THE ETHICS OF
HERCULES
SOME BORZOI TEXT BOOKS
SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL THEORY
Harry E. Barnes
THE ORAL STUDY OF LITERATURE
Algernon Tassin
THE BASIS OF SOCIAL THEORY
Albert G. A. Balz
ESSAYS IN ECONOMIC THEORY
Simon Nelson Patten
THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM
Nelson A. Crawford
THE TREND OF ECONOMICS
Various Writers
AN ANALYSIS OF WRITING
Harold P. Scott
THE ETHICS OF
HERCULES
A Study of Man’s Body as the Sole
Determinant of Ethical Values
BY
ROBERT CHENAULT GIVLER, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy in Tufts College
NEW YORK ALFRED · A · KNOPF MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published, March, 1924
Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.
Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED
TO
THE THOUSAND MEN
OF MY GENERATION
WHOSE THOUGHT I HAVE THE HONOR
OF MAKING ARTICULATE.
“Waste not free energy; treasure it and make the best use of it.”
Wilhelm Ostwald, “The Imperative of Energetics.”
[Pg i]
PREFACE
This book deals with ethics as a strictly naturalscience, and particularly as a branch of mechanisticpsychology. It regards the realm of ethics ascoterminous with the arena of human activity, andholds that the problems of conduct, being exclusivelyman’s problems, are to be solved by themethods of applied science. Moreover, since humanconduct is in the last analysis dependent uponthe postures and manœuvres of our muscle-fabric,he who would understand ethics must first comprehendsomething of the mechanics of the human organism.Indeed, this book attempts to show, notonly that ethics and physiology can no longer bestudied apart from one another, but also that it isthe structure and functions of the human body wh