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.
Excerpted from Mere Christianity © Copyright 2009 by C.S. Lewis. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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