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    The Basis of Morality
    The Basis of Morality
    The Basis of Morality
    Ebook61 pages43 minutes

    The Basis of Morality

    By Annie Besant

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    The Basis of Morality
    Author

    Annie Besant

    Beebop is a series of graded readers for three levels which increase in complexity to allow for improvement in ability and interest. The ratings take into consideration the following components: difficulty of vocabulary, sentence length, comprehension abilities and subject matter. Each level consists of four story books and four accompanying activity books.

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      Book preview

      The Basis of Morality - Annie Besant

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Basis of Morality, by Annie Besant

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Basis of Morality

      Author: Annie Besant

      Release Date: April 4, 2005 [EBook #15545]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BASIS OF MORALITY ***

      Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David Garcia and the Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team.

      THE BASIS OF MORALITY

      BY

      ANNIE BESANT

      AUTHOR OF

      Mysticism, The Immediate Future,

      Initiation: The Perfecting of Man,

      Superhuman Men, etc. etc.

      THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE

      ADYAR, MADRAS, INDIA

      1915

      CONTENTS

      I. REVELATION

      II. INTUITION

      III. UTILITY

      IV. EVOLUTION

      V. MYSTICISM

      I

      REVELATION

      Must religion and morals go together? Can one be taught without the other? It is a practical question for educationists, and France tried to answer it in the dreariest little cut and dry kind of catechism ever given to boys to make them long to be wicked. But apart from education, the question of the bedrock on which morals rest, the foundation on which a moral edifice can be built that will stand secure against the storms of life—that is a question of perennial interest, and it must be answered by each of us, if we would have a test of Right and Wrong, would know why Right is Right, why Wrong is Wrong.

      Religions based on Revelation find in Revelation their basis for morality, and for them that is Right which the Giver of the Revelation commands, and that is Wrong which He forbids. Right is Right because God, or a Ṛṣhi or a Prophet, commands it, and Right rests on the Will of a Lawgiver, authoritatively revealed in a Scripture.

      Now all Revelation has two great disadvantages as a basis for morality. It is fixed, and therefore unprogressive; while man evolves, and at a later stage of his growth, the morality taught in the Revelation becomes archaic and unsuitable. A written book cannot change, and many things in the Bibles of Religion come to be out of date, inappropriate to new circumstances, and even shocking to an age in which conscience has become more enlightened than it was of old.

      The fact that in the same Revelation as that in which palpably immoral commands appear, there occur also jewels of fairest radiance, gems of poetry, pearls of truth, helps us not at all. If moral teachings worthy only of savages occur in Scriptures containing also rare and precious precepts of purest sweetness, the juxtaposition of light and darkness only produces moral chaos. We cannot here appeal to reason or judgment for both must be silent before authority; both rest on the same ground. Thus saith the Lord precludes all argument.

      Let us take two widely accepted Scriptures, both regarded as authoritative by the respective religions which accept them as coming from a Divine Preceptor or through a human but illuminated being, Moses in the one case, Manu in the other. I am, of course, well aware that in both cases we have to do with books which may contain traditions of their great authors, even sentences transmitted down the centuries. The unravelling of the tangled threads woven into such books is a work needing the highest scholarship and an infinite patience; few of us are equipped for such labour. But let us ignore the work of the Higher Criticism, and take the books as they stand, and the objection raised to them as a basis

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