think how far, far away the millennium still is after all our efforts, and how long our little graves will have been forgotten when that blessed time gets here?”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 164

Time , Mountain , Heart , Nature

“Man is not advised to sit down and fold his hands and roll his eyes piously toward the traditional source of good, and allow himself to be eaten up by tigers and ticks. And no one who reads honestly what has gone before can come to any such conclusion. Anything can be misrepresented if the one who attempts it is ingenious and determined enough. It is recognised that this is not an ideal world, and that it is impossible for any being to act among the evil as he would be able to act among the good. It is simply insisted that man shall ignore the urgings of his lower nature and do the best he can in the circumstances. Men do not and cannot act ideally toward their fellow-men, but they think they act nobly when they do the best they can. And, oh, if man would only try to be just to his fellow-races, what a different world he could make of it! If one is disposed to be wayward, it is astonishing what an array of excuses even the simpleton can scrape up in defence of himself. But if one is resolved on that higher life, ever held up to us by the better elements of our nature, it is also surprising how successful one can be, even among adverse conditions.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, pp. 161–162

Reading , Success , Nature , Thinking

“If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 155

“The great trouble is that individuals and races in their treatment of each other are not guided by the same high standards of impartiality as an individual organism in dealing with his own organs and parts. Life is not one. It lacks unity of feeling and purpose. And as long as it lacks this oneness it will lack justice.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 153

Feeling , Life , Justice , Parting

“The question is not. Shall man be master of the earth? but. What sort of a master shall he be? Shall he be cruel and selfish, bigoted and imperialistic, thinking only of himself and sacrificing the interests of others to his own heartless purposes? or shall he be the responsible administrator of the universe, presiding over the affairs of the earth honourably and equitably, with a mind single to the good of all? Shall he be a savage despot or a schoolmaster? a feared and hated monster, or a wise, patient, and affectionate father? Since he has become the manager of the planet, shall he manage it as he would wish it to be managed if he were a subordinate and some other race had succeeded to the superintendency, or shall he cut loose from all moral obligations, ignore the promptings of his better self, and run things absolutely in the interest of himself? Which shall it be—the great law of love or the savage law of might?”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, pp. 149–150

Selfishness , Hate , Law , Question

“Every crime almost is a good thing, looked at from the exclusive standpoint of the criminal. If it were not so, it would never be committed. But from the standpoint of the one on whom the crime falls it is likely to be a very different thing—how different depends on the degree of diversity of the interests involved. The only rational method of judging conduct, and the only method that should ever be employed by beings pretending to be logical or civilised, is to balance the effects which the act on trial has on the different interests involved, and then render a verdict from the standpoint of this balance, which is the standpoint of the universe.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 53

Universe , Dependency

“Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 44

Time , Swine , Dead , Suffering

“New ideas make their way into the world by generations of elbowing. They make themselves known to the eminences first, and from these upper places they spread laboriously to the lowlands. One can hardly help thinking, as he looks back over the evolution of human thought and sees the persecution and blindness through which the race has made its way, that very few human beings possess as adults that degree of sagacity that ought rightfully to have accompanied them into the world.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Nature of Opinion, pp. 13–14

Help , Thinking , Way , World

“Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant, fear-filled world! How can men be blind or deranged enough to think it is a good world? How can they be cold and satanic enough to be unmoved by the groans and anguish, the writhing and tears, that come up from its unparalleled afflictions?”

J. Howard Moore

"Conclusion", p. 328
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Affliction , Suffering , Thinking , World

“Let us be true to our ideals, true to the spirit of Universal Compassion—whether we walk with the lone worm wandering in the twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and forests, the kine of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of the gladed river, the political blanks whom men call wives, or the outcasts of human industry.”

J. Howard Moore

"Conclusion", p. 328
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Universe , Men

“Yes, do as you would be done by—and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low enough nor far enough to find those whose bowed and broken beings will not rise up at the coming of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink and darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you.”

J. Howard Moore

Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird, and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught creatures! Into their dim and lowly lives strays of sunshine little enough, though the fell hand of man be never against them. They are our fellow-mortals. They came out of the same mysterious womb of the past, are passing through the same dream, and are destined to the same melancholy end, as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful to them.
"Conclusion", pp. 327–328
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Horse , Soul , Help , Heart

“Look upon and treat others as you do your own hands, your own eyes, your very heart and soul—with infinite care and compassion—as suffering and enjoying members of the same Great Being with yourself. This is the spirit of the ideal universe—the spirit of your own being. It is this alone that can redeem this world, and give to it the peace and harmony for which it longs.”

J. Howard Moore

"Conclusion", p. 327
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Peace , Soul , Suffering , Heart

“In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?”

J. Howard Moore

"Conclusion", pp. 324–325
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Family , Tree , Sea , Making love

“All beings are ends; no creatures are means. All beings have not equal rights, neither have all men; but all have rights.”

J. Howard Moore

The Life Process is the End—not man, nor any other animal temporarily privileged to weave a world's philosophy. Non-human beings were not made for human beings any more than human beings were made for non-human beings. Just as the sidereal spheres were once supposed by the childish mind of man to be unsubstantial satellites of the earth, but are known by man's riper understanding to be worlds with missions and materialities of their own, and of such magnitude and number as to render terrestrial insignificance frightful, so the billions that dwell in the seas, fields, and atmospheres of the earth were in like manner imagined by the illiterate children of the race to be the mere trinkets of men, but are now known by all who can interpret the new revelation to be beings with substantially the same origin, the same natures, structures, and occupations, and the same general rights to life and happiness, as we ourselves.
Source: The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship, "Conclusion", p. 324

Men

“A central truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition in all departments of human thought.”

J. Howard Moore

"Ethical Implications of Evolution", p. 323
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Truth , Life

“The doctrine of Universal Kinship is not a new doctrine, born from the more brilliant loins of modern understanding. It is as old almost as human philosophy. It was taught by Buddha twenty-four hundred years ago. And the teachings of this divine soul, spreading over the plains and peninsulas of Asia, have made unnumbered millions mild. It was taught also by Pythagoras and all his school of philosophers, and rigidly practised in their daily lives. Plutarch, one of the grandest characters of antiquity, wrote several essays in advocacy of it. In these essays, as well as in many passages of his writings generally, he demonstrates that he was far ahead of his contemporaries in the breadth and intensity of his moral nature, and in advance even of all except a very few of those living to-day, 2,000 years after him. Shelley among the poets of modern times, and Tolstoy in these latter days, are others among the eminent adherents of this holy cause.”

J. Howard Moore

"Ethical Implications of Evolution", pp. 322–323
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

School , Soul , Time , Understanding

“It is about as profound to suppose that the earth and its contents, and the suns, stars, and systems of space, were all made for a single species inhabitating an obscure ball located in a remote quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the gigantic body of the elephant was made for the wisp of hair on the tip of its tail. Man is not the end, he is but an incident, of the infinite elaborations of Time and Space.”

J. Howard Moore

"Anthropocentric Ethics", p. 319
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Universe , Sun , Star , Time

“But when that is the question, when will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world? Ages upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 314
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Time , Question , Dreams , Distant

“If human beings could only realise what it means to live in a world and associate day after day with other beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves, and yet be regarded by these more intelligent individuals simply as merchandise to be bought and sold, or as targets to be shot at, they would hide their guilty heads in shame and horror.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 309
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

World , Intelligence

“If human beings could only realise what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no one of them, not even the most recreant, could find pleasure in such work.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 308–309
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Dogs , Suffering , Pleasure , Horse

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