Explore "Concerning Children" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Our general knowledge of ethics is small and unreliable, and our practice in ethics even smaller and more unreliable. The good intentions of mankind are prominent; but our ideas of right behaviour are so contradictory and uncertain, our execution of such ideas as we hold so partial and irregular, that human behaviour continues to be most unsatisfactory. This condition we used to cheerfully attribute to the infirmity of human nature, taking ignominious consolation from the thought of our vicious tendencies and hopeless weakness.
The broad light of evolutionary study has removed this contemptible excuse. We now know human nature to be quite as good as the rest of nature, wherein everything is good after its kind; and that, furthermore, our human kind has made great improvement in conduct so far, and is capable of making a great deal more. We are not weak: we are strong. We are not wicked: we earnestly desire to be good. But we are still very ignorant of the science of ethics, and most inept in its practice.