In these three instances we see how the joint responsibility among gregarious animals develops in them an ever increasing sense of duty, which teaches the chamois to forgo its food during the hours it is on guard, rouses in the buffalo a savage lust for battle, and makes the baboon perform a premeditated deed of epic heroism. When men act as these animals did, we ascribe this to Morality. This is nothing but joint responsibility in action, the joint responsibility which the species is forced by the conditions of life to adopt, if it is to survive.
Among the moral philosophers the mystics are prevented, by the haze which obscures all their thought, from seeing that Morality originates from this joint responsibility. Or rather, if they do see it, they think this origin too low. They demand a more exalted genealogy for the phenomenon of Morality. According to them the Moral law comes straight from God. The concepts Good and Evil are revealed. Commands and prohibitions are imposed upon the soul by that omnipotence which spiritualizes the universe and of which the soul is an immortal part.
If these phrases were anything but moonshine and tinkling cymbals they certainly would make any other explanation of this astonishing fact superfluous; the fact, namely, that man does what is repugnant to him, and refrains from doing what would give him pleasure, that he is content with himself when he has voluntarily curbed his impulses and made sacrifices, and that he feels the pricks of conscience if he chances to experience the pleasure of appeasement because he has satisfied his desires. "Man obeys divine commands." That suffices and obviates the necessity of seeking for explanations of this phenomenon, which shall satisfy Reason.
It is a mere mirage, the reflection of an earthly state of affairs in the heavens, to assume that the universe is governed by an authority devoid of responsibility, which imposes on its subjects, that is to say men, laws and instructions, discipline and order.
It is a form of anthropomorphism, the most widespread and stubborn of errors in thought among those men who try to understand the unintelligible, and are content with the most unfounded explanation which their naïve imagination freely invents for them. This same anthropomorphism, not even at a loss to solve the problem of the origin and essence of the universe, replies unhesitatingly that God by an act of volition created it out of nothing to prove to Himself His own omnipotence and omniscience; in like manner it has no scruple in ascribing the phenomenon of Morality to a creative act of God's, and makes Ethics, which properly speaking form the chief part of psychology, anthropology and sociology, a subdivision of theology, that is, of anthropomorphic mythology.