Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt by William Matthew Flinders Petrie

Author:William Matthew Flinders Petrie [Flinders, W. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781411462328
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Published: 2017-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

In short, if we were to represent each person who descended to a particular level by a stroke, I, we should have so many strokes above one level, so many more who descended lower, so many more who descended lower still, and so forth, until we could define the proportion of people who are included in each successive stage of truthfulness by an outline as here shown. (Fig. 1.)

But we have no right to draw a line anywhere as the abstract truthfulness; the higher grades are just as much part of the whole series as the lower; and if it is true that very few persons will limit themselves by the highest grades, so it is also true that very few descend to the lowest. The extreme cases are the exceptions, and we may mark them by a single example; on the other hand, there is a great mass of mankind about the middle grades, and we must, therefore, have a great many strokes there (Fig. 2); the outline then that defines the commonness of different grades of lying will be widest out in the middle, and run off tapering above and below.

Now this approximates to the result which is very well known as the law of distribution of errors, or the "probability curve." That is to say, that whenever a simple quality is liable to variation, whether it be the height or weight of a large number of men or animals, the variations of temperature, the errors of measurement, or any other simple variable, it is always found that the greater part of the examples are in the middle, and fewer toward the ends; and that if, for instance, a certain number of men vary one inch from the average height, there will be a fixed proportion that vary two inches, and another fixed proportion that vary three inches, and so forth. So that the distribution of variation, or the number of examples that agree to each different standard, always follows a certain law of distribution. So certain is this that any distinct departure from this distribution is always accepted as proof that some disturbing cause is at work; a different kind of distribution would be found for instance in the height of soldiers, because all men below a certain standard are rejected.

Is it possible then that moral distribution follows the same law as all other natural variations? To anyone accustomed to the regularity of the distribution of all other variations, this would hardly seem to need proof. But to many persons moral law is supposed to be something so spiritual, and so outside of the realm of force and matter, that it may be surprising to see it treated like any other case of the variations found in nature. It is difficult to obtain any sufficient mass of accurate information on any subject of morals or conscience for us to test exactly this general similarity that we have seen to probably hold good between moral and physical distribution.

42. One subject, however, promises to give a result.

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