History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

Professor Freeman defined history as “past politics.” Mr. Buckle argued that the essence of the historical evolution consists in intellectual progress.[1] Many present-day econo...

The most important social product of the human evolution on the lower levels of civilization was the patriarchal family or clan. This community of kinsfolk is the great history-...

Egypt was the China of the ancient Mediterranean world. Like the Chinese, the Egyptians were a comparatively unmixed people. During the historic period no new elements of import...

The information which the cuneiform texts have yielded concerning the moral life of the Babylonian and Assyrian peoples, though scanty, is of the greatest value to the student o...

With the exception of the teachers of the ancient Hebrews, the leaders of thought of no people have so insistently interpreted life and history in terms of ethics as have the sa...

In their moral evolution the Japanese people have developed a system of morals which, notwithstanding certain defects and limitations, is one of the noblest created by any of th...

As in Judea so in India the conception formed of the Supreme Being reacted potently upon morality. Hence in naming the influences under which the moral ideal of Brahmanism was m...

Four tenets or principles, called the four truths, sum up the essentials of Buddhism.[267] These are the truth of pain, the origin of pain, the destruction of pain, and the eigh...

In view of the mixed good and evil in the world, thinkers of antiquity, outside of Israel and before the rise of the Stoic philosophy in Greece, could not conceive the universe...

To the pious Hebrew the rainbow, which to the esthetic Greek was merely the beautiful pathway of Iris, the messenger of Olympus, was Yahweh’s bow hung out from the dark retreati...

The Greek ethical ideal, a creation of the natural feelings and impulses of the human mind and heart uninfluenced by theological doctrines, was one of the most imperishable prod...

The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which m...

The establishment of Christianity, in its Greco-Judaic form, as the favored religion of the Roman Empire by the edict of the Emperor Constantine is rightly regarded as one of th...

Before the close of the third century the development in the Christian communities of the East of asceticism, the germs of which were immanent from the first in Christianity, ha...

The great revolution which in the seventh century of the Christian era agitated all Arabia and gave a new trend to vast currents of world history was essentially a moral revolut...

From the third to the ninth century the ideal of asceticism absorbed a great part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom. During the later part of this period, however, as we ha...

Toward the close of the medieval ages came that important movement in European society known as the Renaissance, a main feature of which was the restoration of classical culture...

In its essential principle the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the principle of authority in the realm of the spirit. It proclaimed the right of individual judgment...

Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion, none has exerted a greater influence tha...

[55] Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks, Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life”...