T

THE ETHICAL IMPORT

OF

DARWINISM

V

-L±IJU ETHICAL IMPORT

OP

DARWINISM

BY

JACOB GOULD SCHUBMAN

M.A. (Lond.), D.Sc. (Edinb.)
SAGE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY

1STEW YORK
CHAELES SCEIBNEE'S SONS

1888.

COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY
CHARLES SCEIBNER'S SONS

TROWS

1NT1NG AND BOOKBINDING COMPAN
NEW YORK.

JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D., LL.D.,

THE ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS HELPER OF TWO GENERATIONS,
THIS STUDY OF EVOLUTIONARY MORALS

IS INSCRIBED

WITH THE GRATITUDE AND REVERENT AFFECTION
OF

AN OLD PUPIL

PREFACE.

THEKE is a remark of Mrs. Carlyle's which has
always seemed to me highly suggestive. When
asked to explain her manifest antipathy to Bishop
Colenso, whom Mr. Froude had got invited to
one of her tea-parties, she confessed that it arose
in part from the anomalous appearance presented
by "a man arrived at the years of discretion
wearing an absurd little black-silk apron," and in
part from the incongruity between that ecclesias
tical symbol and this particular bishop's " arith
metical confutation of the Bible ; " for, proceeds
the philosophical lady, generalizing the causes of
her unfavorable impressions, " it is the mixing up
of things which is the Great Bad. "

In what passes with us for the doctrine of evo
lution there is a mixture of science and specula
tion. Yet it is customary to serve it all up to
gether, so that the hungry soul must needs take
all or none. The result for many minds is apt to
be indigestion or starvation. But this cruel di-

viii Preface.

lemma might be escaped, if the fact and the fancy
entering into current evolutionism were kept
apart and dealt out separately. The mind's nat
ural craving for knowledge could then be satisfied
without detriment ; for it is only when science is
adulterated with nescience that it becomes un
wholesome and poisonous.

The object of the present volume is to distin
guish between science and speculation in the ap
plication of Darwinism to morals. The results
of evolutionary science in the domain of matter
and in the domain of life are everywhere taken
for granted ; the philosophical and, more espe
cially, the ethical theories currently associated with
them are subjected to the most searching scrutiny
I have been able to make. As it has been pre
tended that the doctrine of evolution invests
ethics witk a fiew scientific character, I first ex
amine the various m ethodsof ethics and attempt
to determine under what conditions alone ethics
can become a science. (This first chapter should
be omitted by the general reader not interested in
the logic of ethics.) "Whether Darwinian ethics
is a piece of science or of speculation appears in
the sequel. But before the question is decided
we must know what is meant by Darwinism.
Accordingly, the second chapter gives an exposi-

Preface. ix

tion of the Darwinian theory, comparing and
contrasting it with the more general doctrine of
evolutionism, whose history and meaning are also
briefly traced. Then follow chapters on the phil
osophical interpretation and the ethical bearings
of Darwinism. The fifth chapter is devoted to
an examination of the ethical speculations which
Darwin grafted upon his biological science.
These chapters confirming the conclusion reached
in the first chapter, that a scientific, as opposed to
a speculative, ethic can be constructed only by
adopting the historical method, the last chapter
has to show what light may be thrown upon ethi
cal problems by tracing the actual development of
moral ideals and institutions, of which, for ob
vious reasons, the domestic virtues are here taken
as typical illustration.

The work is primarily the outcome of my own
reflective needs. It has cleared up in my own
mind the confusion between guesses and facts,
which is " the Great Bad " in evolutionary ethics.
I am not without hope that it may also prove
clarifying to other minds. Not, of course, that
I would presume to instruct trained philosophical
experts ; but I have in view the increasingly
large number of intelligent men and women who,
without making a special study of philosophy,

x Preface.

would fain comprehend the significance for
morals of that evolutionary theory which has
revolutionized_jinodern sdejac^aiid^culture^ This
alone woufd have been sufficient motive for the
avoidance of obscure and technical phraseology
and the cultivation of a popular style ; but, apart
from that consideration, I hold that the first duty
of any philosophical writer is to make himself
generally intelligible, and I am of the opinion
that there is no theory, or criticism, or system
(not even Kant's or Hegel's), that cannot be clearly
expressed in a language which in Locke's hands
was strong and homely, in Berkeley's rich and
subtle, in Hume's easy, graceful, and finished,
and in all three alike plain, transparent, and un
mistakable.

This study of Darwinism in ethics being so
largely of a reflective character, reference to
other works has not in general been considered
necessary. I wish here, however, to acknowledge
especially my indebtedness to Darwin, whose
ethical speculations, illusory as I now hold them,
I have found more stimulating than any other
similar work since the time of Kant.

J. G. S.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, August 22, 1887.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

METHODS OF ETHICS, EVOLUTIONARY AND OTHER.

Diversity of Ethical Theories — Need of a Critique of
Ethics as a Science — Is Ethics a Science of the
Same Type as Logic ? It has not in general been
so regarded — Locke's Conception of Ethics as a
Demonstrative Science, like Mathematics, rests on
a Misunderstanding of the Procedure of Mathe
matics, and it assumes, besides, Theological First
Principles— Ethics as a Natural Science— Spen
cer's Reconstruction of Ethics on the Law of Uni
versal Causation, after the Model of Astronomy, an
Illusion — Is Ethics, then, if not a Deductive, at
least an Empirical, Physical Science ? — Its Limita
tions in Comparison with Biology — Ethics, as a
Science, is a Branch of History — What passes for
the " Science of Ethics " is a Medley of Specula
tions—The Highly Speculative Character of Cur
rent Naturalistic, Evolutionary Ethics — An Under
standing with Darwinism the Preliminary to a
True Science of Historical Ethics — Transition to
Examination of Darwinism in Ethics, . . 1

CHAPTER II.

EVOLUTIONISM AND DARWINISM.

" The Origin of Species " — Popular View of Darwin
ism—Antiquity of the Conception of Evolution —

xii Contents.

FAOH

Five Points of the Modern Theory anticipated by
the Greeks— Introduction of the Notion of Evolu
tion into Modern Science by Kant, Goethe, Eras
mus Darwin, Saint Hilaire, Lamarck, and Lyell —
The Problem of Darwin — Importance of his Ob
servations on the Formation of Domestic Breeds
by Man's Conscious Selection — Natural Selection
suggested by Malthus's Essay— Fecundity of Or
ganisms—Struggle for Life— Survival of Favored
Individuals begins the Formation of Species —
Man's Relation to the Apes—Darwinism distin
guished from Evolutionism— How regarded by
Helmholtz, Virchow, Wallace, and Huxley — Net
Result—Significance for Ethics— Dread of Science
an Anachronism, ..... 40

CHAPTER III.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE DARWIN
IAN HYPOTHESIS.

Darwin gives a Scientific Explanation of the Origin of
Species — Need of a Philosophical Analysis of that
Explanation — Significance of the Variations on
which Natural Selection works — They originate,
ultimately, in the Nature of the Organism— They
are Indefinite, according to Darwin, but the
Theory of Natural Selection does not require
that View, which is not shared by Huxley and Asa
Gray — Natural Selection is the Scientific Account
of the Accumulation of Favorable Variations into
Specific Characters, but the Phrase is apt to mis
lead through Metaphorical Associations— Specula
tive License of the Darwinists— What is explained
and what is still left a Mystery by Natural Selec
tion — Human and Natural Selection dependent
upon Transcendent Causation— Darwin's Pro-

Contents. xiii

PAGE

fessed Theism — His Mechanical Philosophy —
Teleology and Darwinism — Evolutionism for
merly Teleological — Has the Instinct of the
Cuckoo a Fortuitous Origin ? — Natural Selection,
not a Creative, but a Sifting Process— Does not
explain the Formation of the Eye — Variations
being predetermined imply Teleology — Fortuity
an Accident in Darwinism, , 74

CHAPTER IV.

DARWINISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OP MORALS.

The Problem— The Moment of Utility in Natural Se
lection — The Utility of Intelligence and Morality
— Evolutionary Biology leads to Utilitarian Ethics
— Utilitarianism Old and New — Evolutiono util
itarianism explains the Innateness, Simplicity,
Universality, and Obligation of Moral Laws — What
Evolutiono-utilitarianism assumes : first, the
Derivative Character of Morality; secondly, the
Ultim'ateness of Pleasure or some other End ;
thirdly, the Fortuitous Origin of Morality
through a Process purely Mechanical — Man an
Automaton, with Intelligence and Conscience as
Accidents— Speculative Objections — Practical Ob
jections drawn from our Sense of Duty and Right
— But this Sense explained away by Spencer and
Guyau— Fallacy in their Theory of its Origin and
Future Decline — Mechanical Metaphysics, not
Evolutionary Science, their Basis— Darwinism
compatible with a Non mechanical and Non-for
tuitous Theory of Conscience— ^Volution not
devolution— Conscience compared with the
Eye and with the Intellect — All Useful because
they reveal Facts, but not therefore mere
Utilities, . . .

xiv Contents.

CHAPTER V.

^^ THE ETHICAL SPECULATIONS OF DARWIN.

PAGE

Darwin's Difficulty with Intelligence and Conscience-
Probability of their Evolution— Comparison of
Human and Animal Instincts, Emotions, Intellect
ual Powers, Progressiveness, Skill, and Speech-
Conscience a Greater Barrier— Origin of Con
science—Animal Sociability— The Social Instincts
being more present and persistent than the Self
ish, if violated, generate under Reflection the
Feeling of Remorse, or Conscience — Darwin's
Treatment of Conscience compared with his
Treatment of Life and Mind : that Speculative,
this Scientific— Possible Objection to his Mental
Science ; Insuperable Objection to his Ethics— In
conceivability of an absolute beginning of Con
science—Darwin takes Intelligence and (in his
Theory of Sexual Selection) the ^Esthetic Faculty
Ready-made : only of Conscience does he venture
the Creation— Ambiguity in his use of "Con
science," and the consequent Perplexity— Con
science identified with Remorse— How the Theory
fails to account for even this Conscience — For the
Social Instincts are not more persistent and pres
ent ; and if they were, to follow them would bring
Satisfaction, not Remorse, to a Non-moral Being
—This Fact not alterable by Reflection— Dar
win derives Conscience from what tacitly im
plies it, .....

CHAPTER VI.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS,
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE FAMILY.

Darwin's Service to Historical Ethics indirect— History
of Morals and Ethical Theories— The Family and

Contents. xv

PAGE

Domestic Virtues — McLennan's Theory of the
Evolution of the Family— Form of Capture, Wife-
stealing, Exogamy, Infanticide, Kinship through
Females— Fallacy of supposing a Universal, Uni
form Development — Absolute Promiscuity a mere
Fancy — The Facts of Infanticide, Wife -stealing,
Polyandry, Exogamy, do not warrant McLennan's
Conclusions — Morgan's Theory — Infers Family
from System of Relationship— The Malayan Sys
tem gives the Consanguine Family, and the Tura
nian the Punaluan — The Pairing, the Patriarchal,
and the Monogamous Families — Aryan System of
Relationship— This Theory follows the Process of
Logical Determination rather than Historical Facts
— Consanguine Family, on which all depends, a
Baseless Myth— Malayan System of Relationship
not based on Blood-ties ; it is merely a Classifica
tion of Generations — Nor would the Consanguine
Family account for it — Explanation of the Tura
nian System different from Morgan's — The other
Families examined — Difficulty of determining the
Development of the Family — Fallacy in Professor
Robertson Smith's Method — Facts, not Theories,
concern the Moralist — Some Facts concerning
Limited Promiscuity, Kinship through Females,
Settling in the Tent of the Woman, Infidelity,
Maidenly Inchastity, Sale of Wives, Incest —
Chastity not a part of the Content of the Moral
Law Universal— But even the Relativist must
agree that the Moral Law has some Absolute Con
tent—Testimony of Civilized and Uncivilized Mo
rality — Points of Difference explained — The Posi
tion of Woman — Her Glory under the Roman
Empire— Her Present and Future Position — The
Operation of Divorce overlooked — Science cannot
tell what ought to be, . . . 201

ETHICAL IMPORT OF DARWINISM.

CHAPTEE I.

.METHODS OF ETHICS, EVOLUTIONARY AND OTHER.

Nothing can be more perplexing to anyone re
flecting upon the unanimity of men's moral judg
ments than the diversity and contrariety of the
theories founded upon them. The incongruity is
as palpable as it is startling. ISTor is it much, if at
all, relieved by the qualification of varying moral
belief and practice, which a more extended survey
of humanity, past and present, obliges us to make
in our first generalization. For if human moral
ity is not at all times and in all places absolutely
identical, it is rather in minor details or in unex
pected applications of common principles that
there is any considerable deviation from the uni
versal type. Besides, this divergency cannot be
the origin of our opposing ethical theories, since
were it to vanish, they would still remain. And,

2 Diversity of Ethical Theories.

indeed, it is a simple matter of history that the
antinomies of our ethical systems have not origi
nated in a distinct consciousness of differences in
moral codes, for these systems are almost always
theories, not of varying universal morality, but
of the common morality of the modern civilized
world. The contrast, therefore, between the uni
formity of moral data and the diversity of so-
called moral sciences suffers no diminution from
the circumstance that that uniformity may be to
some extent relative. The broad fact remains,
that while all are agreed that certain courses of
conduct are right and the opposite wrong, moral
ists seem unable to agree in anything except the
contradictory claim of building their incompatible
theories upon these universally recognized propo
sitions. -

There can be no question about the existence
of this fundamental antinomy. It is admitted,
or rather it is accentuated, by the ablest writers
on morals. Nor has any attempt, I believe, ever
been made to explain it away. But while it is
mentioned as a commonplace, and put aside as if
from fear of demonstrating a truism, its conse
quences have been steadily overlooked. No one
has inquired whether a subject-matter which has
begotten such contradictions really admits of

Methods of Ethics. 3

scientific treatment at all. Schleiermacher is
scarcely an exception, since his profound and pen
etrating critique is rather a dialectical exposition
of moral principles and ideas than a logical in
vestigation into the requirements of a moral sci
ence. Yet the question is surely of primary im
portance. We cannot think so meanly of science
as to believe it possible for the same problem to
have opposite solutions. The history of ethics,
however, presents us with this incredibility. Is,
then, ethics a science ? This question, unfortu
nately, was not raised by Kant. Had it occurred
to him his legacy to future ages would scarcely
have included, along with a demonstration of the
impossibility of metaphysics, an actual metaphysic
of ethics. But the errors of great thinkers are
scarcely less instructive than their perfect achieve
ments. And Kant's critique of our a priori
knowledge suggests the kind of inquiry from
which ethics can no longer be withheld. When,
along with the possibility of pure mathematics
and physics, he asks, How is metaphysics in
general possible ? and, How is metaphysics as a
science possible? he formulates the very ques
tions which, mutatis mutandis, the history of
modern ethics and the logic of the sciences alike
make incumbent upon contemporary moralists.

4 Need of a Critique.

And until these questions on the possibility of
their science are answered, they should (to ap
propriate Kant's language) be solemnly and
legally suspended from their present dubious oc
cupation.

It may be objected, however, that we have
prejudged the question of the actual existence of
ethics as a science in accepting the adverse prima
facie evidence drawn from the number and the
opposition of ethical theories. The same diver
sity, it will be alleged, is found in other sciences
whose validity no one thinks of doubting. In
fact, putting aside, on the one hand, the purely
observational sciences (if there be any, for chem
istry is no longer one), in which demonstration
has not begun, and, on the other hand, the math
ematical sciences, in which it is complete, it will
be hard to find any intervening science which is,
and has been, wholly exempt from the contradic
tions of opposing hypotheses. In natural history,
for instance, our own generation has " assisted "
at the liveliest disputations concerning the nature
and origin of species ; and our fathers witnessed,
in the domain of physics, a struggle scarcely less
bitter between the corpuscular and the undulatory
theories of light. Mathematics even has been
in the past the scene of like encounters ; for

Methods of Ethics. 5

though the analytical geometry of Descartes pre
vailed without opposition, a fierce warfare was
waged over the comparative merits of the fluxions
of Newton and the calculus of Leibnitz. And
(to have done with illustration) the Ptolemaic
and the Copernican hypotheses long held the
field together as rival systems in astronomy.
Yet, in the face of such radical opposition of
theories, it was never maintained that the sciences
of astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology
were illusory, or even impossible. Should not the
examples be a warning to us against inferring
over-hastily the illegitimacy of ethical science ?

And yet there is a difference. Those oppo
sitions, as we know, have been ultimately set at
rest, while ethics remains the scene of perpet
ual antinomies. Where the controversies have
not been laid, as, for instance, in political econ
omy, the legitimacy of the science has actually
been denied. To ethics alone belongs the excep
tional prerogative of ranking as a science while
retaining for subject-matter the still unsettled
questions which three-and-twenty centuries ago
were already themes of discussion among the
savants of the Hellenic world.

What, then, constitutes a science ? If this can
be determined, we shall be in a position to decide

6 What is Science ?

upon the scientific pretensions of ethics. We
cannot define science, however, until the very
point at issue is settled— whether that term is to
denote, along with the various branches of our
systematic knowledge of natural phenomena and
their quantitative relations, such disciplines as
logic, dialectic, ethics, and metaphysics. Certain
ly the oldest known classification of the sciences
embraced logic, ethics, and physics. And apart
from the sciences themselves, we have no royal
rule of exclusion or admission. In doubtful
cases, therefore, the only course open to us is to
compare the branches whose scientific character
is questioned, with others whose scientific char
acter is unimpeachable.

First of all, then, following the ancient classi
fication, ethics may be compared with logic.
Now, logic is the science of reasoning, taking that
term in its broadest sense. In other words, it is
the theory of the ascertainment of reasoned or
inferred truth. It does not undertake to find
reasons, but to determine what is required to con
stitute them, to point out the conditions to which
all facts must conform in order that they may
serve as proof or evidence. But these conditions
are not deduced from any transcendent source.
They are simply the rules which men observe in

Methods of Ethics. 7

the reasonings and inferences of their every-day
life, without reflection, or even without distinct
consciousness. Logic, accordingly, gives us no
new information. It merely makes explicit for
reflection what was already implicit in cognition.
But our stock of knowledge is not increased by
an analysis of the processes whereby it has been
obtained. My syllogistic reasonings, my assump
tion of universal causation, my deductive and ex
perimental investigations may proceed now, as
they did originally, in utter independence of a
logical formulation of them.

Is ethics, now, a science of this character?
Some analogy, at least, lies upon the surface.
As logic analyzes and classifies the processes of
thought, so ethics may be regarded as a system
atic exhibition of the phenomena of conscience.
It has not to determine of itself the nature of
good or evil, but simply to observe, collect, and
classify the moral experience of mankind. Its
observations should be true, its collections ex
haustive, its classifications systematic. The re
sult, among other things, would include a list of
virtues, such as temperance, fortitude, etc., or a
table of duties, such as duties to friends, to the
state, to humanity. But an ethical science so re
stricted, it would, I think, be difficult, if not irn-

8 Ethics compared with Logic.

possible, to find anywhere realized. Moralists
have deemed it a part of their business to in
quire into the foundations of moral judgments,
and even, in some cases, to correct and improve
them. It is as though logicians should under
take to establish, or even to remodel, those laws of
thought which they have hitherto accepted from
the general consciousness of mankind. Such in
quiries no more belong to logic than an inquiry
into the nature of space or the evidence of the
axioms belongs to geometry. And if ethics is to
take rank with logic as a science of pure observa
tion and analysis, it must be purged of these ex
traneous questions that range beyond the limits
of description and classification. "With this limi
tation of its subject-matter would come, no doubt,
a diminution of interest ; since it has been pre
cisely by the problems thus excluded that morals
have always fascinated the deepest thinkers, and
withheld them (Aristotle alone excepted) from es
saying a descriptive ethics, the lack of which, as
when Bacon first deplored it, we must still make
good by the concrete illustrations of dramatic
poetry. But I am not maintaining that ethics
should be curtailed. I am concerned only with
its scientific character. And I think it evident
that, though ethics may, for all that, be a legiti-

Methods of Ethics. 9

mate science, it cannot claim to be a science of
the same type as logic, without at least foregoing
the problems which have hitherto constituted its
principal subject-matter.

Can ethics, then, be likened to mathematics?
Between this science and logic there are striking
points of contrast. Mathematics reasons about
real existence in its most general aspects of space
and time and number ; logic deals only with the
empty forms of reasoning. Both start with fun
damental principles of intelligence ; but the pro
cedure in one case is analytic, in the other syn
thetic. In logic, consequently, there is no subse^
quent advance upon the initial laws of thought,
with which everything else is given ; but in math
ematics the axioms and definitions are, by con
structive imagination or synthetic insight into new
relations, realized into a body of demonstrations,
which are not less certain than the first prin
ciples, but of which these gave no anticipation or
prophetic hint. A real science thus formed by the
mind out of its own resources, in utter indepen
dence of sense, is too captivating an ideal for the
genius of speculation to resist ; and it has been the
model of the systems at least of Plato and Spinoza.
Even a mind so sober and cautious as Locke's
did not escape the fascination, and that, too, with

io Ethics compared with Mathematics.

regard to ethics. Though he never undertook the
task, and when urged to it, late in life, by his
friend Molyneux, declined on the ground of a
preference for the practical morals of the ^N"ew
Testament, Locke nevertheless tells us, more than
once, and maintains, in accordance with his doc
trine of the self-archetypal character of complex
ideas, that the rules of morality maybe demonstrat
ed in the same manner, and with the same evi
dence, as the propositions of geometry. He recog
nizes, as compared with moral ideas, the greater
simplicity of mathematical ideas, and their repre-
sentability by diagrams or other sensible marks ;
and though he admits this gives to the ideas of
quantity a real practical advantage, and has made
them thought more capable of certainty and dem
onstration, he yet emphatically reiterates that
" from self-evident propositions by necessary con
sequences, as incontestable as those in mathematics,
the measures of right and wrong might be made
out to anyone that will apply himself with the same
indifferency and attention to the one as he does to
the other of these sciences." What, then, are
these " self-evident propositions" which constitute
the foundations of our duty and rules of action ? If
we look for anything so simple and evident as the
axioms, definitions, and postulatesof geometry, we

Meth ods of Eth ics. 1 1

shall be much deceived. Far more than this is
included in those first principles in virtue of which
morality is to be placed amongst the sciences
capable of demonstration. They comprise "the
idea of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, good
ness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are,
and on whom we depend ; and the idea of our
selves, as understanding, rational beings."

But the admission of even such principles does
not assimilate the scientific character of ethics to
that of mathematics. It seems to do so only be
cause of the inveterate, though ungrounded, habit
of regarding mathematical truths as deductions
from given first principles. So long as the theo
rems of geometry and algebra are imagined to
follow from the axioms and definitions with the
same inner necessity as a syllogistic conclusion
from its major and minor premises, so long must
the procedure of mathematics appear applicable
to ethics when once the latter has discovered suit
able starting-points. For both sciences are thus
conceived as merely specialized forms of logic.
This, however, is to overlook precisely the essen
tial point. If ratiocination in ethics, as in logic,
gives us no new information, leaving us in the
issue exactly where we stood at the outset, there
is, on the contrary, in the demonstrations of

1 2 Locke s Mathematical Method.

mathematics a constant advance upon previous
attainment, so that each new result is an original
addition to what went before, not, as in logic, a
mere explication of it. Every mathematical prop
osition, being the expression of a fresh insight,
of a brand-new perception of relations, by the
synthetic activity of the mind, has its voucher,
not in antecedent truths, but in the immediate
affirmation of that constructive intelligence by
which those truths in continuous regression to the
axioms have been evidenced and maintained. It
is not, therefore, as Locke supposed, merely a
lack of first principles from which ethics suffers
in comparison with mathematics. Ethics is fatally
handicapped in quite a different way. In the
spatial relations, e.g., with which geometry deals,
the mind has the power (prior to sense-experi
ence, too) of making intuitive discoveries, of con
structing, as it were, by its own native activity, a
genuine science (which is afterwards found valid
for the objects of perception). The geometer,
accordingly, knows a great deal more about the
relations of space than the rest of mankind do.
But the moralist can tell us nothing new about
morality. The sciences begun by Euclid and
Archimedes have been so extended in the course
of eighty generations that the most arduous study

Methods of Ethics. 13

of a lifetime often fails to cover the range of
their original discoveries. But the science begun I -
by Socrates is still unfounded ; and every school
boy knows as much about morals as the greatest
ethical philosophers, though among them have
been included the noblest geniuses of humanity.
The subject-matter of ethics does not, like mathe
matics, admit of progressive determination by the
synthetic intuition of the inind. And the rea
son, since Kant's time, is not far to seek. Good
ness is not, like space, a constitutive, d priori form
of our sensuous experience. Any new proposi
tions you make about it, therefore, can never be
actualized into fact ; they remain a dialectical
exercise, or even a play of words. And so long
as that is so, no supply of first principles can con
fer upon ethics the scientific character of mathe
matics ; they stand as widely apart as analysis of
the known and synthesis of the unknown ; and if
you persist in calling them both demonstrative,
you must not overlook the vital difference that
the mathematician demonstrates by direct insight
into new relations, the moralist solely by unfold
ing what is already taken for granted. In the
nature of things, therefore, Locke's well-meant
attempt to introduce the procedure of mathemat
ics into ethics was doomed to miscarry.

14 Lockes First Principles.

It follows, too, that in the analytic deduction
of moral rules from Locke's first principles — the
idea of a Supreme Being, on whom we depend, and
of ourselves as rational beings — the difficulties at
taching to our conception of moral rules are not
removed, but simply refunded into the assumed
first principles. If they are not immediately vis
ible there it is only because the assumptions are
so much vaster than this particular application of
them that our special problem is overshadowed
by the larger issues to which its solution has
given rise. But a moment's reflection will show
that the debated points of morals cannot be made
to disappear, even at the theistic point of view.
; And it is a matter of history that theistic moral-
; ists fall into the same ethical antagonisms as the
\ sceptics do. Paley and Butler, Edwards and Kant,
are, in some respects, as fundamental oppositions
as the whole history of ethics presents.

!Nor is the fact really surprising. For the idea
of a Supreme Being, on whom man depends, con
tains no information about man's moral nature,
or the end of his conduct, or his specific duties
and obligations. You cannot deduce from that
idea the character of conscience or will ; it does
not supply you with a standard of morality ; it
does not show you in particular cases what you

Methods of Ethics. 15

ought to do. It is an extraneous form, into which
you pour the . whole ethical content, be that con
tent what it may. Morality is not a deduction
from theism, but theism a superinduction upon
morality. It is only by observation, analysis, and
reflection we can discover wherein man's moral
life consists. And the results thus experientially
established would never have been mistaken for
deductions, had men kept in view the distinction
between knowledge and the supposed vouchers
of it, between the ratio cognoscendi and the al
leged ratio essendi. The idea of a Supreme
Being is not, nor can it be (as Locke held), the
ratio cognoscendi of morality. Whether it can be
the ratio essendi is another point which we need
not here discuss, but which, though granted,
would be a fruitless admission in the face of scep
tical and agnostic science. Theological ethics
cannot get under way at all without proving the
existence of God ; but neither that nor any other
superior principle can endow ethics with the
demonstrative character of mathematics.

It has now been shown that ethics is not a
science of the type of logic or mathematics. The
next thing is to compare it with the natural and
historical sciences. If its scientific character pre
sents no analogy or only a partial analogy to

1 6 Ethics and the Natural Sciences.

theirs, then nothing remains but to point out its
unique nature, and inquire finally whether ethics
be not less a science than a branch of speculation ?
In the meantime, however, we must not forget,
and may derive hope from, the current fashion
of identifying the science of morals with the
sciences of nature. Though mathematical ethics
be a vision, who shall say that physical ethics may
not become an actuality ?

The sciences of nature have been classified as
deductive or experimental. Originally they were
all experimental ; their laws expressing only
those particular uniformities which observation
and experiment showed to exist, but giving no
reasons for their existence. Such an empirical
law we have, e.g., in the tendency of hot water
to break glass. Now, when the particular em
pirical laws of a science can be brought into re
lation to more general laws, seen to be special
applications of them, and so deducible from them,
that science passes from the experimental to the
deductive stage. The cracking of glass by hot
water, for example, takes its place as a phenom
enon of deductive science as soon as it has been
shown that heat tends to expand all substances,
that the crack is due to the expansion of the
heated portion in spite of the adjacent cooler por-

Methods of Ethics. 17

tion, and that no crack would have occurred had
the heat been equally diffused as in thin glass
vessels through which it passes rapidly. The
illustration suggests that deductive science, hav
ing apprehended the reasons of phenomena, may
be able to predict their occurrence ; and every
body is acquainted with the sublime prophetic
achievements of astronomy. This power of pre
diction clearly marks off the deductive from the
experimental sciences. And so much being
premised, we are now prepared for the inquiry
whether ethics belongs to either division ? If it
be of the same general type as the sciences of
nature, it must be either a deductive or an experi
mental science.

In assigning ethics to either of these classes,
however, one assumption is made too significant
to pass without distinct mention. The sciences of
nature all rest upon the presupposition that events
follow one another in a fixed and regular order,
that the same cause under the same circumstances
always produces the same effects, that the entire
realm of natural phenomena is subject to the
reign of inexorable law. Deny the principle of
universal causation, and natural science is smitten
with paraly sis. You may be in doubt about the
proof of the principle ; you may attempt to for-

1 8 The Law of Causation.

tify its validity by a priori deduction, like Kant,
or by observation, like Mill, or you may, like
Lotze, confess it is the indemonstrable postulate
of all our knowledge ; but you cannot for a mo
ment fail to see that the law, however it may
be established, is indispensable to the natural
and physical sciences, which presuppose it at
every step.

Now, to say that ethics is a science of the same
type as botany or astronomy is to assert that the
methods of investigation applicable to the latter
are equally suited to the former, and consequently
that constancy of causation, which is the founda
tion of those methods, must obtain among moral
phenomena with the same rigorous invariability
as among the events of nature. Nor can anyone
at all alive to the drift of contemporary thought
and culture have failed to observe the prevalent
acceptance of this determinism, especially on the
part of the ever-increasing number of scientific
inquirers. Schopenhauer, indeed, erected the
dogma into a test of mental vigor, and maintained,
with characteristic asperity and assurance, that
none but intellectual dwarfs could be libertarians.
At the present day the triumphant reign of
physical science has begotten a distrust in meta
physical ethics ; and men have turned their gaze

Methods of Ethics. 19

from the noumenal freedom in which Kant found
the sine qua non of duty, to look for a basis of
morality in the sensible facts of the phenomenal
world. And it is really claimed that, after the
lapse of so many barren centuries of ethical logom
achy, the science of morals has at last been set
upon an immovable foundation through the dis
covery that human conduct is subject to necessary
relations of cause and effect, from which all moral
rules are ultimately deduced. +

This bold reconstruction of eth ics on the

universal causation, after the model ofTHeductive
science like astronomy, has been attempted by
Mr. Herbert Spencer. Unfortunately, however,
of Mr. Spencer's promised "Principles of Mo
rality," only the first part— the " Data of Ethics"
—has yet appeared ; and this instalment, though
postulating for ethics an immediate evolution, like
that which in the course of centuries transformed
empirical into rational astronomy, does not de
monstrate the possibility of such a development,
still less accomplish it, or even make its accom
plishment very credible to anyone who can re
sist the contagion of the evolutionist's scientific
optimism. When the work is completed, it will
be easier to judge how far Mr. Spencer has suc
ceeded in deducing moral rules from first princi-

2O Mr. Spencer s Demonstrative Method.

pies. In the meantime, one who sees in the un
dertaking merely a repetition of the fruitless
attempt of Locke may be allowed to recall
Hume's deprecation of the application of deduc
tion to ethics on the ground that this method,
though in itself more perfect, was less suited to
the imperfection of human nature, and was a
common source of illusion and mistake in this as
well as in other subjects. But whatever the
future may disclose regarding the deducibility of
rules of conduct, it is clear that deductive ethics,
if it is to be a science, must not start with as-
' sumptions unwarranted by, or even opposed to, the
common-sense of mankind. The first principles
of astronomy and physics are indisputable; if
ethics is to take rank with them, its first principles
must be equally axiomatic. But Mr. Spencer,
under the influence of what Mill has called an a
priori fallacy, the offspring of hedonism and
utilitarianism, lays the foundation of his science
of rational, deductive, absolute ethics in the dog
matic identification of goodness with pleasure.
He holds it " to be the business of moral science
to deduce, from the laws of life and the condi
tions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily
tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to pro
duce unhappiness. Having done this, its deduc-

Methods of Ethics. 21

tions are to be recognized as laws of conduct."
But that moral rules have no other foundation
than their felicific consequences is so far from
self-evident, so foreign to popular thought and
modes of expression, to say nothing of moral
philosophy, that the proposition could only
emerge as a final result, not stand as the first
datum, of a truly scientific ethics. Accordingly,
the scientific character of morals — and it is that
we are now investigating — will not be affected by
the contingent issues of Mr. Spencer's venture-
Borne enterprise. Should he, like Locke, fail in
his promised deduction of rules of conduct, the so-
called " rational ethics" will have lost its doughti
est champion ; should he succeed, his deductions
will afford no proof of the evolution of empirical
into rational ethics until it has first been estab
lished that the logical movement has really been
in the ethical sphere — that is, until it has been
shown that the counsels of prudence and precepts
of utility, which he professes to have deduced
from the laws of life and the conditions of exist
ence, are synonymous with the moral laws intui
tively recognized by mankind. But this, unfor
tunately, has been a qucestio vexata since the very
beginning of moral philosophy, and it is ap
parently no nearer settlement to-day than at its

22 Empirical Ethics.

first discussion between the youthful Socrates and
the venerable Protagoras, when, in the whirl of
debate, the protagonists were unwittingly carried
round to opposite sides, and each was in the issue
amazed to find himself attacking the position he
deemed impregnable and espousing the cause he
repudiated as false.

But there are, as we have seen, two types of
the sciences of nature — the deductive and the
empirical — represented respectively by astrono
my and botany. And if at present ethics cannot
claim to rank with the deductive, may it not
at least find a place among the natural sciences
of the empirical kind ? Failing to justify this
-, position, ethics, it would seem, must be stripped
of its scientific pretensions, and banished to that
dim region of ontological abstractions which ag
nostic metaphysicians keep for their gnostic rivals
—a limbo of intellectual inanities, of ghosts of
human speculation (vanitas vanitatum\ which,
like the unaccomplished works of nature, re
mains forever " abortive, monstrous, or unkindly
mixed."

There is, however, reason to believe that physical
ethics, empirical if not deductive, is by no means
an impossibility. It is certain that, apart from
Mr. Spencer, this is the method of ethics generally

Methods of Ethics. 23

adopted by the evolutionists. Eschewing every at
tempt to deduce moral rules for the guidance of
conduct, they institute an inquiry into the origin
of that morality by which human life is actually
regulated. It is not their business to tell men how
they should act, or to supply them with motives for
originating or principles for regulating their be
havior, still less to mete out esteem and affec
tion or hatred and contempt upon what may be
considered the estimable or the blameable quali
ties of men. On the contrary, their aim is
purely theoretical. They seek only the genesis of
those moral notions, beliefs, and practices, which
constitute an obvious phenomenon of the life
of man. As there is an anatomy of the body,
which resolves limbs into tissues and tissues
into cells, and a physiology, that represents the
modes in which the functions of the body are per
formed, so there may be a physiology and anat
omy of conscience, to inquire into its operations,
to dissect complex moral phenomena into simple
elements, and finally, under the guidance of
evolution, to track these elements to their last
hiding-place in the physical constitution and en
vironment of the lower animals. The natural
history of moral phenomena may still be unwrit
ten ; but if it be true, as logicians tell us, that

24 Analogy with Physical Science.

any facts which follow one another according to
constant laws are in themselves fitted to be a sub
ject of science, why deny the scientific character
of an investigation whose ideal is to follow the
development of morality from its earliest rudi
ments and to ascertain the order of antecedence
and consequence in the series of intervening
phenomena ? Physical ethics, based on the law
of universal causation, applies to morality the
same method of investigation as biology has used
for the elucidation of the true relations of the
phenomena of life ; and on whatever ground we
term the one a science, the other would seem
entitled to the same appellation.

Nevertheless there is a striking difference, if
not in the intrinsic character, in the external con
dition of these two sciences. Biology, as natural
history of life, is an achievement ; physical ethics,
as natural history of morals, is a dream. It may
be that the aspiration of the scientific moralist is
a genuine prophecy, that his vision is an inspira
tion of the faculty divine ; but it must be ad
mitted that in the meantime his ideal of a science
of ethics is unrealized. And this negative in
stance is sufficiently striking to give pause to our
scientific enthusiasm.

Let us consider the matter a little more closely.

Methods of Ethics. 2 5

It will be conceded that, so far as observation
and classification go, moral phenomena are not
less manageable than biological ; and in this re
spect both sciences stand on the same level as
logic and psychology. At the next stage, how
ever, a difference emerges. After biological
phenomena have been noted and grouped, they
may be resolved into simpler elements, as the tis
sue, e.g., into cells. And in chemistry, though
obviously not in biology, it is possible to verify
the analysis by a reproduction of the complex
through synthesis of its resultant elements. But
moral phenomena are not susceptible of a similar
analysis. Every resolution of morality, or of any
part of it, into something else must needs be arti
ficial and arbitrary. You do not here know what
is simple and what compound. In this respect
ethics falls behind even psychology in its amena
bility to scientific methods. The psychologist,
starting from the side of objective science, is wont
to take sensation as his datum, and from that
stand-point is justified in regarding it as better
known than any other mental experience ; so that
an explanation of the higher intellectual pro
cesses and products may always be given by re
solving them into this datum, as when Hobbes,
following Aristotle, describes imagination as " de-

26 Comparison with Biology.

caying sense." Beyond sensation, psychology does
not go ; but psycho-physics shows that an appar
ently simple sensation is itself made up of ele
ments — Leibnitz's petites perceptions — which may
be expressed for science in terms of the stimuli
in which they originate. But this regressive
analysis of the more complex into the less com
plex, until indecomposable factors are at last
reached, cannot be applied to moral phenomena
without making arbitrary and unwarrantable as
sumptions. This limitation of ethics, inherent in
its subject-matter, is constantly overlooked ; and
to the ignoring of it is due the diverse and mut
ually confuting systems of derivative morals.

The farther we remove from simple observa
tion and classification, the greater is the differ
ence between the scientific character of ethics
and biology. And to the disadvantage already
noticed we have now to add another, which goes
to the very root of the matter in hand, and
seems to negate the possibility of turning the
ideal of physical ethics into an actuality. When
the biologist, besides dissecting complex phenom
ena into their elements, also demonstrates in a
long series of forms, existent or extinct, the grad
ual building up of the complex organisms out of
the simpler (by means, as he believes, of natural

Methods of Eth us. 2 7

selection), he appeals, not to imagination, but to
observation ; for the successive growths are act
ually open to view on the surface of the earth or
in its fossiliferous strata. He may be wrong in
his explanation of the process of development —
and it is not improbable that natural selection is
not the only or even the chief agency ; but about
the existence of a series of related forms that
have followed one another through the lapse of
vast geological epochs there cannot be a particle
of doubt. With our scientific moralist, however,
the case is absolutely different. I do not mean
merely that he is ignorant of the connections be
tween moral phenomena ; for facts may become
the subject of science though the laws of their
sequence be undiscovered or even beyond the
reach of discovery by our existing resources.
But without the facts themselves there can be no
science. And it is the misfortune of the scien
tific type of ethics we are now investigating that
the phases of morality it binds together in its
theory of development are, when not a part of
human history, purely imaginary. We know
nothing about the morals of the first species that
ceased to be non-moral. From structural affinities
and rudiments the naturalist may trace the
genealogy of man and reconstruct his simian or

28 Ethics not a Science like Biology.

pre-simian ancestors ; but what material is there
for determining their morals — what but the indi
vidual preconceptions of the inquirer ? And of
the morality of even our own race, in its pre-his-
toric stage, we are in similar ignorance. What
marks of virtue, e.g., do you find in the shape, or
size, or cubic capacity of the Neanderthal skull?
There is no fossil pre-human morality. And
for lack of it the ideal of physical ethics remains
unrealized.

The outlook for the " science " of ethics grows
less promising at every new survey. With which
ever of the sciences we compare it, some reason
emerges for excluding it from them. Its data do
not carry it back with biology to the dawn of
life. It is not, like mathematics, synthetic and
demonstrative. And if it is to take rank with
logic, it must forego every function except
classification and observation, and be content to
pass rather as a formal discipline than a real
science.

Perhaps, however, we have been over-hasty in
rejecting physical ethics, or, rather, the physical
method of ethics. Though in its extant form of
an imaginary development of moral from im
aginary pre-moral phenomena it overleaps itself
and, with vaulting ambition, falls to the other side,

Methods of Ethics. 29

it is not inconceivable that the method might be
so applied as to produce a genuine science, but
of narrower limits in space and time than current
evolutionary ethics is wont to set. Such re
strictions are given, indeed, in the very subject-
matter of ethics. For moral phenomena imply
moral beings ; and since, as Darwin himself tells
us, "a moral being is one who is capable of com
paring his past and future actions or motives, and
of approving or disapproving of them," and " we
have no reason to suppose that any of the lower
animals have this capacity," it follows that the
science of morals should take cognizance only of
" man, who alone," as Darwin emphatically adds,
" can with certainty be ranked as a moral being."
There is, therefore, nothing to carry the scien
tific moralist out of the human sphere. It is
different with the biologist. The human hand is
constructed on the same pattern as the hand of a
monkey, or the foot of a horse, or the wing of a
bat ; and the human embryo is at first hardly dis
tinguishable from the embryo of a dog, or seal,
or reptile ; so that any scientific explanation of
man's bodily organism is inadequate, if not im
possible, without reference to the lower animals.
But in ethics such reference seems little less than
a vain parade. You may of course study the

30 Its Theme Limited to Man.

psychical attributes of the dog or the elephant, and
this is a field much in need of cultivation ; but
however rich your harvest of observations, you
will be no whit nearer the origin of human mo
rality so long, at least, as conscience continues the
unique prerogative of man, the only moral being
we know. Even if you imagine a moral sense in
the higher brutes, your descriptive ethics, though
acquiring thereby a comparative character, would
be as far as ever from that genesis of man's mo
rality which evolutionary moralists profess to ex
plain in their theories of physical ethics. Accord
ingly, the scientific moralist, instead of roaming
comprehensively over the fields of animal life,
must brood intensely at the altar-fires of the hu
man heart. However deep the mysteries of
man's moral nature, no irradiating light falls
upon them from the non-moral world without.
The moral being is more than the child of nature ;
he is the member of a kingdom where time and
space are not. Yet is virtue not withholden from
scientific survey, since its manifestations fall in
time and constitute a part of the history of hu
manity. And if ethics, instead of groping through
the void, impalpable inane of fictitious pre-human
morality, would in good earnest describe historic
morality in all its fixed and changing characters,

Methods of Ethics. 31

tracing the evolution of moral ideals and institu
tions from their earliest to their present form,
then its scientific character, which is to-day a
reproach, would be firmly established, and it
could claim to be a science as unimpeachable as
any other branch of history. Some such ideal
doubtless floated before- the minds of those
writers who saw in ethics a comparative and evo
lutionary anatomy and physiology of morals ; but
the associations of natural history led them to sub
stitute the whole extent and duration of organic
life, which is essentially without moral character,
for the narrow and brief historyj)f mankind, in
which alone moral phenomena are actually found.
Here then, at last, we have an answer to the
question, How is ethics as a science possible ?
If it is ever to rise above the analytic procedure
of logic, it can only be by becoming one of the
historical sciences. Given the earliest morality
of which we have any written record, to trace
from it through progressive stages the morality of
to-day : that is the problem, and the only prob
lem which can fall to a truly scientific ethics.
The discovery of these historical sequences con
stitutes the peculiarity of the science, which, like
every other, presupposes observation, analysis, and
classification. Whenever a system of ethics pro-

32 Ethics a Branch of History.

fesses to be a science of any other type, whether
of the physical or the mathematical, it is setting
up its own speculations for facts, and imposing
upon us a dogmatism for which no shibboleth
can atone, be that shibboleth intuitional or utili
tarian, absolutist or relativist, pro- or anti-evolu
tionary.

This conclusion cannot be other than unac
ceptable at a time when philosophical schools,
differing so widely in theory, have agreed in the
practice of producing and reading innumerable
works on " moral science" or the " science of
ethics " as it is now more generally designated.
And yet the conclusion is inevitable. I dare
not say, as Buckle used to say categorically of a
very different proposition, what makes it so pe
culiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute
it. But, assuredly, it is not easy to imagine how
it can be disproved. Range, in fancy, over the
whole circle of the sciences, and you will find
there no place for ethics save as a branch of
human history. Whatever else has been as
signed it, belongs not to science, but to specula
tion ; and is none the less speculation because
carried on by professed scientists. Putting aside
the inquiry into the faculties or functions of the
mind, which is plainly a part of psychology, think

Methods of Ethics. 33

but for a moment of some of the questions dis
cussed in current treatises on the "science of
ethics." What is the chief end of man ? Is the
will free or determined ? Is conscience innate or
acquired? Is moral law absolute or relative?
How did morality first come into existence ? Is
there any other good than pleasure ? This is a
sample, and but a sample, of the problems which
moralists complacently include in what they desig
nate ethical science. To questions like these an
swers are unhesitatingly given, even by agnostics,
who know that we cannot know anything but
phenomena. Manifestly the age which has wit
nessed the divorce of science and speculation in
physics, biology, and even psychology, has not in
ethics succeeded in keeping them asunder. And ,
ethics will never rank as a positive science until, i
following the lead of jurisprudence and ethnol
ogy, it exorcise the spirit of speculation, and
enthrone the spirit of history as it is reflected in/
the cognate investigations of Maine and Ihering,
of Tylor, Letourneau, and McLennan.

I do not deny the possibility of a philosophy of
morals, or even of law or of culture. On the
contrary, I am convinced that every positive
science — chemistry, physics, and mathematics
equally with jurisprudence and ethics — leads up
3

34 Scientific and Speculative Ethics.

inevitably to a TT^COTT; ^tXocro^ta, towards which I
am so far from assuming an indifference that I
hold, with Kant, such indifference an impossi
bility to human nature, and those who profess it
unconscious, instead of conscious, metaphysicians.
But I am sure facts and science must precede theo
ries and philosophy. And the facts with which the
moralist has to deal seem to me, not merely more
complex, but infinitely more numerous and varied?
than is generally supposed. Just as philology was
retarded for centuries by the dogma that Hebrew
was the parent of all human languages, so ethical
science is now hampered by the assumption that
its subject-matter can be found in the moral con
sciousness of the individual alone. For that moral
consciousness is but the reflex of particular social
conditions, and, like them, has had a history which
needs to be traced. Nor is it at any stage of its
development exactly the same as another moral
consciousness, under other skies, at other lati
tudes, in different environments, and within differ
ent civilizations. Moral phenomena may vary as
dialects vary, and until those varieties are observed
and compared, and their developments followed
out, anything like a philosophy of morals is im
possible. Ethics, as the comparative history of
universal morality, is the vestibule to the temple

*

Methods of Ethics. 35

of moral philosophy. And whoso undergoes not
purifications and offers sacrifices there must not
profane with sacrilegious step the inner courts of
the sanctuary, jx

Here, then, we have a clear distinction between •
what we may call ethical science and moral philos-/
ophy. The one is a branch of history, the other of
speculation. They stand in the same relation as
the science of geometry to the philosophy of space
and the axioms. But their development has been
far from analogous. Geometry has been built up
without regard to the ultimate nature of space
and the validity of the axioms : such speculations
proved less attractive than the theorems and prob
lems of the science. But as morals touch the most
vital points of human life, man's practical inter
est in their origin and validity has overcome his
theoretical interest in the history of their growth ;
and we are presented with the striking anomaly
of a science still unfounded from philosophic
absorption in its first principles. It is obvious,
however, that a philosophy without science is as
empty as theory without fact, as unconvincing as
reason without the voucher of sensuous experience.

The achievements of modern science in every
department of inquiry, and the influence of con-'
temporary positivism, could not fail to react upon

36 Current Ethics Speculative.

ethics. But although ethics has been taken in
hand by men of science, its character has not, I
conceive, become scientific. With some abate
ment one dogmatic system has merely been ex
changed for another. The old Metaphysik der
Sitten has given place to the new physique des
mceurs y but, though only an occasional champion
— a Martin eau or a Green — comes forward to
defend the former, it would take a microscopic
intelligence to discern wherein it is more specu
lative than the latter, to which the scientific
world seems to be giving in its adherence. The
masters of the positive sciences have, however,
become the spiritual leaders of our generation ;
and coming to their own, their own receive them ;
so that in morals their unverifiable guesses are apt
to pass for scientific hypotheses, or even facts, and
their refutation of opposing systems, easier than
to damn with faint praise, needs only consist in
characterizing them as " metaphysical."

Such seems to me the present deplorable con
dition of ethics. Speculation, on the one hand,
waning but conscious of itself, on the other,
waxing but unconsciously taking itself for science.
From neither movement can fruitful results be
expected. The great desideratum, the sole con
dition of ethical progress, is the suspension of all

s «Y--

:

l*J^

Methods of Ethics. 37

t^^^Je ftAA^c*^ - S^W^.,. , A '

philosophizing until an ethical science has been
constructed through a comprehensive study of the
phenomena of universal morality.

But has not the scientific coryphaeus of the
century, it will be asked, undertaken these his
torical investigations and evolved from them a
final philosophy of morals ? Darwin certainly is
the father of evolutionary ethics ; and the first
five chapters of his " Descent of Man " are turning
out, as the late Professor Clifford was keen enough
to anticipate, more pregnantly suggestive and more
revolutionary than any other modern contribution
to the subject of morals. Two considerations,
however, suggest the incompleteness of Darwin's
ethical work. In the first place, the historical
method is in his hands less an independent in
strument of investigation in morals than an apt
means of confirming a biological hypothesis.
And in the second place, it never escaped the
embrace of the spirit of speculative utilitarian
ism. With Darwin, in fact, historical ethics was
forced into the service of a foregone conclusion
upon the origin of species, and a foregone conclu
sion upon the derivation of morality. The time has
now arrived when the history of morals should be
followed out for its own sake and allowed to tell
its own story. But such an investigation will not

38 Importance of Darwinian Ethics.

be attempted so long as scientists remain convinced
of the finality of the ethical science and philos
ophy associated with the name of Darwin.

It is, of course, no unusual thing to find the
plastic, world-moving thought of a genius crys
tallizing into the barren dogma of a school
wherein the master's name is invoked to stem
the very march of knowledge which he himself
set in motion. But doubt, as the case of Dar
win happily illustrates, is the condition of all in
tellectual progress. And the true heirs of Dar
win are not the dogmatists of the schools, but the
open-minded, candid, fact-revering inquirers who
walk in the spirit of the master. Socrates does
not lay violent hands upon his father Parmenides,
because he points out the difficulties in the Ele-
atic doctrine of being and non-being. Nor does
an investigator who ardently admires Darwin's
scientific achievements, and sees in the man a
very embodiment of the true scientific spirit, re
nounce his allegiance in criticising Darwin's
treatment of the questions of morals. And noth
ing, I imagine, is to-day such a hindrance to a
true science of ethics as the lack of a right un
derstanding with Darwinism. To supply this
want is the primary aim of the following pages,
though incidentally, it is hoped, a beginning may

Methods of Ethics. 39

be made with historical ethics, and an example
furnished of its value for moral philosophy. The
main object, however, is, assuming the truth of
Darwinian science, to make a dispassionate exam
ination of its bearing upon morals, as well as to
distinguish in Darwin's own moral theory what
is fact or science from what is fancy or specula
tion. But this presupposes a preliminary survey
of Darwinian ethics, and that of Darwinism, to
the exposition of which we must now proceed.

> f 1 rr ' *^> f r« a

*„.«•«•••••>-< v< *%v »••.:. ^/* ^ o^ •>•$.-(. ..Jt.-Cc,.-*- *: c-*-"-

CHAPTEK II.

EVOLUTIONISM AND DARWINISM.

A generation has passed away since 1859, when
Charles Darwin, then a man of fifty, published his
epoch-making work on the " Origin of Species."
The reception of the book by the public was an
augury of the influence it was destined to exert.
The first edition was exhausted almost immedi
ately, and a second edition was out six weeks
after the first. This was followed by others ; and
as the wave thus set a-going reached the Conti
nent, translations of the volume soon appeared
in most of the languages of Europe. The book
has had a wider influence, has stirred men's
thoughts and feelings more profoundly, and ex
ercised their attention more arduously, and even
painfully, than any other scientific work since
1543, when Copernicus demonstrated, to the con
sternation of mankind, the revolution of the earth
and laid the foundation of modern astronomy.
Darwin's treatise has not only become the classic

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 41

of contemporary science, but, touching the popular
imagination, it has added a new word to our
language ; and we all speak of Darwinism much •
as we speak of evolution. It is true the scientist 0; \
reminds us the words are not synonymous, that
evolution is much broader than Darwinism, that
Darwinism is only a fragment of the total evolu
tionary doctrine. Still there is no regulating the Qi^
use of new words, and for the mass of mankind^
the system of Darwin is identified with the the
ory of evolution. Nor is this astonishing. For,
tJTnngh..pvn1nt.i'nTi was t^ncrM long before the time
of Darwin, and had even been conjectured of hu
man life, it did not come home to the hearts and
bosoms of men till Darwin produced his passive
and overwhelming argument to demonstrat^Aow x
the development of all living beings from simpler "'
forms had been brought about by means of the r% }
" survival of the fittest " in the " struggle for exist
ence." This made it believable that man was de
scended from the same ancestors as the apes. And
people who had remained stolidly incurious re
garding the evolution of sun, and planets, and the
milky way, and the rings of Saturn, and all the
choir and furniture of heaven, were startled into
wondering and inquisitive interest by Darwin's
demonstration of our kinship with the apes.

42 Darwin s Peculiar Doctrine.

fa}**'

" The proper study of mankind is man ; " and Dar
win for the first time compelled general attention
^S to the doctrine of evolution by the bearing of nat
ural selection on man's origin, kinship, and his-
' tory. He first made the public acquainted with
the idea of development ; and the public has done
him the honor of christening it Darwinism.
ZX Ask, now, a representative of the great public
what he means by Darwinism or evolution, and
you will probably be told it is the doctrine which
teaches that man and the monkeys have the same
forefathers ; or, should you succeed in finding a
/^ better-informed spokesman, you will be informed
that Darwinism is the theory which supposes all
the species of plants and animals to be the re
sult, not of special creation, but of gradual changes
in pre-existing and simpler forms. Now, it is
important to observe at the outset that while both
these answers contain cardinal ideas of the theory
of evolution, neither touches Darwin's great orig
inal contribution to that theory. Darwin was
iwt the author or first propounder of the doctrine
that man and the monkeys have the same ances
tors, nor yet of the doctrine that all the varieties
of animal and vegetable life have been produced
by the slowly accumulated modifications of one
or more earlier types. It is true that Darwin ac-

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 43

cepted these traditional tenets as a part of his
system, and in that way procured for them a
wider circulation and a more general assent than
they had ever before obtained ; but Darwin never
claimed, nor could he have claimed, a patent for
the discovery of these ideas, nor did he assert
any right of exclusive proprietorship to them.
Darwin was not the author of the theory of de
velopment in any of its forms. It is his peculiar
and indisputable merit to have discovered the
mechanism by which (as is generally believed)
development is actually brought about in our
species of plants and animals. Not that there is ^ j
evolution in the world, but how evolution is ef
fected within the sphere of life, is the central
point of all Darwin's demonstrations.

What, then, we must first of all ask, is the his
tory of that theory of evolution, the mechanism
of whose processes it was reserved for Darwin to
discover? Like most of the fundamental con
ceptions of our knowledge and our science, the
essential elements of the theory are as old as
human reflection. It did not spring suddenly
from the brain of Darwin. As evolution itself
teaches that nothing in the world is brand-new —
nothing exists which did not pre-exist in another
form — so must this be true of the theory of evo-

44 Conception of Evolution Old.

lution. It, too, like the hand that wrote it out,
Kke the brain that gave it form, has had a his
tory reaching far back into the dim recesses of
vanished and unremembered ages. Such meagre
records as are preserved to us of historic times
warrant our inclusion of the doctrine of evolution
within the old declaration that " there is no new
thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof
it may be said, See, this is new ? It hath been
already of old time which was before us." As
names and dates are often very deceptive we
must here be on our guard. For the evolutionary
hypothesis was not begotten of any single brain ;
it is the offspring of that ever-growing, ever-
ripening human culture, at whose breasts succes
sive generations of thinkers are nourished with
the same vital substance. Foretold in the specula
tions of the ancient world, it was announced in the
philosophy, poetry, and science of modern Europe,
some decades before Darwin, by his spiritual
foster-brothers of an earlier generation ; though
to Darwin undoubtedly belongs the honor of
lifting it up to the full gaze of an astonished
world and fixing it there as a landmark and a
monument in the intellectual development of
mankind.

It requires but little attention to see that the

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 45

problems underlying evolution are as old as
human reflection. From the dawn of specula
tion the world and all that therein is has been to
man an object of wonder and mystery, suggest
ing to him those undying questions on the origin
of the cosmos, the source of life and conscious
ness, the course and tendency of the universe, the
origin, nature, and destiny of man. But these
are the problems with which our current theory
of evolution has to wrestle. And though the
modern evolutionist is able, owing to the enor
mous growth of physical science, to supply a
fuller and more detailed treatment of the subject,
the fundamental conceptions of his theory meet us
in the most ancient cosmogonies. Thus the cardi
nal point of modern evolutionism — that nothing
is, but everything is in a state of becoming, that
nothing is fixed and immutable, but everything
may be transformed into something else — you
may read alike in the early speculations of a philo
sophical people, like the Greeks or Hindoos, and
in those weird legends of our Algonquin Indians,
which have been preserved from oblivion by the
piety and devotion of Rand and Leland. This
idea of metamorphosis, of change of one being
into another, is not the only element of antique
origin to be found in the modern theory of evo-

46 Early Greek Anticipations.

lution. Equally old is the notion of the essential
unity of existence, which is so important a constit
uent of our current hypothesis. "When an evo
lutionary philosopher tells us one thing can be
evolved from another only because all things
are at bottom the same, he cannot be accused of
speculative innovation, seeing that his dogma was
a musty commonplace two thousand five hun
dred years ago ! Greek philosophy asserted, e.g.,
that atoms were the essence of all things, that
atoms were the one underlying reality whence
all things had issued and whither all things tended
to return. But besides these two notions — that
one thing may become another, and that all things
are at bottom the same — Greek speculation also
furnishes us with a crude anticipation of the bio
logical doctrine of the descent of man from some
simpler organism. In the sixth century B.C. An-
aximander struck out the idea that men were
developed — not apes — but developed fishes, which
had come on shore and thrown off their scales.
And in the following century Empedocles traced
the origin of man through a process much akin
to Darwin's struggle for life and survival of the
fittest. This vigorous thinker held that, through
the action of subterranean fire, there were thrown
up shapeless lumps, formed of earth and water,

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 47

which afterwards shaped themselves into the parts
and organs of animals and of men. Here was
an infinite chaos of heads, hands, legs, arms,
eyes, and other bodily members. Under the rule
of chance they formed at first all kinds of strange
and monstrous combinations, which of course
proved unstable ; until, after a long series of
unions and dissolutions, they at last, as if from
exhaustion of all other modes, accidentally hit
upon a happy marriage of suitable organs and
members, and set up the surprise of animal or
ganisms and self-conscious men. This is surely
a Darwin-out-Darwining theory of natural se
lection. But we have not yet reached the last
element of our evolutionary hypothesis which
was anticipated by the Greeks. For, in the
fourth place, the general conception of system
atic growth, advance, or orderly progression,
from matter to life, from the polyp to man, from
the atom to the cosmos, was as familiar to Greek
thought as to modern evolutionary science. The
Greek natural philosophers held that the course
of the world consisted in a gradual transition
from the indeterminate to the determinate, so
that higher and more complex forms of existence
follow and depend on the lower and simpler
forms. Thus the catholic genius of Aristotle

48 Views of Plato and Aristotle.

was unable to conceive the universe as other than
a progression of graduated existence from inert
matter at the base up through ascending forms
of life till it culminated in the rational activity
of man. If our agnostic scientists reject the
theology of Aristotle, they will give him credit
at least for his idea of cosmic development, of a
world subject to evolution. And, fifthly, they
will have to confess 'that we find in Plato an ex
plicit profession of the evolutionary faith in the
antiquity of man. Either, says Plato, the human
race had no beginning at all, or had a beginning
in infinitely remote ages — at a time so far back
that in the interval seasons have changed, ani
mals have been transformed, and human civiliza
tion has been many times acquired, lost, and re-
acquired.

*,. Among the Greeks, then, we find these five
constituent elements of the modern evolution-
hypothesis : the belief in the immeasurable an
tiquity of man, [the conception of a progressive
movement in the life of nature, the notion of a
survival of the fittest) and the twofold assump
tion that any thing or any animal may become
another since all things are at bottom the same.
Perhaps if we knew as much of the speculations

^ of other ancient peoples as we know of the Greeks,

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 49

we should find similar thoughts elsewhere. "We
need not, however, stop to conjecture what the
ancient world believed ; for its civilization was
submerged, in the early Christian centuries, by
inundations of Goths, Yandals, Huns, and simi
lar masses of barbarism. This social cataclysm
was stemmed by the young Christian Church,
which, for a millennium after, remained the one
beneficent and potent agency in European civili
zation. Consequently, as the best intellects were
everywhere in the Church, theology flourished
and science was neglected. The meagre biblical
account of creation was interpreted in the light —
or, rather, darkness — of those first crude impres
sions which our senses give us of things ; and
it was believed that the world had not been in
existence more than five or six thousand years,
that the earth was the middle point of the world,
and man the central object of creation, with the \
Church about him, hell beneath the earth, and
heaven stretching beyond the utmost rim of the
celestial universe, through orders of angelic hie- •'
rarchies, up to the throne of God himself ! At
the touch of Copernicus and Galileo, however, this
whole fabric collapsed. And modern science,
with which the age had long been in travail, was
born.

4

50 Kant's Cosmic Evolution.

It was not, however, till another century had
passed that the notion of development found a
place in modern science. In 1755, Immanuel

N^Kant, the greatest of the German philosophers,
attempted to trace the evolution of the universe
from a primitive chaos to its present orderly array
of suns and stars, planets and satellites. The world
as it is, he said, is not the immediate product of
the divine creation. God has created matter, and
endowed it with forces ; and through the blind
play of these forces the primitive chaos has been
shaped, by a purely mechanical process, into cen
tral bodies with their planets, planets with their
moons, and so on in ever-widening circles till
the completed universe at last emerged, full of
order, harmony, and beauty. Half a century
later this theory of Kant's was independently

\i established by Laplace, the greatest of French
mathematicians.

The conception of evolution thus introduced by
Kant was not new to the countrymen of Leib
nitz. Like Kant's metaphysics and ethics, it was
appropriated, developed, and extended from nat-
ure^to spirit by Schelling and Hegel, through

x whose influence it became a constituent element

^Qa German habits of thought. Meantime, in Eng
land, it was^seized upon by geologists to account

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 5 1

for the features and appearance of the earth's
crust. The astronomers asserted the earth was
originally a cooling sphere of incandescent mat
ter. And we know it to-day as a solid core,
enveloped with air and water, here tossed into
corrugated mountains, and there hollowed into
scarped ravines or spread out in fruitful 'plains
and valleys. Between its primitive and its pres
ent condition there is an enormous interval, and
the earlier geologists had filled it up with mirac
ulous cataclysms and volcanic eruptions. But
Lyell now came forward with his proof that the
history of the earth was a process of slow devel
opment, solely through the agency of causes still
in operation. The colossal results were due, not
to the magnitude of the causes, but to their cu
mulative effects in the course of vast geological
ages, which we inadequately attempt to define by
millions of years. Hold to this notion of an in
finite past, and the phenomena of the earth, like
the phenomena of the universe, all find their
place in the process of evolution.

Evolution in the universe, evolution in the
earth ; it now remained to discover evolution in the C\
life of the plants and animals on the earth. And
it was in this biological department that Darwin
made his original contribution to the evolution-

52 Later Evolutionary Science.

ary movement, at the same time that his friend

xLyell was carrying it into geology. We

abundantly found that Darwin did noLoriginate-
-7 the general theory of evolution. We are now to
see he was not the first to propound even the
more limited doctrine of the evolution of plants
and animals. Fifteen years before he was born,
his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in Eng
land, the poet Goethe, in Germany, and Geoffrey
Saint Hilaire, the French naturalist, came almost
simultaneously to the conclusion that species were
not separate creations and immutable, but de
scendants of pre-existing simpler forms and ca
pable of undergoing modifications. From that
day to this there has been a ferment of specula
tion on the origin of species. Early in the cen
tury it took the form of an antagonism between
creation and evolution. Are our species of plants
and animals primeval creations, or modified de
scendants of simpler species ? A horse is different
from a zebra ; a man is different from a monkey
—were they created different, or is each pair de
scended from a common ancestor? The evolu
tionary view of the question was maintained
throughout the first third of our century by the
\ eminent French naturalist, Lamarck, "whose
conclusions on the subject excited much attention."

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 53

" He first did the eminent service," says Darwin,
" of arousing attention to the probability of all
change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic,
world being the result of law, and not of mirac
ulous interposition." He held that organic beings
were modified by the action of the physical con
ditions of life, by the crossing of already existing
forms, and by the effects of habit — of use or of
disuse. It is due to constant use, e.g., in brows
ing on the branches of trees that the neck of the
giraffe has grown to such an abnormal length.

Lamarck was the true precursor of Darwin.
And Darwin's " Origin of Species " was the cul
minating point of evolutionary biology. That
work may be called the embodiment of its au
thor's intellectual life from his twenty-second to
his fiftieth year. What, now, was the theory
which Darwin struck out and elaborated in these
twenty-eight years ? What was Darwin's original
contribution to that hypothesis of evolution with
which his name is now so generally associated ?
Well, in the first place, it was not the general / \i
theory of development — the theory which sup- ! /
poses that everything, instead of being created as
it is, has reached its present precise and deter
minate form only after passing through an infin
itude of lower stages. And, secondly, it was not

54 Darwin s Contribution.

^ the particular biological application of this gen-
^ ' eral doctrine, seeing that Lamarck and other
naturalists had maintained before Darwin that
our species of plants and animals were growths,
and not independent and immutable creations.
-N But Darwin's original contribution to the evolu-
?T tionary theory was a demonstration of the mech
anism by which the development of species had
been effected. To take a specific example, he
undertook to show how it happened, by what
means it was brought about, that from one an
cestral species there could have descended, in the
course of thousands on thousands of generations,
four species so distinct as the horse, the ass, the
quagga, and the zebra, j^

In explaining how species originated, Darwin
got most help from the study of domesticated
animals and cultivated plants. The initial and
even fundamental fact of his whole theory is the
tendency of all living beings to vary ; and the
variations, which are generally minute and in
definite, are especially noticeable in our cultivated
plants and domesticated animals. Thus every
boy knows how much rabbits in a hutch differ
from one another in the hue of their fur, the
length of their ears, etc.; and anybody who has
paid the least attention to dogs, horses, cows, or

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 55

other animals, or even to plants, will readily ad
mit that each individual has peculiarities which
mark it off from its fellows. This, then, is the

/-/ firstjfact to which Darwin calls attention — indi
viduals of the same species, descendants of the
same parents, differ from one another by small,
insignificant, and indefinite variations. The sec-

MJ) ond fact is that these differences may be trans
mitted to offspring ; they may be inherited. And

\ the third fact is that man, by attending to those
variations which are useful or pleasing to him,
may originate breeds so diverse as the dray- and
the race-horse, or the greyhound and the race-
hound, or the carrier- and the tumbler-pigeon.
Man creates nothing ; he waits for the variations
which nature gives; and then selecting those
which are useful or pleasing to him, he preserves
them, and in preserving accumulates them,
throughout successive generations. Man's power
of accumulative selection is, therefore, the key
to the origin of our diverse breeds of domesti
cated animals and cultivated plants. And the
influence of this power cannot well be overesti
mated. Speaking of what breeders had done for
sheep, Lord Somerville observed, " It would seem
as if they had chalked out upon a wall a form
perfect in itself, and then had given it existence."

56 Domestic Breeds Formed by Man.

Take another species, and consider the numerous
breeds of pigeons — the carrier, the tumbler, the
runt with its long beak, the barb with its short
one, the pouter with its enormous crop which it
glories in inflating, the turbit with its reversed
breast-feathers, the trumpeter and laugher with
their peculiar coo, the f antail with its forty tail-
feathers instead of fourteen. Yet these astonish
ingly diverse breeds are all descended from the
wild rock -pigeon of the European coasts ; and
Darwin, who was a great pigeon-fancier and
member of two of the London pigeon-clubs,
found no difficulty in explaining the origin of all
these varieties from man's power of selecting and
accumulating the individual peculiarities which
nature was always presenting. Suppose, e.g., that
some tamed rock-pigeons, ages ago, happened to
have more than fourteen tail-feathers. A pigeon-
fancier is struck with the peculiarity, and pre
serves these individuals. Their descendants may
have sixteen tail-feathers, or perhaps more. In
the course of countless generations, pigeons may,
as a result of man's constant selection, be pro
duced with twenty or thirty tail-feathers, till at
last the fantail appears with its full quota of
forty.

Have we not here some light on our question

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 57

of the origin of species ? "We have seen that the
various races of our domesticated animals and
cultivated plants have been formed by man.
Nature presents individual differences ; man pre
serves those beings whose peculiar modifications
are useful or pleasing to him ; these peculiarities
are transmitted to offspring, and in transmission
through successive generations are accumulated,
till forms arise which we call varieties, but which
in fact are scarcely distinguishable from genuine
species. Domestic races are thus made by man
through his power of accumulative selection. But
the species of animals and plants in a state of
nature cannot be thus produced by man. How,
then, do they originate ? Is there any agency
analogous to the selection practised by man?

Man forms domestic races, which are " incipi
ent species," by selecting certain natural variations
in organisms and accumulating them by trans
mission through successive generations. In the
absence of man, could the modifications which
are constantly appearing in organic beings be
preserved and accumulated ? Darwin affirms
they could on one condition — that they are bene
ficial or directly useful to the creature modified.
The demonstration of that process constitutes at
once Darwin's solution of the origin of species

58 Selection the Means.

and his original contribution to the hypothesis of

evolution. It was the spark which kindled into

life the long-prepared materials for biological

*x science. The thought of natural selection, of a

i universal struggle for life and survival of the

\ ~ fittest^was the soul with which Darwin informed

the scientific body fashioned by his predecessors.

Tn that thought, and that alone, consists, as

Haeckel says, the essential service which Darwin

rendered to modern science.

But what in particular is the nature of this new
formative conception ? and how did it originate
in Darwin's mind ? The latter question Darwin
himself enables us to answer. After he had at
tained, through a study of domestic productions,
a just conception of the power of selection, it
dawned upon him, " on reading Malthus ( On
Population,' that natural selection was the inevi
table result of the rapid increase of all organic
beings." And he justly describes his own cardi
nal principle as " the doctrine of Malthus applied
with manifold force to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdoms." It was with man that
Malthus, an English reactionary against the social
optimism of the school of Rousseau, was primarily,
if not exclusively, concerned. He saw a barrier
set to the realization of their dream of the happi-

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 59

ness of human society in the constant tendency of
population to multiply faster than the means of
subsistence. While human beings tend to in
crease in a geometrical ratio, food can at best be
increased only in an arithmetical ratio. The in
evitable result is starvation. And starvation is
the ultimate check to population. But although
the ultimate, it is not the immediate check ; since,
in ordinary circumstances, the unrestrained in
crease of human beings is prevented by pruden
tial considerations with regard to marriage, by
brutal and revolting practices, and by such ruth
less destroyers as disease, war, pestilence, and the
whole train of human miseries.

Such is the principle of Mai thus. It has be
come a constituent part of political economy,
giving its tone, one might almost say, to the treat
ise of Mill. And it has become the germjnant
idea of biology, accounting, in the hands of Darwin,
for the formation of varieties and the origin of
species of plants and animals in a state of nature.

Let us now endeavor to follow Darwin's account
of the process.

The first moment is the excessive fecundity of
nature, which Darwin was enabled to realize from
his observation of the teeming, self-strangling life
of the forests of Brazil. But to take a less favor-

60 Fecundity of Organisms.

able case, consider the elephant, which is the slow
est breeder of all known animals. Yet, at the
minimum rate of increase, a single pair would
" after a period of from seven hundred and forty
to seven hundred and fifty years " have " nearly
nineteen million" living descendants. "Even
slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five
years, and, at this rate, in less than a thousand
years there would literally not be standing-
room for his progeny." Or, consider the case of
plants. There is no plant which does not produce
more than two seeds ; yet, merely at that rate of
increase, an annual plant would, in the course of
twenty years, produce a million plants. Without
adding examples, we may now realize Darwin's
general statement "that every organic being natu
rally increases at so high a rate that, if not de
stroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the
progeny of a single pair." Hence, as infinitely
more individual animals and plants are produced
than can possibly survive, nature must be the
scene of universal competition. " There must in
every case be a struggle for existence, either one
individual with another of the same species, or
with the individuals of distinct species, or with
the physical conditions of life." Existence is an
appalling tragedy, with the universe for its scene,

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 61

/ and for time the duration of geological ages ; its
characters are made up of that infinitude of indi
viduals which constitute the organic world ; but
so full of horrors is the drama that most of the ac
tors are cut down at their first entrance upon the
stage, while those who escape are doomed to a
never-ending struggle for life, in which only the
strongest and the best favored have any chance
of reaching the second scene, that opens, like
the first, with mutual conflict and all but uni
versal extermination. Now, in this struggle of all
against all, and of each with the conditions of
life, it is easy to see that the struggle will gen
erally be most severe between closely related or
ganisms, between species of the same genus, or
individuals and varieties of the same species, ow
ing, of course, to the similarity of their structure,
constitution, and habits. The fish does not com
pete with the bird ; and of birds, swallow com
petes against swallow, and robin against robin.
So complex, however, is the web of relations
by which all organic beings of the same country
are bound together that helps or checks to the in
crease of a species frequently come from the most
distant and unexpected sources. Who would have
suspected that the growth of red clover was largely
dependent on cats ? Yet, as this flower can be f er-

62 Struggle for Life.

tilized only by the humble-bee, and bumble-bees
flourish only where mice do not destroy their
combs and nests, and mice are destroyed by cats,
we can see that without cats there would be no
combs and nests, no bees, and therefore no fertili
zation of clover.

Directly or indirectly, then, the animal and
vegetable kingdoms are, owing to the enormous
rate at which living beings tend to increase, the
scene of universal competition and struggle for
existence, in which the great majority must inev
itably perish. We have seen, however, -that all
living beings are subject to slight modifications;
and taking account of the infinite complexity of
the relations of all organic beings to one another,
and to their conditions of life, it would be strange
if some of these modifications were not more ben
eficial than others. In that case the individuals
that have happened to undergo this profitable va
riation would have an advantage over their rivals.
They would, accordingly, be victorious in the
struggle for life ; and transmitting their benefi
cial peculiarities to descendants, these would enjoy
a similar advantage. Such favored forms would
spread and conquer, while their rivals would
first decline and then become utterly extinct.
This is what Darwin means by natural selection,

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 63

or survival of the fittest, in the struggle for exist
ence.

See, now, the result. As, man forms domestic
races by selecting and preserving through succes
sive generations those individuals whose peculiar
modifications are useful or pleasing to Mm, so, in
the struggle for life, individuals with modifications
useful to themselves are preserved, while their less-
favored rivals are killed out ; and in transmitting
to their offspring the peculiarities which enabled
them to survive, they begin the formation of a
distinct variety, which, in the lapse of geological
ages, may emerge as a new species. Man forms ^ >
species through selective breeding, the result of
his own choice ; nature forms species from that
selective breeding which is the necessary conse
quence of the extermination of rivals and sur
vival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.

This, then, is Darwin's theory of the origin of
species. Assuming that species were not special
creations, fixed and immutable, Darwin shows
how all the species of any one genus have been
developed from a single stock by means of natu
ral selection, or survival of the fittest, in the strug
gle for life. The horse, the ass, the quagga, and
the zebra are not originally distinct species, but
descendants of a common ancestor, modified

64 Formation of Species.

through natural selection. And as other species
may, in the same way, be reduced to a single
primitive form, it is clear that the number of
original species will be exceedingly limited. In
deed, some naturalists hold that all the organic
beings which have ever lived on this earth may
be descended from some one primordial form.
And even the cautious Darwin maintains that all
" animals are descended from at most only four
or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or
lesser number."

In this genealogical table of all living beings
man cannot be separated from the apes. Both
are modified descendants of the same progenitors.
This deduction from Darwin's theory of natural
selection, now, is confirmed by a comparison of
the two species. In the first place, their struct
ure is not only on the same fundamental plan,
but presents a complete correspondence of parts.
If you compare the gorilla with man, you will
find, it is true, that its brain-case is smaller, its
trunk larger, its lower limbs shorter, its upper
limbs longer, in proportion, than those of man ;
but in all these respects the other apes depart
still more widely from the gorilla. And what
ever organ or system of organs be selected for
comparison, whether the vertebral column, the

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 65

skull, the teeth, the hand, the foot, or even the
brain, it has been established by Huxley, after the
most careful determination of form and weight
and number, that in every visible character " the
structural differences which separate man from
the gorilla and chimpanzee are not .so great as
those which separate the gorilla from the lower
apes." Secondly, the minute structure and com
position of the tissues and blood of monkeys is
closely similar to our own. They are liable to
our diseases, and have been known to suffer from
catarrh, consumption, apoplexy, fever, etc. Their
nervous system, too, is similarly affected. They
often take to tea, coffee, tobacco, and spirituous
liquors. They have been known to get drunk ;
and on the following morning they have exhib
ited the perfectly human phenomenon of I£atz-
enjammer, with its complication of headache,
doleful countenance, and disgust with beer or
wine, but relish for the juice of lemons. An
American monkey, we are told, after once getting
drunk on brandy, would never taste it again.
Shall we call this the simian stage of American
teetotalism? Thirdly, man possesses in a rudi
mentary condition organs or parts which are
regularly present in some of the lower animals.
These now useless parts and organs can be ex-

66 Mans Kinship with the Apes.

plained only on the assumption that man is de
scended from some lower animal in which these
rudiments were useful. But in monkeys many
of the same parts are in a rudimentary condition ;
hence, monkeys will have a genealogy similar to
man's. JL^ fourthly, embiyologists have shown
that in the early stages of its existence the young
human being goes through the same development
as the young ape, and in the later stage, if
marked differences appear, the human being is
not more unlike the dog than the ape is. •

Man, then, must be ranked in the same order
with the apes. The whole simian stock, includ
ing man, has sprung from the same progenitors.
And the structure and condition of this common
ancestor may even now be dimly discerned by
anyone who can interpret the human and simian
characteristics we have just mentioned. Such an
observer would discover that the early progeni
tor of man was a hairy, tailed quadruped, proba
bly arboreal in his habits, and a denizen of
some warm, forest- clad land in the Old World.
But behind this Adam even there is a pre-\
Adamite. If we look still farther back in the dim VI
recesses of time, we shall see the genealogical line t ^
running through a long series of diversified forms v)
of marsupial, of reptile, of fish, to an ultimate

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 67

ancestral animal — a fish-like creature, which
united both sexes in itself, and in which the lungs
existed as a float and the heart as a simple pul
sating vessel. No paradise was the birthplace of
this first parent, but the shore of a restless sea,
whose changes by day and b,y month begot in
him that periodicity of function which, like an '<
echo over eternities, to this cKy survives in his
latest human descendant.

This, then, is Darwin's new hypothesis in nat
ural history. I have had to limit myself to the
merest outline. But I must adsl, before pass
ing on, that Darwin develops his theory with a
fecundity of intellectual resources a wealth of
observations and experiments, a skill in the group
ing of evidence, and, more than all, *vith an ex
treme of caution in speculation and an extreme of
candor in weighing the arguments of opponents,
which no one can fail to recognize ail marvellous
in itself and even honorable to our common hu
manity. Hasty, however, as our sketch has been,
it will now, I think, be clear what the essential
moment of the Darwinian theory really is? Were
we asked to define it, we should say, Darvinism is
the application of the law of natural selecVon —
i.e., struggle for life and survival of the fittcot —
to account for the development of life and the

68 Darwin s Achievement.

origin of species throughout the whole organic
world. It is only a part of the general theory
of evolution. For evolutionism is that conception

•N. ^••OHMMMMwMMM^«MiM«lMM^*MBM^^^H^"^""«dkBMB^

Ou of the universe which regards it as the result,
not of an act, but of a process, which holds that
it is not now what it was in the beginning, but
has become what it is through a series of slow and
gradual changes, whereby growth, development,
or progress has been effected, and all purely by
the action of causes immanent in the universe.
This evolutionism is as old as human thought,
and it had explained before Darwin the process
of development in the inorganic world. Further,
it had asserted development as a law of life and
originator of species ; but causes adequate to
such a result it had not discovered. It was this
lack that Darwinism supplied with natural selec
tion.

It is not the province of the present investiga
tion to inquire into the truth of evolutionism and
of Darwinism. Assuming them true, we have to
ask, What follows ? But before raising that ques
tion I may be allowed to observe, as a simple his
torical fact, that no one nowadays seems to doubt
the validity of the general theory of evolution.
That the genesis of the cosmos and of the earth
which we inhabit is not explained by a single

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 69

creative act, but implies a process extending
over the immensity of geological ages, is ad
mitted by everyone at all conversant with the gen
eral results of modern astronomy and geology.
And " so far as the animal world is concerned,"
we have the high authority of Professor Huxley
for the assurance that " evolution is no longer a
speculation, bul: a statement of historical fact." /
Observation has done for the natural sciences pre
cisely the reverse of what criticism has done for
the Homeric poems — it has turned a number of
separate stories into a continuous epic, an epic
which traces the world-events from that homo
geneous chaos "in the beginning" to the defi
nite, coherent, heterogeneous cosmos of to-day.
While, however, evolutionism is generally accept
ed in some form or other, theistic or' naturalistic,
rationalistic or agnostic (in itself it is absolutely
neutral between these metaphysical theories), there
is not the same unanimity of verdict, even in the
scientific world, about Darwinism. There is no
doubt, I think, that the vast majority of what Pro
fessor Huxley calls the " hodmen of science" ac
cept Darwin's theory of natural selection, both in
itself and in Darwin's extensive application of it.
But it is yet a significant fact that leaders, perhaps
the leaders, of the scientific world give only a very

70 How Regarded by Scientists.

qualified adherence to Darwin's essential doctrine.
Helmholtz asserts that, while natural selection may
have been competent to produce varieties within
the same species, and even many so-called species,
the question of the descent of species in general,
and man in particular, is at present determined
rather by the preconceptions of individual in
vestigators than by the facts themselves. And
Yircliow, after claiming for experts alone the
final adjudication of the question (and this claim
every dispassionate thinker will concede), goes on
to observe that at the present time there is no
actual warrant for taking the step from the theory
of descent (which, let me say, was as fascinating
for Kant as for Darwin) to the fact of descent,
though, on the other hand, there is no ground for
maintaining that it is either impossible or irra
tional. More important still is the testimony of
Alfred Russell Wallace, the joint discoverer with
Darwin of the theory of natural selection. And
yet it is Wallace who tells us that " natural selec
tion could only have endowed the savage with a
brain a little superior to that of an ape." Lastly,
Darwin's friend and defender, Professor Huxley,
tempering his well-founded admiration with
equally well-founded scepticism, reminds us in
no uncertain tones that our " acceptance of the

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 71

Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional so long
as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting ;
and so long as all the animals and plants certainly
produced by selective breeding from a common
stock are fertile, and their progeny are fertile with
one another, that link will be wanting. For so
long selective breeding will not be proved to be
competent to do all that is required of it to pro
duce natural species." So that "it yet remains
to be seen," as lie tersely puts it, in a later work,
" how far natural selection suffices for the produc
tion of species."

According to most eminent authorities, then,
the case stands thus : Biology has demonstrated,
as matter of historic fact, that life first appeared
on our globe in plant-form, that it next emerged
in the lower animals, and thence passing by in
numerable gradations through beings of increasing
complexity of organ and function it culminated
in man. There is, therefore, evolution in the
organic world, as science has already traced it in
the inorganic. But the cause of this evolutionary
movement in the history of organisms has not as
yet been established ; though it is probable Dar
win's natural selection is a part of the cause. In
other words, we know that there has been evolu
tion, but we are not yet certain how it has been

72 The Missing Evidence.

brought about ; we know, as Dr. Martineau puts
it, the when of evolution, but not the whence.

That the missing evidence in the evolutionary
theory of causation may yet be supplied, everyone
who has felt the divine impulse to science will
ardently hope, as the more enthusiastic, indeed,
confidently predict. In fact, the belief in the ul
timate perfectibility, if not in the present perfec
tion, of the doctrine has become a part of the
scientific fanaticism with which our age matches
the religious fanaticism of the sixteenth century.
And so it happens that the majority of readers
are scarcely aware of the hitches in the Darwinian
argument any more than they were formerly aware
of the intellectual difficulties in the way of many
accepted theological dogmas. For all such minds,
now, any inquiry into the ethical significance of
Darwinism will be without weight unless the
theory in its entirety be accepted as initial truth.
I propose, therefore, without further ado, to as
sume, for argument's sake, that the Darwinian
hypothesis has been completely established ; and
I would, then, invite Darwinists to join me in an
impartial attempt to interpret that hypothesis,
and to determine its bearings upon the problems
of morals. "Whether there actually exists, as the
late George Henry Lewes imagined, a wide-spread

Evolutionism and Darwinism. 73

fear and dread of science, I shall not pretend to
determine ; but if it exists, it is certainly an an
achronism. For the scientist is the veritable ruler
of the modern world. And, for my own part, I
can understand no feeling but that of admiration
and loyalty towards the man who, from no other
motive than the simple love of truth, gives his
days and nights for weary years to spelling out

(that mystic language which God has illuminated
by the central fires of the world, traced in the
orbits of planets, graven upon the strata of the
earth's crust, and sent echoing round the great
globe in the rhythmic pulse-beat of all organic life.
Such men were Kepler, Faraday, Agassiz, and
l Darwin. Thanks to these, and such as these, we
I can to-day read a little in nature's book of infinite
s secrecy. The gradual development of all organic
,)and inorganic existence they seem already to have
Completely spelled out. How that development
was effected in the domain of life is still a mys
tery ; but for argument's sake, I repeat, we are
ready to let Darwin's hypothesis of " Natural Se
lection" stand for the yet undeciphered hiero
glyphic.

CHAPTER in.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE DAR
WINIAN HYPOTHESIS.

The function of natural selection in the origi
nation of species of plants and animals has, I trust,
been sufficiently described and illustrated in the
preceding chapter. We must now go on to in
quire into the philosophical significance of the
doctrine. And, obviously, the main point can
be no other than a precise determination of what
it really is that natural selection explains, as well
as of what is left unexplained by it, in the origin
of species of organic beings.

Scientific explanation consists in the assign
ment of a phenomenon to its causes. These causes
must be known natural agencies. It may well be,
indeed, that speculative reason is unable to stop
at such causes, involving, as they do, an inconceiv
able regression in infinitum • but it is solely of
these secondary causes that science takes account.
And when this limitation of its province is con
sidered, it must be conceded that science is clearly

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 75

in the right in refusing to recognize supernatural
activity as a relevant explanation of natural phe
nomena.

But it was a dogma of this kind which Darwin
found in the biology of his day regarding the ori
gin of species. He substituted for it a scientific
hypothesis of the development of life by means
of purely natural causes. He did not deny the
ultimate creative or preservative agency of God,
with which as a biologist he was not called upon
to deal ; nor is his theory at bottom a contradic
tion of the essence of that theological doctrine,
for the two belong to totally different orders of
interpretation. With complete neutrality towards
such speculative matters, he asserted merely that
the manifestation of life on our globe was
through a process of evolution, of which natural
selection was the proximate cause, be the ulti
mate cause what it may. "Whether this hypoth
esis be true or not, it is at least an attempt to
solve the scientific problem which, on the other
hand, is simply overleaped by the transcendental
doctrine of divine creation. It is the only kind
of explanation that science can consider legiti
mate.

The phenomenon to be accounted for — the ori
gin of species — is by Darwin referred to vercs

76 Scientific Explanation.

causce, to agencies actually known to be in opera
tion. The excessive fecundity of all organic be
ings, the limited means of subsistence, the inev
itable struggle for life, the advantage accruing,
in this struggle, to some individuals in conse
quence of slight modifications in organ or func
tion, structure or habit, such as nature in liberal
variety is perennially turning up, the preserva
tion of these favored forms, and the consolidation
and accumulation, through transmission to suc
cessive generations, of their beneficial peculiar
ities until first varieties and then species are pro
duced — these are facts which every observer
may verify for himself, and which, it is almost
universally conceded, account for the origin of
many, if not of all, organic species. And for the
scientist who finds no species too marked for gen
esis through this common process the problem
has been completely solved.

But where science ends philosophy begins.
The one is concerned with the discovery of pro
cesses, the other lias to analyze the ultimates —
realities or conceptions, being or thought- — which
the processes everywhere involve. While science,
accordingly, sees no difference between the vari
ous links of the causal chain with which Darwin
draws out the development of life, philosophy

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 77

fixes at once upon a fundamental contrast between
the initial variations and the subsequent means
of their preservation. It regards the former as
infinitely more significant than the latter. For the
variations are the ultimate material out of which
species are built up ; and though the manner of
their consolidation is an important problem for
science, philosophy is interested only in the
what f and whence f of the variations themselves.
Or, otherwise expressed, every new species being
the sum of a series of variations, philosophy is
concerned with the units, science with the mode
of their addition. And this mode it is which
Darwin has unfolded in his theory of natural selec
tion, or survival of the fittest. There have been
objections to the theory, especially to the somewhat
startling assumption that the results of man's pur
posive selection in breeding could be attained —
and that, too, on a much larger scale — by the blind
and purposeless operations of nature ; but grant
ing all that the hypothesis requires of us, we are
still in presence of the fact that natural selection,
or survival of the fittest, can accomplish nothing
until it is supplied with material for " selection,"
until there has appeared upon the field an ante
cedent " fittest "—a fittest organ, function, habit,
instinct, constitution, or entire organism. Natu-

78 Philosophic Explanation.

ral selection produces nothing ; it only culls from
. what j^already in existence. The survival of the
fittest is an eliminative, not an originative, process.
And yet it is the explication of this apparently
subsidiary process that constitutes Darwinism.
The fact of variations in organic beings having
been demonstrated from the experience of breed
ers, the sphinx of science was the problem of their
accumulation into specific characters. It was not
the business of biology to consider what the fact
of variations implied. That falls to philosophy,
whose function it is to examine the starting-
points and first principles with which the various
sciences uncritically set about their specific task.

The survival of the fittest, I repeat, does not
explain the arrival of the fittest. Natural selec
tion is a term connoting the fact that of the in
numerable variations occurring in organisms only
the most beneficial are preserved, but it indicates
nothing concerning the origin or nature of these
variations. As in them, however, is ^veloped
all that is subsequently ^veloped, they form the
sole ground for philosophizing in connection with
Darwinian science.

Fortunately, too, Darwin and his followers
have not left us in utter darkness with regard
to the rise of these modifications, which, as we

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 79

have just said, constitute the material for natural
selection. In the earlier editions of the " Origin
of Species " much influence was ascribed to the
external conditions of life, which Geoffrey Saint
Hilaire, a generation before, had declared the
principal cause of change. But apart from the
environment, Darwin always maintained, with
Lamarck, that habit, or use and disuse, played a
considerable part in the modification of the con
stitution and structure. Thus if, as is the case,
the bones of the wing of the domestic duck weigh
less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion
to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in
the wild duck, the change may be safely attrib
uted, he tells us, to the domestic duck flying
much less and walking more than its wild par
ents. Lastly, there are modifications which emerge
as concomitants or indirect effects of other modifi
cations. The whole organism is so conjoined and
knitted together during its growth and develop
ment, that when slight variations occur and are
accumulated in one part, other parts become modi
fied, too. A curious instance of this correlated
variation, not in process, but in complete realiza
tion, is presented by the uniform conjunction of
deafness with blue eyes in perfectly white cats.
But however much be ascribed to the influence

8o The Origin of Modifications.

of external conditions, of habit, and of correla
tion, Darwin found these factors incompetent to
produce the variations presupposed for natural
selection in his theory of the origin of species.
Accordingly, while they retain their place in the
later editions of his work, they are there over
shadowed by a more potent cause of modification,
which is nothing less than a force inherent in the

O

organism itself — u an innate tendency to new va
riations " or a " spontaneous variability," as it is
indifferently called. The environment is, I have
said, still recognized as one of the factors of
change ; but since it is shown that similar varie
ties are produced from the same species in differ
ent environments, and dissimilar varieties in the
same environment, it is established that the nat
ure of the organism is a much more important
factor than the nature of the external conditions
of life. ""We clearly see," says Darwin, " that
the nature of the conditions is of subordinate im
portance, in comparison with the nature of the
organism, in determining each particular form of
variation ; perhaps of not more importance than
the nature of the spark, by which a mass of
combustible matter is ignited, has in determining
the nature of the flames." And if he objects to
Ivageli's or Mivart's formulation of an innate

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 81

tendency towards progressive and more perfect
development, it is only because the phrase seemed
to suggest an " internal force beyond the ten
dency to ordinary variability," not that he* did
not agree with them in holding to some kind of
an " inherent tendency to vary."

This, then, is our first determination regarding
the variations which supply material for natural
selection to work upon. They originate, we know
not how, in the nature of the organism. Nor
would the state of the case be essentially altered
if it were demonstrated, in opposition to Darwin,
that every organic modification was occasioned
by some external stimulus. For the change thus
set up in the organism in response to the foreign
excitation would obviously derive its character
from the constitution of the organism, just as, to
use Darwin's own example, the peculiarity of a
flame is due to the constitution of the combustible
materials, and not to the igniting spark.

So much of the origin of the variations. With
regard to their nature, it may be either definite
or indefinite. That is to say, the offspring of
individuals exposed to given conditions during
several generations may be modified in a similar
or a dissimilar manner. Indefinite variability is
the general rule, according to Darwin, who, in
6

82 Their Indefinite Character.

fact, takes account of no other in liis theory of
the origin of species. lie seems to conceive of
the organization as absolutely plastic, in unsta
ble equilibrium, and only apparently at rest at
a point radiating infinite directions for further
movement. The variations, being altogether in
definite, offer themselves to natural selection for
any line of development, but not for any partic
ular line. And Darwin was accordingly supposed
to have substituted chance for design, a fortui
tous evolution for a purposive creation. It turns
out, however, that his assertion of indefinite va
riability was premature, and that in any case it
has no necessary connection with natural selec
tion, which, according to the latest statement of
Professor Huxley, would operate equally well
" if variability is definite, and is determined in
certain directions rather than in others, by con
ditions inherent in that which varies." And the
advance in doctrine is still more strikingly illus
trated when Professor Huxley goes on to say, " it
is quite conceivable that every species tends to
produce varieties of a limited number and kind,
and that the effect of natural selection is to favor
the development of some of these, while it op
poses the development of others along their pre
determined line of modification." This limita-

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 83

tion of the number of variations and the prede
termination of their character are conceptions
foreign, I believe, to Darwin's habitual mode of
thought, but they may now be considered tenets
of the school ; and Professor Asa Gray, adopting
categorically the suggestion of Professor Huxley,
declares, "The facts, so far as lean judge, do
not support the assumption of every-sided and in
different variations." ^ -* —

The nature and the origin of the modifica
tions being described, we have next to fix atten
tion upon the process of their accumulation into
specific characters. It is the exhibition of this
process that constitutes the peculiar glory of Dar
winian science. And to science, certainly, as the
register of nature's operations, the whole subject
of natural selection properly belongs. But when
the designation for a purely natural process has,
through the suggestions of metaphor and the use
of capital letters, come to stand 'for something
more than a process, and, from constant association
with an extraneous metaphysics, has acquired the
potency of a conjurer's formula in the philoso
phy of life, mind, and conscience, it is high time
to set about the perennial problem of laying the
dust raised by dogmatic metaphysicians, who are
all the more insidious when they disown their

84 How Accumulated.

vocation and come to us in the name of posi
tive science with the prestige that science gives.
Darwinism, like every great principle when first
discovered, intoxicated and unbalanced its dev
otees ; with license unrestrained, it has been ap
plied to fundamental problems of the natural and
the spiritual world. But the ultimate mysteries of
existence forever baffle, as they ever fascinate, the
scientific understanding of man, and an age of confi
dent construction is always followed by an aveng
ing age of destructive criticism ; so that the high-
towering, wride-extending edifice under which but
yesterday intellectual mankind reposed in peace is
seen to-morrow as a conventional structure, whose
former magnitude and splendor arose solely from
an optical illusion distorting the perspective and
true relations of things. It is with such specula
tions as with the pandemonic councillors :

" They but now who seem'd
In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount, or farey elves."

In the march of mind, if the discovery of new
theories is indispensable, equally so is the reduc
tion of the monstrous shapes which they too soon

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 85

assume to normal proportions conformable to
reality. And pending the morrow of the Dar
winian and post-Darwinian speculations, we may
to-day examine what natural selection is and
what it is not, what it can do and what it can
not do.

To maintain that Darwin, who has taught
us all we know about the subject, gives an incor
rect account of natural selection would of course
be paradoxical. Nor, in the absence of new light
from scientific discoveries, is anyone likely to
hazard such a judgment. Nevertheless, it will
be found that whoever is resolute to see clearly
the fact which Darwin means to indicate by the
term " natural selection " must look beneath the
phraseology in which it is described, else the es
sence of the matter will be missed amid the
distracting associations of highly figurative lan
guage.

Not, of course, that metaphors are unintelligible,
or even undesirable. Only the recollection of the
warring creeds that have sprung from biblical
imagery, and of the opposing systems of philos
ophy that have turned on the comparison of the
mind to a waxen tablet, suggests the necessity of
looking away from a metaphorical expression like
natural selection to the actual fact which it was

86 Metaphorical Explanation.

intended to denote. Now, that fact, in utter
nakedness, is nothing more than the survival, in
the struggle for life, of an individual that has
somehow undergone modifications useful to it
under the actual conditions of existence. Or, in
Darwin's own words, "This preservation of fa
vorable individual differences and variations, and
the destruction of those which are injurious, I
have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of
the Fittest." The process, therefore, does not
touch the origin of the variations, or even the
accumulation of them. Natural selection pro
duces nothing, either at the beginning or in the
progress of the development ; it means only that
when the variations have somehow appeared the
most advantageous are preserved, and that when
these favored forms have been somehow propa
gated, and thereby somehow consolidated, the most
favored again survive in the struggle. Nature
originates the modifications, nature propagates
them, nature accumulates them through propaga-
gation ; but how all this is done is a mystery on
which science throws no light, and the personifi
cation of nature serves only to disguise our real
ignorance. On the other hand, we can under
stand from the well-known fact of the increase
of life beyond the means of subsistence that,

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 87

given the creations, the transmissions, the accu
mulations, the worst favored must perish and
only the fittest survive ; and this fact it is — this
single ray of light athwart a path of darkness
unpenetrated — that Darwin designates natural
selection.

Now, the personification of nature is quite legit
imate, and often unavoidable^ But when a mere
event of nature, like the one we have just de
scribed, comes to be invested with a title so sug
gestive of volitional attributes as " Natural Selec
tion " is, the imagination cannot fail to run riot
with the understanding, and the mind is apt to
become the slave of what Bacon calls the idola
fori. It would indeed be in itself a thankless
task to point out the warping influence of met
aphorical language on the mind of a great in
vestigator like Darwin, but when his lapses
(which may do no harm in science) are made the
grounds of a metaphysical and ethical philoso
phy, the task, however ungrateful, must be under
taken.

The term natural selection is borrowed by
analogy from that purposive selection practised
by man in the rearing of domesticated animals
and cultivated plants. We have already seen that
breeders form varieties that pass for " incipient

88 What Man does in Selection.

species." This result is due to the accumulation
in one direction, during many generations, of
slight differences, differences that may be wholly
inappreciable to the uneducated eye and touch.
" The key," says Darwin, " is man's power of
accumulative selection ; nature gives successive
variations ; man adds them up in certain direc
tions useful to him. " Kow, this mode of language
(of which I have hitherto availed myself) is not
capable of misinterpretation in relation to man ;
for everybody knows it is only by metaphor that
man can be said to have the power of accumulat
ing variations or adding them up. It is very
manifest that man can do nothing towards the re
sult except leave the varieties that please him fiee
to breed together. As it is nature that gives the
modifications, so it is nature that consolidates
them ; man's power is limited to selecting from
the materials given by nature that on which he
wishes her further to operate. But that simple
intervention does not explain the accumulation
any more than the origination of variations ; and,
for the rest, we have to confess that u the laws
governing inheritance are for the most part un
known." The breeder's conscious selection, then,
is not the cause, but at most the negative condi
tion, of the origin of domestic races.

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 89

ISTow, in organic beings in a state of nature the
struggle for life effects what man's purposive
selection effects for domesticated animals ; by re
moving other forms it leaves only those with cer
tain peculiar modifications free to breed together.
It is true that in the one case these modifications
are such as are pleasing or useful to man ; in the
other they are such as are serviceable to the indi
vidual in its competition with rivals. " Man selects
only for his own good ; nature only for that of the
being which she tends." But the main point is
that, just as domestic varieties arise from the se
lective breeding practised by man, natural varie
ties, which are " incipient species," arise from
that selective breeding 'due to the killing out of
competing, but less-favored, forms in the strug
gle for existence. And this natural selection,
Darwin holds, is as much superior to human se
lection as the works of nature are to art. " As
man," he tells us in a striking passage, " can pro
duce a great result with his domestic animals and
plants by adding up in any given direction indi
vidual differences, so could natural selection, but
far more easily, from having incomparably longer
time for action."

It has been objected that this attribution of
superior potency to natural selection, in compari-

90 Human and Natural Selection.

son with the purposive selection of man, involves
the conception of nature as an intelligent, active
being. Nature seems to do so much, it is urged,
only because you have personified her ; use un-
metaphorical language, and you will not make it
credible that blind natural processes can ever at
tain the ends realized by human design. But
tliis dogmatism cannot be established. For it
is certainly conceivable that that selective breed
ing by which man works all his results might be
brought about without the intervention of man.
All that is required is that organic beings which
have undergone some modification shall be al
lowed to propagate it, say, to breed together ; and
this would result as inevitably from the extermi
nation of all competing forms as from the exclu
sion of them practised by man. But extermina
tion does take place when variations occur in any
individual which give it an advantage over its
rivals in the struggle for life ; and since varia
tions useful to man do actually occur in organic
beings, it would be a most extraordinary fact if
none occurred useful to the beings themselves,
especially when we consider the vast possibili
ties for such useful variations contained in the in
finitely complex relations of all organic beings to
one another and to their environment. Assum-

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 91

ing, then, that such advantageous modifications
somehow arise, the beings thus characterized will
have the best chance of being preserved ; and
these serviceable peculiarities will be propagated
and, in successive generations, consolidated until
there emerge at last varieties, as strongly, or more
strongly marked than our domestic races. But
this preservation, or survival of the fittest, is what
Darwin calls natural selection. And it must
now be evident that we have the best grounds for
comparing its function in the development of
species with man's function in the formation of
domestic races.

Not the likening of nature's work to man's,
but the assignment to both natural and human
selection of results which they are incompetent to
produce, is the real valid objection to Darwin's
presentation of his theory. "We have already
seen that man can no more accumulate variations
than he can produce them ; accumulation is
simply a continuous production. And yet, while
Darwin concedes to Hooker and Asa Gray that
man " can neither originate varieties rior prevent
their occurrence," it is added — and that, too, in
passing from human to natural selection — that
" he can only preserve and accumulate such as do
occur." Only accumulate ! And then, of course,

92 Limits to Both.

it is assumed that natural selection accumulates,
too. " It may metaphorically be said that natu
ral selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing,
throughout the world, the slightest variations ;
rejecting those that are bad, preserving and add-
ing up all that are good." And since natural
selection is the name of an event that follows
from physical causes, the reader gets the impres
sion that the origin of species has at last been
referred to a system of purely natural causation.
But the true state of the case is very different.
No cause has been discovered for the origin of
those variations which, through inheritance, are
accumulated into specific characters ; and the
theist- who formerly believed in a supernatural
cause may hold to it still, if he only substitute
gradual for sudden creation. Do you say we
-need not postulate a transcendent cause ? Possi
bly not ; but there is nothing in Darwinism, in
the theory of natural selection, to take the func
tion assigned to that supernatural power. If
you refer the origination and accumulation of
variations to nature, it is not the nature known
to science, nature as a complex of phenomena
governed by physical laws, but the poet's
vision :

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 93

*'Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

But this conception of nature, however true,
is foreign to that system of efficient causes with
which alone scientific explanation is concerned.
If the scientist, in poetic exaltation, feels with
Pope that " God and nature only are the same,"
or with Goethe that " nature is the living garment
of God," he may speak of the variations out of
which specific characters are built up as having
natural causes, but he then uses the word " natu
ral " much in the same sense as ordinary people
attach to "supernatural." But the naturalist
who recognizes the limits of science will have to
confess that variations come in organisms we
know not whence, and are accumulated we know
not how (though we name the processes varia
bility and inheritance), and that natural selection
is only a designation for an event as simple as
this — that beings with the most serviceable va
riations survive in the struggle for existence.
Natural selection is not a power, scarcely even a

94 The Natural and the Supernatural.

process, but the result of a process — namely, of
that sifting of forms effected through the all-test
ing combat for life.

If this analysis of the fundamental conceptions
of the Darwinian theory be correct, much less is
really explained by that theory than its advocates
have been in the habit of supposing. In spite
of its prolific application to so many fields of in
quiry, one may still question whether in its na-
t tive province of biology the account given of the
! origin of species is not ultimately as supernatural
as the dogma which it displaced. It was rightly
urged against the latter that creation was not a
scientific conception, that explanation consisted in
correlating a phenomenon with other phenomena
and assigning it a place in the tissue of our ex
perience, and therefore that the reference of
species to a Creator was a mode of accounting for
them with which science could not be content.
But does the Darwinian theory enable us to rest
in purely natural causation ? It tells vis that
species are the strongly marked varieties that sur
vive in the struggle for life, and that these va
rieties are formed by the consolidation of modi
fications that spontaneously arise in organisms.
Here everything is assumed with the primitive
organisms and their innate tendency to vary.

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 95

Has not the mystery that shrouded the origin of
species been removed simply by the introduc
tion of a new mystery — the wonder of an organ
ism so constituted that it throws off progressive
modifications as materials for new species ? That
science may ultimately show such variability to
be a characteristic of organisms I do not as
sert or deny. My only contention is that that
aspect of the problem of the origin of species
which led men to refer them to a hyperphys-
ical agency would not thereby be removed ;
it would still reappear in the question, Whence
those germinal organisms with their wonderful
capabilities of differentiating into species ? And
to this question there is no satisfactory answer
within the province of natural or physical causa
tion. So that ultimately it comes to this — the
gradual development of species is one mode of
conceiving the action of supernatural causality,
the sudden formation of them is another. Dar
winism is an assertion that the former mode has
actually been followed, not a denial of the super-
natural ground which both processes presuppose.
If the " Origin of Species " opens with the thesis
that species are not independent and immutable
creations, but variable descendants of common
ancestral forms, it closes with the credo that it

96 Darwin s View of Creation.

was "by the Creator" that life with all its
potencies was " originally breathed " into these
ultimate types. Between this closing and that
opening declaration stands the principle of natu
ral selection, which implies that, of all the varie
ties produced by the spontaneous evolutions of the
descendants of those divinely created types, only
the fittest or most favored survive. But even
this sifting process has, ultimately regarded, a
supernatural ground. It depends upon the exist
ence of germinal organisms, their growth with
reproduction, inheritance, variability, and capa
city for increase beyond the means of subsist
ence — all of which must ultimately be attributed
to ' ' the Creator," who, according to Darwin,
breathed " life with its several powers " into the
primitive forms.

To evolutionary science as thus unfolded by
Darwin, or to evolutionary science pure and sim
ple without any such theistic reference, it is not
competent to philosophy to offer any objection.
Biology is clearly within its own province when
it follows the history of organisms and delineates
the processes or steps by which life has been
evolved. To this scientific investigation Darwin
ism makes a twofold contribution. It established,
from actual experiments with animals under do-

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 97

mestication, the modifiability of organisms, and
thus grounded the presumption that species had
been gradually formed. And, in the second
place, under the guidance of Maltlmsianism it
showed that the world is inhabited by its present
denizens, and not by others, in consequence of the
superiority of their modifications over those of
their rivals in the general struggle for existence.
This is the essential content of Darwinism. And
it is manifestly consistent with any philosophy,
empirical or rational, spiritualistic or material
istic, theistic or atheistic.

Nevertheless, I think every reader of the " Ori
gin of Species " would maintain that it seems to
explain something more than the natural processes
just indicated, and that, further, it is so far from
indifferent to philosophy that it draws much of ita
inspiration from a definite speculative system —
a system, too, essentially opposed to that theism
which the author occasionally appropriates. And
there can be no doubt about the fact that most of
the evolutionists have identified the new doctrine N
with a philosophy of mechanism and fortuity.
By pure physical causation they hold that every
thing has been produced from a primeval nebula,
or gas-cloud. It was in the beginning, and it has
evolved life, intelligence, self -consciousness, all

7

98 Darwin s Mechanical Philosophy.

reason in man, and the reflex of reason in the
order of the universe. Thus no case is left for
any hyperphysical agency, much less a creative,
designing intelligence.

But neither Darwinism nor evolutionism in
general really necessitates, or even warrants, such
a speculative inference. For if everything has
been evolved from that impalpable nebula, either
it was originally more than a nebula or it has been
added to, in the course of its development, from
a source beyond itself. An effect is simply its
cause translated ; and nothing can be developed
into actuality which was not enveloped potentially
in the germ. If a primitive ether has turned
into the cosmos with all that inhabit it, this evo
lution was possible only by the constant addition
of increments which, though singly so inappreci
able as to pass for nothing, are in their aggregate
so infinite that they constitute everything but
ether. Power adequate to the result there must
have been ; and it makes no difference whether
it be " concentrated on a moment or distributed
through incalculable ages." -And it surely is, as
Dr. Martineau has so happily observed, " a mean
device for philosophers thus to crib causation by
hair's-breadths, to put it out at compound inter
est through all time, and then disown the debt."

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 99

This jugglery with causality, as though in time
everything could be got out of almost nothing, is
the besetting sin of Darwinists. In Darwin him
self it takes the form of a dissolution of design
into chance. In spite of his own admission that
variations are determined by the nature of the
organism, and that the ancestral organisms were
divinely created and stocked with all the poten
cies that subsequently unfold themselves^ the
whole tone of the " Origin of Species " implies
that organic nature has been blindly shaped by
the mechanical operation of physical agencies, that
instincts,, functions, organs, and constitutions are
but special instances of order that survived after
the collapse of innumerable instances of disorder,
which the reckless gambling of natural forces has
been continuously producing since the first dawn
of life upon our earth, The normal develop
ment seems a special case among a thousand.
Instead of design, there is only a happy hit amid
countless failures^ Or, as Lange, rendering Dar
win, graphically illustrates the point : You would
not see evidence of purpose, much less of higher
wisdom or transcendent cleverness, in the conduct
of a man who, to kill a hare, fired a million pis
tols in all directions over a vast meadow ; or
who, to enter a locked room, bought ten thousand

ioo Teleology in Darwinism.

random keys and made trial of them all ; or whos
to have a house, built a city and turned the su
perfluous houses over to the mercy of wind and
weather. Thus the conception of design, which
Aristotle required for the understanding of all
nature, and which Kant could not dispense with
in reflecting upon organisms, is declared at last, by
the Darwinist, useless in science and unwarranted
in philosophy. And the famous argument from
final causes, which Paley illustrated from the
adaptations of a watch, seems to collapse at the
touch of Darwinism. " Suppose," says an emi
nent interpreter of that theory, " that anyone had
been able to show that the watch had not been
made directly by any person, but that it was the
result of the modification of another watch which
kept time but poorly, and that this, again, had
proceeded from a structure which could hardly be
called a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures
on the dial and the hands were rudimentary, and
that, going back and back in time, we come at
last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable
rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that
it had been possible to show that all these changes
had resulted from a tendency in the structure to
vary indefinitely, and, secondly, from something
in the surrounding world which helped all vari-

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 101

ations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper
and checked all those in other directions — then it
is obvious that the force of Paley's argument
would be gone."

Does, then, the doctrine of descent and Dar
winism give the death-blow to teleology ? This
is a question of vital importance for metaphysics
and ethics. And it is not too much to say that
the essential philosophical significance of Dar
win's work lies in its extra-scientific attempt to
explain the adaptations in plants and animals as
the blind outcome of purely mechanical causa
tion. Full of admiration for those exquisite
adaptations of one part of the organism to an
other part, and of one organic being to another
being, as well as of all organic beings to the phys
ical conditions of life, Darwin, after studying
them with marvellous insight and patience, pro
nounces them all results of " nature's power of
selection," of the struggle for life and survival of
the fittest, among the innumerable combinations
that have happened to arise.

Now, before inquiring into the warrant with
which fortuity is here substituted for design, two
preliminary remarks suggest themselves. The
first is that the doctrine of fortuitous combina
tions is not the outcome of modern evolutionary

IO2 Evolutionism formerly TeleologicaL

science, but the undemonstrated postulate of
every merely mechanical philosophy. It is as
old, therefore, as materialism ; and the Greek
atomists expounded it as skilfully as the mod
ern English biologists, who, in fact, as we have
already seen, were in this respect clearly antici
pated by Ernpedocles. Matter first, atoms first,
blind, groping mechanism first : that is the alter
native which the history of speculation has al
ways offered to the philosophy that holds intelli
gence to be the prius and nature but a means
for the realization of divine ideas. If Darwin
ian science tends to assimilate the former, it is,
I hope to show, equally compatible with the lat
ter. At most you can only claim that it stands
Janus-faced between avdy/crj and i>o£>9, indecisive
whether in the beginning was rv^rj or in the be
ginning was the \6yos.

The second remark is that the doctrine of
evolution, previously to the form it has recently
assumed at the hands of the empirical philoso
phers of England, was not, as Janet has observed,
usually opposed to the teleological, but to the me
chanical, conception of the world. It was a theory
of development from within, and in direct con
trast to every theory of agglomeration from with
out. Leibnitz is the father of modern evolution*

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 103

ism, the foundations of which were laid in his
law of continuity, his theory of insensible percep
tions, his principle of the infinitely little, and his
profound insight into the truth that " the present
is big with the future." And yet the evolution
ism of Leibnitz implies final causes, and is char
acterized by its antagonism to the geometrical
mechanism of Descartes and Spinoza. Schelling
and Hegel were evolutionists, but as remote from
the mechanism of the French school of their day
and the English school of ours as they were near
to the hylozoism of the ancient Greek cosmologists.

Evolutionism, then, is not mechanism. Nor, as
I think it can be shown, does the Darwinian doc
trine of descent with modifications necessarily
imply fortuity. Perhaps nothing in the " Origin
of Species " has lent more color to that view than
the account given of the formation of the eye
and of the origin of the peculiar instinct of the
cuckoo. And we may be sure that if not here,
then nowhere in Darwin, does the fortuitous
really play the role of a veritable artist, a dens
absconditus, a creator of order and design.

It is well known that the European cuckoo lays
her eggs in other birds' nests. The American
cuckoo, however, makes her own nest. But in
rare instances she has been known to follow the

104 Instinct of the Cuckoo.

example of the European cuckoo. From this
fact Darwin undertakes to derive the origin of
the unique instinct of the latter by means of nat
ural selection. " Suppose," he says, " that the
ancient progenitor of our European cuckoo had
the habit of the American cuckoo, and that she
occasionally laid an egg in another bird's nest.
If the old bird profited by this occasional hab
it, through being enabled to migrate earlier or
through any other cause ; or if the young were
made more vigorous by advantage being taken of
the mistaken instinct of another species than
when reared by their own mother, encumbered,
as she could hardly fail to be, by having eggs
and young of different ages at the same time-
then the old birds or the fostered young would
gain an advantage. And analogy would lead us
to believe that the young thus reared would be
apt to follow by inheritance the occasional and
aberrant habit of their mother, and in their turn
would be apt to lay their eggs in other birds'
nests, and thus be more successful in rearing their
young. By a continued process of this nature I
believe that the strange instinct of our cuckoo
has been generated."

This hypothesis raises many interesting ques
tions for the scientist, but we are only concerned

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 105

with the fortuity which it seems to imply. We
need not question that modifications of instincts,
as of organs, may be advantageous ; or that, having
occurred, they will tend to perpetuate themselves
on an arena where the race is to the swift and the
battle to the strong. And we may even concede
as possible Lamarck's identification of instinct
with hereditary habit, and Darwin's derivation
of such habit from the repetition of serviceable
actions insured through natural selection. But
on two points more light is indispensable. In the
first place, do such variations of instinct as the
hypothesis supposes actually occur ? Experiment
has shown that the habits of bees may be changed ;
but has it shown that this flexibility is inconsist
ent with the doctrine of fixed instincts? To
regard the gradations of instinct as so many
stages in the modification of it is to take for
granted the very question at issue. Then, in the
second place, if the variability is granted, by what
right is it made fortuitous ? When Darwin tells
us that instincts have been acquired from habits
and actions " which at first appeared from what
we must in our ignorance call an accident," his
language is unhappy and, indeed, unwarranted,
for he is only giving expression to the doctrine
with which our study of variations has made us

io6 Not Fortuitous in Origin.

familiar — the doctrine of "spontaneous variations
of instinct ; that is, of variations produced by the
same unknown causes which produce slight devi
ations of bodily structure." But these causes, as
he has already told us, are innate to the organ
ism ; they are grounded in the very constitution of
the being that varies. Were they not, they could
not be inherited. An action purely accidental —
ungrounded, that is, in the nature of the being
that performs it — would not, on the doctrine of
chances, even be repeated by that individual,
much less transmitted to its descendants. What
is there to transmit in such a fortuitous perform
ance ? By the very definition of it, it stands un
related to everything else, and exhausts itself in
the doing. If the strange habit of the European
cuckoo was formed in the way indicated by Dar
win, it is only because a predisposition to that
mode of action lay dormant in the constitution.
" When species vary," says the eminent botanist
!Naudin, whom Darwin frequently quotes, " they
do so in virtue of an intrinsic and innate prop
erty." Mere chance variations could never get
repeated and perpetuated. And this, indeed, is
implied in a sentence with which Darwin con
firms the report of the occasional aberrant habit
of the American cuckoo. " I could also," he says,

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 107

"give several instances of various birds which
have been known occasionally to lay their egga
in other birds' nests." If the cuckoo's deviation
were as fortuitous as these, if it had no predeter
mining and abiding ground in the constitution of
the cuckoo, how came it alone to develop into an
instinct, when all the advantages accruing in this
case were presumably operative in the others,
too? This marriage with fortuity really ham
pers the single-eyed achievement of Darwin. Di
vorcing his science therefrom, he elsewhere ad
mirably describes his position in these words :
" If it can be shown that instincts do vary ever
so little, then I can see no difficulty in Natural
Selection preserving and continually accumulat
ing variations of instinct to any extent that was
profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the
most complex and wonderful instincts have origi
nated." Here, as always, everything is assumed
with the variations. And their character can
only be determined by direct observation and by
inference from what they effect ; and neither of
these methods justifies us in calling them fortui
tous.

When we pass from instinct to organ, we are
still in the presence of analogous facts. The
question is, How was the eye, with all its inimi-

io8 Evolution of the Eye.

table contrivances and marvellous adjustments,
formed ? The lowest animals, and probably our
remotest ancestors, had no eyes, or any other sense
than touch. We can imagine that the first stage in
the development was a slightly heightened sense
of feeling at some spot in the organism. If it
gave the animal an advantage over others, either
in procuring food or in defending himself, or in
any other way, it would enable him to vanquish
his rivals and perpetuate his advantageous modi
fications ; and if the variability in that direction
continued, animals possessing it would in surviv
ing accumulate it, until, after the lapse of mill
ions of years, the sensitivity might have solidi
fied into something like the pigment-cells that
constitute the lowest organs of vision now in ex
istence. It is at this point Darwin takes up the
problem. The apparatus of an optic nerve,
coated with pigment and invested by transparent
membrane, is only one step onward ; and when
we reflect on the wide, diversified, and graduated
range of ocular structure in the lower animals,
" the difficulty," according to Darwin, " ceases
to be very great in believing " that natural selec
tion may have converted this simple apparatus
into an eye as perfect as man's or the eagle's, with
all its wonderful arrangements for admitting

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 109

light, changing the focus, and correcting spheri
cal and chromatic aberration. If the eye varies,
what are all these different gradations but so many
stages in the history of its variability — forms
that have been preserved by natural selection \
" The difficulty of believing that a perfect and
complex eye could be formed by natural selec
tion, though insuperable by our imagination,
should not be considered as subversive of the
theory," nor will it so be considered by any sci
entist who feels it " indispensable that the reason
should conquer the imagination."

But if reason is to " conquer the imagination,"
it can only be by clearly apprehending the facts
which imagination distorts. And when the im
agery of the preceding description is translated
into reality, the account of the formation of the
eye looks reasonable enough, though of course it
is not proof against an irrational interpretation.
What perplexes us at first is the creative func
tion assigned to natural selection. The eye is
"formed by natural selection." And repeatedly
in the same chapter natural selection is said to
"produce structures." Now, we have not hither
to thought of natural selection as an originative
power, and we are not prepared to admit that it
could have formed the eye. And, indeed, it is

no Not Explained by Darwin.

only metaphorically that anything of the kind
can be attributed to it. Natural selection, it
must be reiterated, is only a phrase for the sur
vival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
But the survival of an eye at any stage of de
velopment is a very different thing from the for
mation of an eye. Natural selection, as Darwin
elsewhere says, " can do nothing until favorable
individual differences or variations occur." As it
was only figuratively that we found it designated
an " accumulative " agency, much bolder is the
figure that invests it with " productive " powers.
Literally, it means nothing but the survival of the
fittest ; and reason and imagination alike concur
that the " fittest" must have preceded the survival.
Eyes, therefore, are not formed by the survival
of some of them, but merely culled and sifted.
Natural selection does not issue the creative
word, Let there be sight ! Its is the humbler
function of sitting in judgment on all forms that
do emerge, dooming some to death and promot
ing their executioners to higher life. To find
out, now, if there is any trace of design in the
matter, you must turn your gaze from the bench
of judgment and scrutinize the beings that await
its sentence. And doing so, must you not assert
that the same ends which are realized in the

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 1 1 1

highest forms of organism and of organ were
already contemplated and prefigured in their
lower antecedents, and the gap between the two
filled up by progressive modifications that strive
restlessly toward their predetermined goal ? And
in Darwin's account of the formation of the eye,
when metaphor has been translated into fact, I
can find warrant for nothing more than this:
That the eyes of animals have been improved
through beneficial modifications, originating we
know not how or whence, and that, in the strug
gle for life, the least advantageous eyes have been
eliminated. Natural selection explains how any
particular eye came to be perpetuated, once it had
arrived upon the scene, but it is dumb regarding
the formation of that or any other eye. ,

Although Darwin's account of the evolution of
the eye contains nothing more than I have stated,
there was, I think, in Darwin's mind an arriere-
pensee due to speculative preconceptions. In
accordance with the philosophy of fortuity, he
seemed to regard the variations between which
natural selection had to decide as altogether in
definite in their character, running out in every
direction, and as little adapted, for example, to
the formation of an eye as to the formation of a
stone. The infinite modifications of that tingling

112 Variations not Indefinite.

sensitivity at some spot of the skin of our sight
less ancestor might have developed into any
thing else than an eye ; and it is solely owing to
the fact that other combinations, innumerable
and heterogeneous, could not hit upon a stable
equilibrium in relation to the environment that
an eye happened to be set up at all. In this
view, natural selection is only a learned name for
chance. And so interpreting it, Lange, as we have
seen, ridicules teleology, and the design-argument
of Paley is declared by Huxley forever obsolete.

But we now know there is no scientific warrant
for this philosophy of chance. Ko organism
varies indefinitely. " A whale," says Professor
Huxley, " does not tend to vary in the direction
of producing feathers, nor a bird in the direction
of producing whalebone." And, as we have al
ready seen, other authorities join in the denial
that variations are every-sided and indifferent.
Further, the same scientists assure us that the
" importance of natural selection will not be im
paired " by this view of variations. But if so,
natural selection is manifestly not wedded to
chance, and not incompatible with design. Kay,
it seems to presuppose design; since develop
ment takes place along certain predetermined
lines of modification, and natural selection only

The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 113

weeds out the inferior competing forms. The
skin-spot that develops into an eye, and the re
volving barrel that could develop into Paley's
watch, both presuppose a tendency to definite
variations ; and this being confirmed by the
latest evolutionary science, as we have already
seen, everything is conceded that the teleologist
demands. Natural selection as little implies for
tuity as it excludes reason. Its alliance with
an irrational and mechanical philosophy is due
merely to a historical accident. The scientists
who first ardently embraced the doctrine, and
burned with missionary zeal in promoting it,
happened for the most part to favor, or to seem
to favor, a materialistic metaphysics. And this,
in conjunction with the undertone of kindred
speculation we have already noticed in Darwin
himself, led inevitably to a coalescence of the new
science with the old philosophy. The union was
allowed to pass unchallenged by the first assail
ants, who were more bent upon disproving natu
ral selection than keen in distinguishing between
scientific hypotheses and metaphysical specula
tions ; and it is still all but universally believed
that the biology of Darwin is inseparable from
those mechanical and materialistic schemes of the
universe into which it has been fitted by the ingeni-
8

H4 Fortuity not Involved.

ous labors of evolutionary teachers in Europe and
America. That there is no necessary connection,
however, between the two, that Darwinian science
is independent of this philosophy of mechanism
and fortuity, has, I think, Been convincingly estab
lished in the course of the present examination.

The determination of the general philosophical
significance of Darwinism is a considerable step
towards the solution of our ethical problem, for
which, indeed, it was an indispensable precondi
tion. Every system of ethics is affiliated to a
metaphysics, expressed or understood ; and every
system of metaphysics carries with it a definite
ethics. The moral philosophy of Kant could not
be grafted upon the mental philosophy of Hume ;
and the "First Principles" of Spencer would
never blossom into the " Sermons on Human
Nature." On the other hand, the mechanical
conception of the world has always engendered a
utilitarian theory of morals. But if, as we have
shown, Darwinian biology does not imply the
philosophy of Democritus, it cannot, at least
through that channel, conduct to the ethics of
Epicurus. Are morals, then, in any way affected
by the doctrine of natural selection ?

To this question an answer is attempted in the
following pages.

CHAPTEE IY.

DARWINISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALS.

It is important to fix accurately in mind what
the subject of the present chapter is. With Dar
win's own ethical views and speculations we have
now nothing to do, though the exposition and ex
amination of them (both in themselves and in re
lation to his natural science) must form the topic
of a later chapter. Just at present, however, our
inquiry is of a more general character. We want
to know whether, the Darwinian doctrine of evo
lution being assumed, it entails any particular
theory of morals. Or, since natural selection is
the essence of the scientific achievement of Dar
win, we have simply to ask, Does natural selec
tion involve or indicate a definite type of ethics,
so that acceptance of the one logically necessi
tates acceptance of the other ? This question, it
is obvious, is not identical with an inquiry into
Darwin's own moral system, which, though de
pendent upon some philosophical principle, may

n6 Natural Selection in Morals.

be absolutely disconnected with the hypotheses of
biology. Leaving Darwin the moralist, therefore,
wholly aside, we would fain settle whether Dar
win the naturalist, in establishing the function
of natural selection, thereby predetermined ethics
to a particular form or invested its phenomena
with a new cast of thought. And this point can
be resolved only by ignoring the uncritical assump
tions of the school and undertaking afresh an in
dependent consideration of the facts and analysis
of the notions which the Darwinian theory in
volves.

That theory, as already expounded, consists
essentially of two moments — the struggle for life
and the survival of the fittest. The former con
nects it historically and logically with Malthusi-
anism, and may be considered as an applica
tion of the famous doctrine of population to the
whole organic world. That is to say, the strug
gle for life follows inevitably from the enor
mous increase of living beings beyond the means
of subsistence, as first pointed out in the case of
man by Malthus. This debt to the national po
litical economy Darwin has openly acknowledged.
But it has not been observed that the other mo
ment of his theory — the issue of the struggle —
was conditioned by a conception borrowed from

Darwinism in Ethics, 117

the national ethics. He remembered distinctly,
as he wrote Haeckel, how on reading Malthus's
" Essay on Population " the thought of a uni
versal struggle for existence first flashed upon his
mind. But he could not remember, so early, so
gradual, so subtly pervasive is the entrance of
ethical ideas, when he had become inoculated with
the national utilitarianism. Yet it can scarcely
be doubted that it was from this source he ex
tracted the notion of utility as determinator of
the issue of the combat for existence. No one
uninfluenced by the ethics of the school of Plume
and Bentham would have ventured to interpret
the evolution of life as a continuous realization of
utilities. And yet the survival of the fittest, by
which, according to Darwin, development is ef
fected, just means the preservation of the most
useful modifications of structure or habit. "Any
being, if it vary, however slightly, in any man
ner profitable to itself" says Darwin, "will have
a better chance of surviving, and thus be natu
rally selected." Or, in other words, before the
operation of natural selection there must be a
utility of some kind on which it acts. What is
useful is preserved, what is harmful is destroyed.
"Nature cares nothing for appearances, except
in so far as they may be useful to any being."

1 1 8 The Moment of Utility.

Tims, as you dig down to the roots of existence,
you find it draws its vital sap from utility.
" Natural selection acts solely by and for the good
of each." It may " produce structures " for the
direct injury of other species, but never for
their exclusive advantage. "With certain excep
tions that can be explained, the structure of
every living creature as well as every detail of that
structure " either now is, or was formerly, of some
direct or indirect use to its possessor." Similarly,
the instinct of each species is useful for that
species, and has never been produced for the ex
clusive benefit of another species. Could these
propositions be refuted, " it would," says Darwin,
"annihilate my theory," for structures and in
stincts could not in that case be the product of
natural selection. The survival of the fittest
implies an antecedent utility — a modification ad
vantageous to the individual or, it may be, to the
community of which it is a member, but never
directly and exclusively to others beyond this
pale. Natural selection rests upon a biological
utilitarianism, which may be egoistic or commu
nistic, but which cannot be universalistic.

Let us now apply this doctrine to man, with the
object of discovering its bearing upon morals.
"We have, then, to admit that the human species

Darwinism in Ethics. 119

has originated and developed'to its present stage
through the preservation and accumulation of a
number of useful modifications which, whether
of individual or social benefit, gave our semi-
human, semi-brutal ancestors an advantage over
other animals in the struggle for life. Of these
modifications, one of the most obvious is an erect
attitude. This peculiarity, which the orang, the
gorilla, and the gibbon seem now on the way to
acquiring, has manifest advantages. It enabled
simian man, not only to hurl missiles at his
enemies without forfeiting the power of simul
taneous locomotion, but also to break and dress
stones for definite purposes, thus beginning the
career of that tool-using animal whose skill and
ingenuity have changed the face of his physical
environment.

But this career, even in its commencement,
would have been impossible without the emer
gence of a still more important factor in the de
velopment. Mind is infinitely more useful than
mere bodily structure ; and it is not necessary to
deny intelligence to the lower animals when we
assert that the human mind is the most colossal
and revolutionary of all the modifications any
species has undergone. Such an enormous ad
vantage would be preserved and perpetuated by

120 The Utility of Mind.

natural selection. For it enables man to do at
once what nature takes ages to accomplish for the
other animals ; it enables him to adapt himself
to his environment without change in bodily
structure and organization. Imagine a group of
carnivorous animals suddenly exposed to a severer
climate and obliged to capture more powerful
prey ; only those with the warmest natural cloth
ing and strongest claws and teeth could manage
to survive ; and as the battle with their evil star
grew fiercer, the group, if not altogether exter
minated, must languish through the long course
of aeons until their modifying organs and struct
ures had become completely adapted to the new
requirements through the play of natural selec
tion. But the mental powers of man render him,
in similar circumstances, independent of nature.
He makes thicker clothing, and he fashions
sharper weapons or constructs more cunning pit
falls. Simple as these performances seem, how
infinitely advantageous they must have been in
the struggle for life. When the intelligence
which made them possible first appeared upon
the scene, it effected " a revolution which [to
quote the language of Mr. Alfred Russell Wal
lace] in all the previous ages of the earth's history
had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was

Darwinism in Ethics. 121

no longer necessarily subject to change with the
changing universe."

Simultaneous with this revolution was another,
scarcely less significant, due to the appearance
and operation of the moral sentiments. The
moral being lives for others as well as for him
self. But the lower animals are at best grega
rious, not social ; they lead a life of individual
isolation and self-dependence. Each is alone, in
the battle for life, exposed to the whole force of
the combat. The sick and the feeble fall victims
to beasts of prey or die of starvation. There is
no division of labor to relieve the one from di
rectly procuring its own food, no mutual assist
ance to succor the other till health and visror are

£3

restored. Accordingly, any group of animals en
dowed with the least tincture of sociality and
sympathy would, through the internal union and
strength which these qualities evoke, have a de
cided advantage over other groups not thus en
dowed. A tribe animated by these instincts con
tains in itself a principle of survival of scarcely
less efficacy than the mental faculties themselves.
If these check the action of natural selection on
the body, and transfer it to the sphere of intelli
gence, the social and sympathetic feelings screen
the individual and oppose to the play of natural

122 The Utility of Virtue.

selection the solid framework of a united and
strengthened society. But sympathy and social
ity imply fidelity, trustworthiness, truthfulness,
obedience, and the like. And as these are useful
in the struggle for life — being, in fact, means of
social survival — not less useful are the other virt
ues which form the complex tissue of our moral
ity. Hence it follows that the moral sentiments,
as motors tending to the preservation of the tribe,
must, like the mental faculties, be self-preserving
and self-accumulating under the utilitarian sway
of natural selection.

This view of the development of the simian
quadruped into the moral person by means of
natural selection seems to confirm the general
impression that utilitarian ethics is the necessary
implicate of Darwinian biology. We began by
remarking that the biological theory borrowed
the notion of utility from empirical morals ; but
we must now confess the loan has been so success
fully invested that there is some ground for be
lieving the proceeds suffice, not only to wipe out
the obligation, but even to make ethics debtor
to biology. In demonstrating the evolution of
plants and animals, organs and functions, in
stincts and intelligence and conscience, through
the preservation and accumulation of modifica-

Darwinism in Ethics. T2c

tions useful for survival in the struggle for life,
biology has led up to an ethical theory which
places the governing principle of human conduct
in utility ; since, on its showing, utility has gen
erated that conduct as well as the life and the
species in which it is manifested. In the war of
nature, nothing seems inviolate except what is
useful. The stone which the intuitional moral
ists despised has become the head of the corner.
In the evolutiono-utilitarian theory of morals,
the process which nature has blindly followed in
the development of life comes to a consciousness
of itself, and is recognized as the norm of human
conduct. " The ideal goal to the natural evolution
lof conduct is," according to Mr. Spencer, " the
|deal standard of conduct ethically considered."
Moral life is held to consist in harmonious
adaptation to that social tissue whose production
through natural selection was a prime condi
tion of the origin of a species of moral beings.
Moral rules are regarded as the expression of
those social adaptations which, on the whole, and
after infinite gropings, proved most serviceable in
the preservation of groups of human animals in
the struggle for existence. They are the picked-
up clothes which warmed and protected a naked
social body and enabled it to vanquish all its

1 2 2 ^ Biological Eth us.

rivals. Little wonder if, after the conflict, they
have become a fetich to the victors — to all but
the few who have tracked their fossil history !

Thus, then, this philosophy of human conduct
has been merged in the wider philosophy of life.
But the new utilitarianism wears an aspect some
what unlike the old. They hold, indeed, the same
fundamental position in regard to opposing the
ories ; but as between themselves there is an
obvious contrast. For, though the note of util
ity is as clear in the " Origin of Species " as in
the " Principles of Morals and Legislation," there
it means power-giving, here pleasure-giving ; so
that, far from running in to each other, Darwinism
and Benthamism might take their places respec
tively under those opposing categories of activity
and pleasure into which Schleiermacher resolved
every difference of ethical systems.

Of course, if it could be shown that what
brings pleasure is identical with what gives power
to survive — what is serviceable in the struggle
for life — the case would be changed, and the last
residuum of the old utilitarianism would have
been assimilated by the new. But for this iden
tification Darwinian biology supplies no material.
And though it has been speculatively attempted
in Mr. Herbert Spencer's elaboration of Pro-

Darwinism in Ethics. 125

fessor Bain's suggestion that pleasure is accom
panied by an increase of some or all of the vital
functions, his arguments are not so much deduc
tions from evolutionary science as postulates of
a foregone psychological and ethical hedonism.
Even, however, where hedonism is theoretically
held to, it is no longer the real vital moment of
evolutiono-utilitarianism. Instead of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, you have an
other standard ; and morality, as with Mr. Leslie
Stephen, is defined as " the means of social vital
ity," " the conditions of social welfare," " the sum
of the preservative instincts of a society." In
the last phase of its development, as in the ear
lier, utilitarianism retains the conception of mo
rality as something relative, a means to an end
beyond itself, and as a product of physical or
psychological compulsion rather than the self-
imposed law of a free moral agent. It has for
feited none of the essential attributes of a system
of utility. But, in spite of the protests of its
leading advocates, it is casting the slough of
pleasure, which seemed a vital part of its earlier
life. It still holds that the moral is identical
with the useful, though when you ask, " Useful
for what ? " the answer is no longer " For pleas
ure," but "For preservation" — i.e., for social

126 Utility and Pleasure.

vitality, for the well-being of the community. Of
those pleasures and pains in which Mill found
the sole motive of conduct, as well as the crite
rion and the sanction of morality, Darwin knows
nothing ; but, these apart, the essence of utilita
rianism and the essence of Darwinism, the prin
ciple of utility and the principle of natural se
lection, have such strong elective affinities that
to effect their combination nothing was required
but to bring them together. Their union estab
lishes the high-water mark of contemporary util
itarianism.

The transformation has given scientific com
pleteness to utilitarianism. In the hands of Ben-
tham, even, the phenomena of morals were held
apart from all other phenomena, but through the
common notion of natural selection they have
been colligated with the facts of biology ; and
from the enlarged horizon a gain is expected sim
ilar to that which came to the sciences of heat,
light, and electricity when they were recognized
as merely different applications of the one gen
eral theory of motion. And already, it is main
tained, obscurities of the system on its lower
plane are dissipated in the light of its higher alti
tude. ISTor is this effected by the incorporation
of elements foreign to the primitive doctrine, such

Darwinism in Ethics. 127

as may be seen, for example, in that peculiarly
noble and attractive exposition which the pre-
evolutionary utilitarianism received from its last
great exponent. In John Stuart Mill's presenta
tion of it the ethics of utility transcends itself,
and the hedonism of Bentham has to be supple
mented by the moral law or categorical impera
tive of Kant, which appears under the form of a
" sense of dignity," a reverence for the humanity
in one's person, an abiding consciousness of an
ideal and attainable worth which forbids dallying
with lower ends however strong the attraction of
their pleasures. But it is not by such an amalga
mation of opposing conceptions that the evolu-
tiono-utilitarian commends his theory. He holds
that utility alone, under the action of natural se
lection, takes on the appearance of morality, and
he pledges himself to derive from this lowly
source all those lofty attributes with which men
have invested the moral law and glorified it as
the oracle of God. Thus evolutionary ethics
claims the field, not merely as a deduction from
biology, but as a complete scientific explanation
of the phenomena of morals. This aspect of it
we have now to consider.

The moral law is popularly regarded as simple,
unanalyzable, or ultimate. "When it is said that

128 Explains Moral Law.

justice is right, that benevolence is a duty, that
stealing or lying is wrong, we do not attempt to
demonstrate these propositions by means of others,
but directly and immediately assent to them as
carrying their own self-evidence. It is instinc
tively felt that no reason can be given for them,
any more than for the axioms of geometry. And
the unsophisticated sense of the plain man is
shocked by the suggestion that moral precepts
stand or fall with their conduciveness to pleasure,
and still more by the suggestion that virtue,
which he takes to be the end of life, " is natu
rally and originally no part of the end," but merely
a means to something else — to pleasure as final
goal. And it was very difficult for Mill and his
predecessors to explain how in theory men had
been duped into accepting ethical precepts solely
on their own credentials, and how in practice they
had been hoodwinked into realizing them disin
terestedly, for their own sake, and without the
slightest reference to ulterior consequences. But
the example of the miser did valiant service in
their psychology ; and it was argued that, if mon
ey, originally only a means to what it purchases,
could through association of ideas come to be de
sired for itself, and that, too, with the utmost inten
sity, virtue might undergo a similar transforma-

Darwinism in Ethics. 129

tion, and through conduciveness to an end event
ually become identified with the end. Nor is the
musty example of the miser yet obsolete, as
readers of Mr. Spencer will remember. It is,
however, reinforced with new arguments in the
ethics of the evolutionists. They do not require
the plain man to believe that the tissue of his
ethical sentiments has been woven in his own
lifetime. They show him how the warp and
woof were spun in the brains of animals scarcely
yet emerged as men, and then, following the
movements of the shuttle in the roaring loom of
time, they delineate the formation of a moral
texture in our race— a texture inherited by every
individual when once it has been acquired by the
species. And how precisely is it acquired ? By the
help of natural selection. The early societies
that did not happen to hit upon the practice of
justice, benevolence, etc., could not possibly hold
together against groups observing these relations ;
and then the constant danger of extermination
impressed the survivors with the indispensable-
ness of the fundamental virtues, which flamed
ever before them, as it were, in characters of blood.
What we are familiar with seems simple, what
we have always done we do again ; and who can
wonder, therefore, that our primitive ancestors.

130 Innateness, Simplicity, Etc.

slaves of imitation and of habit, should have
deemed moral precepts self-evident and the prac
tice of them an end in itself ?

Equally with the simplicity and ultimateness
of our moral conceptions, the evolutionist ex
plains their innateness. Agreeing with the in-
tuitionist that these notions are part of the orig
inal furniture of every mind that comes into the
world, the evolutiono-utilitarian holds them to be
ultimately derived from experience ; and if he be
a hedonist, Hive Mr. Spencer, he will add, from
experience of pleasurable or painful consequences,
though this experience is by him relegated to
the past history of mankind. u Moral intui
tions are the results of accumulated experiences of
utility." Just as the emotion you feel in visiting
the home of your4 youth seems unique and inexplic
able, yet is manifestly due to a vague recollection
of joys formerly associated with the objects that
surround you, so, it has been ingeniously suggested
by M. Fouillee, the sentiments which accompany
the performance of virtuous acts are the perfume
of an earthy soil — a kind of recollection or in
distinct echo, not only of our own pleasures, but
of the joys of the entire race. And it is this rever
beration over the ages of a utility for the race that
we take for an innate tendency to disinterestedness.

Darwinism in Ethics. 131

A similar account is given of the immutability
and universality of moral conceptions. Morality
being the indispensable condition of social exist
ence, it is coextensive with humanity. The
primal virtues shine in every tribe and nation,
for without them no section of the human family
could have found its way through the struggle for
existence. And as amid many smaller variations
the general conditions of social life are every
where the same, moral laws could not fail to be,
if not eternal and immutable in the absolute
sense of Cudworth, yet as unchanging and endur
ing as the human species and the universe it in
habits. The fundamental agreement in men's
moral notions is thus explained without any as
sumption of supranatural revelation or d priori
intuition.

Moral obligation presents a greater difficulty ;
and evolutionary moralists of the school we are
now considering have had to fall back upon the
answer of the ordinary utilitarians. They ascribe
the sense of obligation to the effects of the legal
and social sanctions with which certain kinds of
conduct are visited. Moral motives being at first
inseparable from political and social motives, they
have been permeated with that consciousness of
subordination to authority which naturally arises

132 Account of Obligation.

out of the relation of subject to ruler and of in
dividual to tribe. The coerciveness which now
forms so important a constituent in our conscious
ness of duty is a survival of the constraint with
which primitive man was forced by external
agencies into certain lines of conduct and deterred
from others. And hence it follows that, as
morality is differentiated more completely from
the legal, political, and social institutions in which
it originated, the feeling of obligation generated
by them will gradually fade away. Thus the
evolutiono-utilitarian account of obligation dis
covers it a transitional feature in the process of
human " moralization," and this essentially is all
that it adds to the theory of Mill and Bain.

This newest theory of morals, here too briefly
outlined, embraces in its range the entire province
of moral conceptions and sentiments. But from
what has been said the general character of the
system will be readily discerned. It is simple,
intelligible, and even plausible. That it should
have proved fascinating to all, and irresistible to
many, of the generation that has so long listened
to it with an ardor brooking little distraction from
other theories, cannot be a matter of surprise to
anyone who has duly considered the facts with
which the theory is associated. Borrowed, as

Darwinism in Ethics. 133

they are, either from observation or from well-
established sciences, and fitted ingeniously into
current evolutionary ethics, they seem to be an
organic part of the structure ; and the question of
otherwise explaining them is not likely to be
raised. Conversely, the full implication of the
principles upon which they are here grafted has
been left unexplored. And thus, while the new
ethical philosophy has been widely accepted, a
determination of the bases on which it really
rests still remains to be made. This want we
must now attempt to supply.

In the first place, then, evolutionary ethics, as
hitherto presented, takes for granted the deriv
ative character of morality. I say " as hitherto
presented," because I hope to show in the sequel
that there is nothing in the notion of develop
ment when applied to morals which necessitates,
or which even warrants, the assumption. But our
exponents of evolutionism happen to have been
trained in the school of Epicurus, Hume, and
Bentham, and it is not, on the whole, very sur
prising they should have carried the old leaven
into the new teaching. What is surprising Js the
assumption, so coolly made, that the theory of
evolution in some way vouches for the utilitarian
ism our moralists associate with it. As though a

134 First Assumption.

follower of Plato or Kant, for example, could not
be a Darwinist in science ! Is it forgotten that,
even if goodness be an end in itself — the sole end
worth living for — it still remains true that hon
esty is the best policy, that honest acts are the
most advantageous acts, and that they will ac
cordingly be preserved through natural selection
in the struggle for existence ? All that natural
selection requires is that something shall be use
ful ; what else it may ~be, what other predicates it
may have, wherein its essence consists, natural
selection knows not and recks not. Be virtue a
proximate end or an ultimate end, natural selec
tion tells us it will be preserved and perpetuated
if it is useful ; and it tells us no more. It is,
accordingly, a gratuitous assumption which our
exponents of evolutionary ethics make, when
they decline to allow more than a merely relative
value to morality. And as their position derives
no support from evolutionary science, so is it
exposed to all the objections which moralists,
voicing the universal consciousness of mankind,
have brought against it, from the time when
Aristotle asserted that virtue has no extrinsic
end (roO KaXov eveica) to the time when Kant pro
claimed the absolute worth of a good-will.

In the second place, the current expositors of

Darwinism in Ethics. 135

evolutionary ethics having made the radical as
sumption that moral laws are not categorical im
peratives which command unconditionally, but
hypothetical imperatives which prescribe means
to the attainment of some end, they cannot escape
the problem of determining wherein consists that
ultimate end, conduciveness to which alone gives
morality its worth and obligation. Nor, in gen
eral, has the school been dismayed by the mag
nitude or the obscurity of this problem. Possibly
it has not fully realized that the question is noth
ing less than an inquiry into the highest good
for man or the supreme end of human endeavor.
Be that as it may, one cannot but be interested
to find that, in spite of the distrust of reason
generated by modern theories of knowledge, our
evolutionary thinkers dare to face the problem
which, in undisturbed consciousness of reason's
might, ancient philosophers put in the foreground
of their ethics. Even in an age of agnosticism
thoughtful men come round to the sphinx-riddle,
What am I here for ? what is the end of life ?
The question may not, it is true, take precisely
this form in the mouth of a modern evolutionary
moralist, but that, after all, is substantially what
he is bent on discovering and what he must dis
cover — miist, if his thesis is to be made good that

136 Second Assumption.

morality is only a means to something else. And
there is no logical reason why he should not
appropriate the Aristotelian solution that man's
highest good consists in the most perfect rational
activity, that his supreme end or function is to
inform life with reason and make his entire being
the embodiment of reason. But, as a matter of
fact, most typical evolutionary moralists have
selected a very different ethical end — pleasure.
They have maintained writh Mr. Spencer that
"the good is universally the pleasurable," and
that conduct is made good or bad solely by its
" pleasure-giving and pain -giving effects."

Still the evolutionary moralist, even of the de
rivative school, is not necessarily committed to this
solution of the problem. He may doubt that the
supreme end of life is to get and to give the
greatest amount of pleasure. And appropriating
the language of that Rabelaisian description of
Carlyle's, on which Mr. Spencer has poured forth
eloquent objurgation, our doubter may question
whether the universe is merely "an immeasur
able swine's trough," and whether "moral evil
is unattainability of pig's-wash and moral good
attainability of ditto." For certainly the hedon
ist cannot, in the absence of antecedent obliga
tions which this theory excludes, but deem his

Darwinism in Ethics. 13?

own pleasure the highest good ; and whether ac
cepting or not the psychology of the school
which teaches that nothing but one's own pleas
ure can be the object of desire, he will acquiesce
in the ethical dictum of Bentham, that " to at
tain the greatest portion of happiness for himself
is the object of every rational being." But as
soon as this opposition between his own pleas
ures and the pleasures of others is brought dis
tinctly into consciousness, and the former recog
nized as the end, the impossibility of constructing
an ethic on this basis is manifest. There is no
way across the chasm that yawns between " each
for himself" and "each for others." And if
man be merely a pleasure-seeking animal, you
but mock him when you enjoin him to promote
the happiness of others. Accordingly, a sincere
and logical utilitarian who felt with Mill, that
the spirit of his ethics was that of the golden
rule of Jesus of Nazareth, would drop altogether
the notion of pleasure, which has hitherto filled
the system with inconsistencies, and allow the
ethical principle, thus freed from the accidental
setting of a psychological hedonism, to proclaim
itself as the greatest good of the greatest num
ber, or, better still, as the well-being of society.
Whatever be the content of that well-being (and

138 The End Pleasure or Good?

there is much in it besides pleasure), it, and not
happiness either of self or others, is the end
which utilitarianism pure and simple, the utili
tarianism of Mill divorced from his more than
dubious psychology, might set up as the ultimate
end for every moral agent. And this, in fact, is
the supreme principle of the ethics of Darwin,
though he directs attention rather to the gene
sis of moral rules than to the reason for our ob
serving them. And though Mr. Spencer is too
strongly influenced by the national ethics to fore
go the final reduction of morality to pleasure —
and even the agent's own pleasure — he yet main
tains that those acts are good which conduce
to the welfare of self, of offspring, and of soci
ety. The same end is recognized by Mr. Leslie
Stephen in his explanation of moral rules as
means of social preservation ; yet Mr. Stephen
has not been so unfaithful to what he calls his
own " school "•— Bentham, Mill, etc.— as to sep
arate its psychology of self-seeking from its
ethics of self-sacrifice.

When this divorce does take place, however —
and already it is heralded in Darwin— there will
be no longer in this respect a fundamental oppo
sition between evolutionary ethics and common-
sense morals. Attempts to patch up a truce, on

Danvinism in Ethics. 139

the assumption that pleasures might through
heredity be transformed into duties, have utterly
failed. But the simple recognition of the wel
fare of society as an ultimate end is not to go
outside of morality to find a reason for it, against
which the intuitionist has always protested. It is
to take one virtue, already recognized by the in
tuitionist, for the whole of virtue. And to that
extent the two schools are in essential agreement.
A difference, however, appears when you inquire
if there are not virtues which the general formula
of promoting the well-being of others does not
embrace. Common-sense seems to say there are
other duties as original, as self-evident, and as
obligatory, as benevolence. And it does look ra
ther incredible that every man should be an end
to others and not to himself. We do not easily
rid ourselves of the conviction that goodness con
sists rather in the realization of a certain type of
character in ourselves than in the performance of
any external actions, though of course conduct
promotive of the welfare of others would be one
necessary outcome of the character thus indi
cated.

I come now to a third characteristic assump
tion of current evolutionary ethics — the fortuitous
origin of morality through a process purely me-

14° Third Assumption.

chanical. This must, I think, be regarded as the
fundamental tenet of the school ; but in England,
at least, it seems to have been taught with all the
reserve of an esoteric mystery. The accredited
expounders of the subject have in their exoteric
writings enveloped this point in such a wrapping
of extraneous discussions that even a master
in ethics like Professor Sidgwick has hazarded
the declaration that evolution, however con
ceived, can make no difference at all in our
ethical theories. But, with all deference to so
eminent an authority, I hold that if this mechan
ical conception of moral evolution be conceded,
the question of an ethical end— of what we ought
to aim at — becomes unmeaning, since there cannot,
in a literal sense, be any ends or aims for a being
conceived as a mere mechanism, even though its
random acts have through natural selection been
solidified into habits, and habits, on the super
vention of consciousness, been reflected as rules.
And this interpretation of evolution would be as
fatal to practice as to theory. An individual
who really accepted it must regard moral respon
sibility as illusory, as nothing but an echo of
the modes of conduct which enabled the human
species to overcome what was untoward to its
progress or what threatened its extinction. For

Darwinism in Ethics.

him the entire preceptive part of morality must
seem a baseless imposition. And in the courage
ous language of M. Guyau he could recognize
nothing but une morale sans obligation ni sanc
tion. No longer avrovopos man must perforce
be az/o/409. Had this point been brought out as
clearly by the English as by the French evolu
tionists, they would have seen that their own prin
ciples required them to dismiss the incongruous
problem of establishing the validity of moral
rules, even if they still persisted in speculating on
the origin of them. It is worse than idle for
mechanical evolutionists to talk of the reason or
end or ground of morality.

That morality has had a mechanical origin is,
I have said, the fundamental assumption of cur
rent evolutionary ethics. The ancestors of man
had no moral fibre in their constitution, but
through long-inherited experiences of the conse
quences of conduct man has been rendered " or
ganically moral." Just as intelligence, in general,
according to the same theory, has been generated
in unintelligent beings through the accumulation
of modifications arising from intercourse between
the organism and its environment, so the moral
faculty, in particular, is the result of all those ex
periences whereby mutually repellent individual

142 Mechanical Origin of Morals.

animals were fused together into society and en«
abled to perpetuate a victorious existence. The
evolutionist conceives life as the continuous ad
justment of inner relations to outer relations ; so
that, even before the rise of sentiencj, the acts of
living beings must have been adapted to their en
vironment, and intelligence, when it did emerge,
could be nothing but the consciousness of rela
tions already blindly established, and the function
of conscience could only be to recognize the utility
of what promoted life. The evolution of man—
the self-conscious and moral person — from lower
forms of life is referred to physical causation
alone. As the human pedigree has been traced
up to the simian branch of the animal tree, and
no ground discovered for absolutely separating
the latest from the earliest offshoots, our most
eminent living biologist maintains that when
Descartes declared all animals to be automata, his
only error lay in excluding man from the same
class. This conscious automaton is but the high
est term of an animal series whose law of devel
opment is already known, and everything in his
constitution is explicable by that law. But the
evolution of life has realized itself through a
mechanical process; consequently those distinc
tive characteristics which mark off the human

Darwinism in Ethics. 143

from the simian species must be the products
of the same process. As natural selection has
endowed all beings with the constitutions and
habits and faculties which they actually possess — •
the eagle with his eye, the bee with her sting, the
lion with his rage and strength — so must natural
selection have endowed man, not only with an
erect attitude, but also with a reason that looks ^
before and after and a conscience that responds |
to right and wrong. The mental and moral fac- {
nl ties are both reduced to the rank of natural
phenomena. Indeed, to express their essentially
derivative and, as it were, accidental character,
a new word has been coined, and intelligence is
described as an " epiphenomenon." By this term
is meant that consciousness is a merely accessory
aspect of the human automaton, a psychological
index of corporeal movements which are the
prime reality, a reflex of mechanism which would
go on all the same without any reflex, just as an
engine would move along the rails if it did not
whistle, or a bird fly if it cast no shadow. But
if the school interprets consciousness as an acci
dent of the human automaton, it makes conscience
an accident of this accident. First mechanism
realizing itself in certain relations (by means of
natural selection), then consciousness of these

144 Connection with Metaphysics.

relations, then approval of their life-conserving
tendencies, or conscience. The moral faculty is
the recognition of social relations ; it is the social
instinct of the animals come to a consciousness of
itself in man ; and this social instinct is but the
consolidation of habit, and habit is the pro
duct, through natural selection, of random actions
struck out in the struggle for life. Thus the
moral nature of man is merged in the mechanism
of nature. The logical, as the chronological,
prius is, therefore, not intelligence, but mechan
ical action. The exegesis of Faust receives a
startling illustration: Im Anfang war die
That.

This moral theory, therefore, implies and rests
upon a system of metaphysics. I do not think we
can too often reiterate that current evolutionary
ethics is the outcome of a very dubious physico-
psychical speculation. From overlooking this
connection the issue between moralists of this
school and of other schools has not been clearly
discerned, and the very heart of the question
has been generally left untouched. I do not, of
course, mean to call in question the results of the
astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological
sciences. What one teaches about the gradual
formation of the universe, and another about the

Darwinism in Ethics. 145

gradual development of organisms on our globe,
I accept implicitly. But because minerals and
plants and the lower animals appeared before
man, I will not, therefore, hold that they were
adequate conditions to his production, or that
there is nothing in him that was not generated
through actions and reactions between an animal
system and its physical or social environment.
Such a doctrine used to be called material- X.
ism, but in deference to the feelings of specu
lative evolutionists the word has nowadays been
dropped. All the objections, however, which
were formerly urged against the derivation of
mental and moral functions from material com
binations, however finely organized, are still valid
against the evolutionary identification of intel
ligence with the modifications produced in the
nervous and muscular systems from action and re
action between the organism and its environment.
Man is later on the scene than the unintelligent
organisms ; but whence his intelligence we know
not, unless it be the emergence of something
new from the fountain of being, from the under
lying ground and sustaining cause of the whole
evolutionary movement. Certainly it was not
evolved by mere repetition of mechanical actions.
Were intelligence not at the heart of the cosmos,
10

146 Both Indefensible.

it could not have turned up as the crowning glory
of the development of life.

The same position may be taken up in oppo
sition to the current evolutionary ethics. Biology
warrants the belief that non-moral beings existed
on our globe long before the appearance of the
only moral being we know — man ; and natural
selection explains the process by which the latter
may have been descended from the former. But
natural selection, as we have already shown, cre
ates no new material ; it merely sits in judgment
upon what has already appeared. Given acts, or
habits, or moral practices, natural selection is the
name for the survival of the fittest of them, not
the talismanic cause which originates any of them.
However they originate, they must have a defi
nite relation to the constitution of the being that
manifests them ; and to suppose that moral sen
timents, moral notions, moral practices, could be
grafted upon a primitively non-moral being is, in
the first place, to take a grossly mechanical view
of human nature and, in the second place, to
transgress the limits alike of natural selection and
of evolutionary science. Yet this is what is done
by our evolutionary moralists. A moral law, they
tell you, is the formulation by intelligence of the
social practices instinctively followed by the more

Darwinism in Ethics. 147

or less unintelligent ancestors of man, these prac
tices themselves having crystallized into habits
from an inchoate chaos of random acts. "YVe have
in the preceding chapter considered Darwin's
derivation of instincts from casual actions, and
we have here only to inquire whether conscience
is nothing but the social instinct illuminated by
intelligence. Were it so, we could not fail to ad
mire the manner in which morality was forced
upon unwilling beings until at last appeared an
intelligence capable of freely accepting it and
heartity setting about its realization. As in the
education of the human race, according to Les-
sing, religion is at first revealed only that it may
ultimately become rational, why should not the
practice of morality at first have been compulsory
that it might in due time become free and gra
cious ? But, after all, I believe an analysis of
the facts will not suffer us to take this view of the
providential government of the world. In the
contents of the moral consciousness I find unique
elements, unlike anything that went along with
the earlier stages of the development of life, and
absolutely incapable of resolution into practices
useful for social survival blindly followed by the
non-moral precursors of humanity. If the social
instinct is, as the theory supposes, only a means

148 Wreck against Right and Duty.

of preserving society, how could intelligence ever
take it for more than that ? But in the moral
consciousness of mankind there is clear recogni
tion of an absolutely worthf ul. And, in the next
place, if this be denied, there remains one ele
ment in the moral consciousness that forever dis
tinguishes it from a mere intelligence -illumi
nated social instinct, namely, the sense of duty.
Even if moral law be supposed nothing more than
the expression of devices wrought out uncon
sciously in the course of aeons, for securing the
vitality and well-being of society, why do I recog--
nize myself under obligation to observe the law ?
This consciousness of duty, the most certain and
most imperious fact in our experience, whence does
it come if man have no moral fibre in his prim
itive constitution? On this rock the ethics of
Kant, giving scientific shape to human morality,
is firmly intrenched. And no better testimony
to its security could be found than the shifts to
which evolutionists are put when they attempt to
resolve this element of the moral consciousness
into race-accumulated experiences of utility. Mr.
Spencer, indeed, supposes men to have been scared
into moral obligation by the baton of the primi
tive policeman, the ostracism of primitive society,
and the hell of the primitive priest. How a

Darwinism in Ethics. 149

society could exist to deal out these political, so
cial, and religious sanctions, unless it rested on a
moral basis, the evolutionist does not explain.
And one may, therefore, be pardoned for seeing
here only another of the countless attempts to de
rive morality from ideas and institutions which
already presuppose it. The varepov Trporepov is
the bane of evolutionary ethics. Naturally
enough, the sentiment produced by the terrors of
ancient law, politics, and religion, will decay with
the cessation of its causes ; and as Mr. Spencer
identifies this sentiment with, moral obligation, one
can understand how he reaches the paradox that
the " sense of duty, or moral obligation, is transi
tory." In another way the same conclusion is
reached by M. Guyau, who follows Darwin. Con
science is the social instinct, he says, and the scien
tific spirit is the great enemy of blind instincts ;
it illuminates them, and in the flood- tide of light
dissolves them ; what habit has made, reflection
unmakes ; and nothing can save morality when
conscience has met the doom of every instinct —
dissolution under scientific reflection. " Pan, the
nature-god, is dead ; Jesus, the man-god, is dead ;
there remains the ideal god within us, duty, which
is also, perhaps, destined one day to die." But the
irrefragable reply to these oracular prophecies is

15° Spencer and Guyau on Duty.

that they rest upon a misreading of the actual
record. If moral obligation be the effect of cer
tain historical causes, it may decline with the de
cadence of those causes, and if conscience be a
blind instinct, it may follow the supposed law of
dissolution of instincts ; but the conditional ground
•of the consequence is in neither case established,
in neither case does it rest upon evolutionary
science, in neither case has it any antecedent
probability apart from the a priori prejudice of
the utilitarian in favor of the derivative charac
ter of morality and the moral faculties. Instead
of so accounting for the rise of a moral sense and
moral obligation, as a kind of accident in our con
stitution, mankind (a few metaphysicians apart)
persists in regarding them as of the very essence
of human nature. The absolute " ought " cannot
be the product of any experience with the primi
tive policeman or priest, since (apart from the fact
that there would be neither without it) experience
only records what is advantageous for certain ends
and cannot, therefore, enjoin anything categori
cally. Hence the pretence of the evolutionists
to have reconciled the experiential and intuitive
schools of ethics cannot be sustained. Those pre
dicates of the moral law which, in the earlier part
of this chapter, we found the evolutionary theory

Darwinism in Ethics. 151

claiming to account for — its simplicity, universal
ity, etc. — are not its essential attributes ; so that,
even if the evolutionist's contention be granted, he
leaves untouched the fundamental constituents of
the moral consciousness — our sense of an abso
lutely worthful, the right, not merely the useful,
and our recognition of its authority over us as
expressed in the word " ought." For these ideas
no experience can account, and every experiential
theory virtually explains them away as the indis
pensable condition to its own plausibility. How
ever long the process, whether extending through
one generation, as the older utilitarians imagined,
or through countless generations, as the evolutiono-
utilitarians assume, there never will be success, as
Lotze justly observed, in fetching into an empty
soul, by means of the impressiqns of experience, a
consciousness of moral obligation.

Nor, in fact, does evolutionary science, relieved
of the metaphysical baggage with which it has
hitherto been grievously freighted, require us to
believe in the possibility of this desperate feat.
It assumes that morality has been developed
through natural selection. And because natural
selection presupposes a utility — a fittest that sur
vives — the evolutionists have fallen into the fal
lacy of supposing that morality was nothing lut

152 Their Fundamental Fallacy.

a utility. That is the explanation of the plausi
bility of their ethical theory as expounded in the
earlier part of the present chapter. And no other
refutation, after all that has been said, need now
be added except the reminder that natural selec
tion, though wide-awake to the uses of things, is
blind to their nature and essence. It takes ad
vantage of the utility of morality, but no more
determines its content and meaning than a posi-
tivist who passes over the question of the essence
of things. It acts upon germs of all kinds, once
they have been produced and are moving through
phases of development ; but it knows not what the
germs are, whence they come, or what develops
them. The whole question, so far as ethics is
concerned, turns on the nature of those primitive
modifications out of which morality has been
evolved. But on that point evolutionary science
has no answer of its own to give, and the blank
has been filled by the preconceptions of evolu
tionary speculators. Subordinating, as the school
lias hitherto done, intelligence to mechanism, it
has invariably sought the first germ of con
science in a random action that proved useful to
the species in which it was struck out. We
have, on the contrary, maintained that this hypo
thetical derivation passes over the very essence

Darwinism in Ethics. 153

of the moral consciousness; nor can we imag
ine any other way of deriving it which does not
already presuppose it. In opposition to this
mechanical theory of conscience, we hold that it
is an ultimate function of the mind, and that
in germ as in full fruition it must be regarded, not
as an action, but as an ideal of action. The con
sciousness of right and wrong is underived, and,
like intelligence in general, witnesses to a supra-
sensible principle in man — a principle which the
wheels of mechanism, grinding through eternity,
could never of themselves produce. This view
of the subject may be affiliated to Darwinism as
readily as the other. For an abiding ideal of ac
tion is, to say the least, quite as beneficial as a
chance action ; and wherever there is an advan
tage, there natural selection may operate. But
natural selection does not determine the mate
rial upon which it works. Given the forms of
primitive morality, whatever they be, natural se
lection only settles which shall perish and which
survive. Its function is the negative one of sift
ing whatever has attained to positive existence.
In the book of Job, Satan represents, according
to Professor Davidson, the testing, sifting prov
idence of God : natural selection is the Satan of
the evolutionary powers. Strange, indeed, that it

154 Further Objections.

should ever have been mistaken for the powers
themselves !

The ethical conclusions here reached and co
ordinated with the doctrine of evolution and Dar
winism (which I everywhere take for granted)
are so opposed to those of most evolutionists
that some fallacy may be supposed to infect all
our reasonings. After the evolutionary teachings
of the last twenty years, it seems either blindness
or disingenuousness to maintain that evolution
leaves our ethical problems precisely where it
found them. And so, in spite of all the preced
ing analyses and criticisms, the old objections
are sure to recur. Does not the evolutionary
doctrine of heredity imply that man is what his
ancestry has made him, and so abrogate our be
lief in the freedom of the human will? And
does not goodness cease to be divine when you
Lave explained moral laws as a statement of the
habits blindly struck out and blindly followed by
simian or semi-human groups in the struggle for
existence ? If morality is merely a formulation
of the practices which, accidentally hit upon by
some group of animals, made the group coherent,
and thus enabled it to vanquish rival groups with
different practices, would it not seem merely ac
cidental that justice and truthfulness are vir-

Darwinism in Ethics. 155

tues, and not injustice and lying ? For if these
vices, or others, had enabled those primitive semi-
human societies to survive, they would not have
been vices, but virtues ; for virtue is nothing but
a useful means of social survival. "Will not evo
lution, then, as thus interpreted, work revolution
in our views of the moral nature of man, since
it implies that morality is not grounded in the
nature of things, but something purely relative
to man's circumstances — a happy device whereby
man's ancestors managed to cohere in a united
society and so kill out rival and disunited groups ?
Now, it is not necessary to deny either the so
cial utility of morals or the influence of heredity
in order to show that, whatever the first appear
ance, evolution is not in reality revolution in the
sphere of man's moral nature. It is no doubt ^,
true that heredity supplies us with much of the
material out of which we make our characters.
But it is only by an oversight that we identify
our character with the inherited elements out of
which we form it. As Aristotle profoundly ob
served, nature does not make us good or bad,
she only gives us the capacity of becoming good
or bad — that is, of moulding our own characters.
Emphasize as you will, then, the bulk of the in
heritance I have received from my ancestors, it

156 Evolution not Revolution.

still remains ' true that in moral character I am
what I make myself. On stepping-stones of their
dead selves men rise to higher things ; and
neither our ability to do this, nor the conscious
ness of that ability implied in the freedom of the
will, is affected in any way by evolution.

But surely, it will be objected, evolution does
mean revolution in our views of human nature,
if it makes moral rules a mere social utility. I
admit the conclusion, but reject its premises.
For, as I have already urged, the facts of human
life will not allow us to interpret morality as a
mere accidental arrangement whereby our animal
ancestors came out victorious in the struggle for
life. I do not deny that morality would, as a
matter of fact, be useful to any society practising
it in the war of all against all- in the struggle for
life. That it is useful is clear from the readiness
with which people follow Hamlet's advice to his
mother and assume a virtue when they have it
not. But if morality be nothing more than mere
social utility, a mere device which enabled man's
ancestors to kill out rival groups, I fail to under
stand how there has arisen in man a conscience
which makes cowards of us all ; a remorse which
drives a Lady Macbeth to madness, and a Judas
to suicide; a sense of eternal right so strong that

Darwinism in Ethics. 157

no theory can make ns believe we are hoodwinked
into righteousness, truth, and justice, by the mere
accident that lying, injustice, and unrighteousness
were less useful in holding primitive societies
together and enabling them to kill out their
rivals. And all this might be conceded by the
evolutionist, had he not fallen into the fallacy of
holding that, because virtue is socially useful,
therefore it is nothing but a social utility. There
are other things besides morality which favor the
survival of primitive societies. "We have already
spoken of the advantages of an erect attitude and
of a sound intelligence. Yet the evolutionist
does not call these characters mere social utilities.
The eye, for example, has no existence among
the lowest animals ; yet when it does appear, its
own new story is accepted as a fresh revelation
of fact. Instead of describing it as an advantage
in the struggle for life, the evolutionist sees in
the new organ the possibility of a deeper com
munion with reality ; and the more developed
the organ the more valuable its evidence. The
earliest eye was probably nothing more than a
tingling sensitiveness to light and darkness. The
most developed eye discerns a spectrum of seven
colors ; and along with this advance it has also
acquired the capacity of measuring distances,

158 Sense, Intellect \ Conscience.

magnitudes, and situations. Both these func
tions of the eye were eminently useful in the strug
gle for life : they enabled their animal possessor
to get food more easily and escape foes more
deftly. Yet the evolutionist does not hold the
eye is merely a utility. Bringing the surprise of
something new and unexpected, the eye, he will
recognize, is useful only because it makes us
aware of fact. But if you accept the evidence of
the eye when it testifies to the colors or sizes of
objects, you cannot reject the depositions of con
science to the moral character of conduct and
motives. This is a new mental function, and has
the same claim upon you as the other. The va
lidity of the intuition, "Injustice is wrong," is
neither greater nor less than the validity of the
perception, " Snow is white." The vision of both
the outer and the inner eye is useful, but useful
simply because each gives us new revelations of
reality.

The same result is reached by comparing the
deliverances' of conscience with the discoveries of
intelligence. The lowest animals have neither
conscience nor reason. The infinite advantage of
either we have already described. Even the
germ of reason suffices to make man lord of crea
tion. Think only of the significance of the dis-

Darwinism in Ethics. 159

covery that twice two are four. An intelligence
advanced to that point is on the way to geometry,
trigonometry, and the calculus, to all those sciences
whose application has changed the face of the
material world. As the highest mathematics is
useful to us, so was the first germ useful to our
ancestors. But it does not, therefore, follow that
arithmetic is merely a social utility. On the
contrary, it is useful for the reason that it brings
man into deepening relation with fact ; but its
validity is wholly independent of its advantage
to mankind, and only the satirist could suggest
that twice two would be five if that product
were more advantageous to us. Arithmetical
facts cannot be determined by a plebiscite of
utilitarians. And the same is true of the de
liverance of conscience that injustice is wrong.
Ultimate mathematical principles and ultimate
moral principles have the same intuitive evi
dence ; and it is not weakened by the assumption
that man owes his bodily organism to animals in
which there was no trace either of a moral or a
mathematical faculty. Fact is fact ; and neither
morality nor geometry ceases to be objectively
grounded from the accident that our ancestors
only gradually came to an apprehension of them.
From all points of view, then, we are led to the

1 60 Evolutiono-utilitarianism.

same result. Evolutionary science in general,
natural selection in particular, does not necessi
tate, or even indicate, a new system of ethics. It
stands logically indifferent between intuitionism
and utilitarianism, though from the accident that
most expounders of evolution happened to be
utilitarians there has arisen a belief that the two
were in some way connected. In reality, evolu
tionary ethics, as hitherto expounded, is nothing
but an arbitrary combination of utilitarianism in
one or other of its forms with a speculative meta
physics which discovers the ground of mind and
conscience in an antecedent physical or nervous
mechanism. And as such it not only has no sup
port from evolutionary science, but is at the same
time exposed to all the objections which the
common-sense of mankind has always brought
y against every empirical theory of morals and
every mechanical theory of intelligence.

CHAPTER Y.

THE ETHICAL SPECULATIONS OF DARWIN.

From our consideration of the logical bearings
of evolutionary science upon the fundamental
questions of morals we now pass to an examina
tion of the ethical speculations of Darwin. It
will be advisable to begin with an exposition of
his views, after which we shall have to inquire
into their validity, as well as determine their re
lation to evolutionary biology. And, for reasons
that will be evident as we proceed, the account
of the moral faculties must be supplemented by
an account of the intellectual faculties.

Darwin himself confesses that the greatest ob
stacle to the acceptance of the hypothesis which
he had framed to account for the phenomena of
life lies in the high standard of man's intellectual
powers and moral disposition. And his endeavor
is to show that the mental faculties of man differ
only in degree, and not at all in kind, from those
of the lower animals ; and that man's moral at
tainments are, under evolution, the necessary cor-
11

1 62 Human Mind Evolved.

relate of this superiority of intellectual power.
We have now to follow this process of affiliating
human reason and conscience upon animal intel
ligence and instinct.

On the origin of intelligence in our world
Darwin disclaims the knowledge which some
other evolutionary thinkers profess. In what
manner the mental powers were first developed
in the lower organisms he holds " as hopeless an
inquiry as how life itself first originated." He
accepts the facts as he finds them, without pro
fessing to explain them. Animals are alive and
intelligent ; the law of the evolution of life is
known ; what if the development of intelligence
were subject to the same law ? If man, physically
considered, is just a highly developed animal, is
he more on his mental side? Is not his intel
lect, like his physical organism, the product of
natural selection ? It must certainly be admitted
that, wide as the interval confessedly is between
the mental powers of the lowest man and the
highest ape, it is not so wide as the interval be
tween the highest ape and a fish like the lamprey
or lancelet ; and if this latter interval is filled by
numberless gradations now in existence, it is not
impossible that the blank between the human
and the simian mind may once have been covered

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 163

by intervening varieties which are now totally
extinct. And so far as regards the action of
natural selection in the evolution of mind, if, as
must be admitted, such slight beneficial varia
tions of intelligence, as may now be perceived to
occur among animals and to be inherited by their
offspring, occurred in the past history of the
world, and gave the individuals so favored an ad
vantage in the struggle for life ; then it cannot
be doubted that natural selection, which issues
in the survival of the fittest, must always have
spared the most intelligent animals, and might,
therefore, in the course of ages, by perpetuat
ing the transmitted intelligence of countless gen
erations of victorious combatants, have at last
evolved such a combination of mental powers as
enabled their fortunate possessor, the veritable
heir of all the ages, to make weapons for the de
struction of his enemies, to use tools for procur
ing the satisfaction of his own wants, to utter
articulate sounds for convey ing information to his
fellows, and, finally, with many additional accom
plishments, to come forth as man, the most domi
nant of all living creatures, the grandest intellect
ual and sole moral being in this terrestrial world.
The probability thus established by analogy
of general inference, that man's mind is simply a

164 Compared with, Animal Mind.

development from the brute's, differing from it
only in degree, is strengthened by Darwin's com
parison of the two, as manifested in all the forms
of intelligence from blind sensation np to self-
conscious reason. In the instincts of self-preser
vation, sexual love, and mother-love, man and
beast do not differ. And since both have the
same organs of sense, they agree in sensuous per
ception. Like man, too, the lower animals feel
pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. They
experience, also, the same emotions. With them,
as with us, terror causes the muscles to tremble,
the heart to palpitate, and the hair to stand on
end. Courage and timidity we may see in our
dogs, good and bad tempers in our horses, rage
and revenge in monkeys and other animals. A
dog may be as jealous as his mistress, and as fond
of praise as the urchin she sends to school.
African monkeys have been known to die of
grief for the loss of their young.

Great as the animal capacity for emotion there
fore is, it does not, however, exceed the concomi
tant intellectual power. All animals feel wonder,
and many exhibit curiosity. Darwin gives an
amusing account of the mental struggle which
monkeys in the Zoological Gardens underwent, be
tween their instinctive dread of snakes and their

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 165

curiosity to peep into a paper bag containing one,
which he placed among them. Monkeys have
also the faculty of imitation to a wonderful de
gree. And attention, the indispensable condition
of all intellectual progress, is conspicuous in any
animal waiting for its prey. Memory, too, they
share with us. After an absence of five years
and two days, Darwin's dog followed and obeyed
him exactly as if he had " parted with him only
half an hour before." The power of imagination
is evidenced by the sounds and movements of ani
mals during their dreams. And of the highest
faculty of the human mind Darwin says, " only
a few persons now dispute that animals possess
some power of reasoning." For example, the
Vienna bear that deliberately made with his paw
a current in some water, which was close to the
bars of his cage, for the purpose of drawing a
piece of floating bread within his reach, must
have performed the same inductive reasoning as
the lowest savage or the highest scientist.

If it is said, in reply, that man alone is capa
ble of progressive improvement, this must be pro
nounced doubtful in face of the fact that old ani
mals are harder to catch than young ones ; that
birds in the course of a very few years cease to kill
themselves by flying against new telegraph-lines ;

1 66 Use of Tools and Speech.

that animals both lose and acquire caution in re
lation to man and other animals, and that our
domestic dogs have attained to moral qualities un
known to the wolves and jackals from which they
are descended.

ISfor does the capacity to use tools imply, as has
been urged, a fundamental difference between
the mental powers of man and of other animals ;
for the chimpanzee, in a state of nature, cracks a
fruit somewhat like a walnut with a stone, and
troops of Abyssinian baboons have been known
to attack their foes, human and simian, by rolling
down stones from the mountains upon their heads.
So that apes as well as savages use weapons and
implements ; and though savages now grind and
polish stones for definite purposes of utility and
defence, as did also their neolithic ancestors, the
most primitive men who have left any record of
themselves, the men of the palaeolithic age, had
not advanced beyond the use of rough, nngronnd
stones, which differed from the natural tools and
weapons of the apes only in being slightly
though rudely fashioned.

The possession of articulate speech is regarded
by naturalists, like Huxley and Cuvier, and phi
lologists, like Max Muller, as the grand distinctive
character of man ; but Darwin holds that Ian-

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 167

guage has been developed from the cries and gest
ures of the lower animals. The difference lies
solely in the infinitely larger power which man
possesses of associating together the most diver
sified sounds and ideas. And this power, like
language itself, has been slowly and unconsciously
developed by many steps. The beginning of
language was not improbably made by some wise
ape-like animal imitating the growl of a beast of
prey, for the sake of warning his companions of
the expected attack — much as at present fowls
give one another warning of the hawk, and mon
keys utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows.
It is true that no existing ape uses his vocal or
gans for speech ; but this entitles us to infer only
that his intelligence is not sufficiently advanced.
The first speaking progenitor of man must have
had far more highly developed mental powers
than the chimpanzee or gorilla. But there is
nothing in the faculty of articulate speech, so
Darwin concludes, which offers " any insuperable
objection to the belief that man has been devel
oped from some lower form."

Neither, then, in the higher intellectual facul
ties nor in language, which has contributed so
much to their development, does Darwin find
anything to prove that the immense difference

1 68 Conscience.

between the mind of the lowest man and that of
the highest ape is more than a difference of
degree. The moral sense, however, he acknowl
edges is peculiar to man, and it affords, he main
tains, the " best and highest distinction between
man and the lower animals." But even this
faculty turns out not to be beyond the genetic
power of natural selection. For the awful voice
of conscience, which silenced the scepticism of
Immanuel Kant and compelled him to a belief
in the moral communion of man with a super
sensible world that pure reason knows not,
seemed to the scientific epigon of British utili
tarianism only the articulate utterance of the
dumb social instincts of the animal world as, in
the evolution of animal intelligence, they have
been developed, partly by expression in language,
but especially by the ever-deepening conscious
ness, inevitable to an advancing intellect, of the
greater persistency of social instincts in compari
son with all other impulses to action. The so
cial instincts of the animal are by the purging
rays of ascending intelligence transmuted into a
conscience. That sensibility of honor which
feels a stain like a wound is only the far-off
tremor of 'a sympathetic chord whereby some an
cestral group of animals, in the dissonant strug-

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 169

gle for existence, became harmoniously united in
a common and a victorious defence.

"Any animal whatever," says Darwin, "en
dowed with well-marked social instincts, the pa
rental and filial affections being here included,
would inevitably acquire a moral sense, or con
science, as soon as its intellectual powers had be
come as well, or nearly as well, developed as in
man." Not that any social animal, with the
same mental faculties, would acquire exactly the
same moral sense as ours; for the nature of
the moral sense is determined by the conditions
of the animal's life. If, for instance, men were
reared under precisely the same conditions as
hive-bees, they would possess a conscience which
required unmarried women, like the worker-bees,
to kill their brothers, and mothers to kill their
fertile daughters.

Conscience, or the moral sense, being, according
to this theory, derived from sociability, it may
be worth while glancing at the operations of that
instinct in the lower animals. That animals are
social we may see in our horses, cattle, and sheep,
in rooks, jackdaws, and starlings, in creatures as
far asunder as ants and monkeys. The most
common mutual service of the higher animals is
to warn one another of danger. As danger-signal,

170 Animal Sociability.

rabbits stamp on tlie ground with their hindfeet ;
and the chamois, as the hunter in Tell knows,
stamp with their forefeet, whistling at the same
time. Animals also assist one another in sick
ness or distress, even at the risk of life. An
Abyssinian baboon once returned alone to a pack
of dogs that had driven off his troop and carried
away a young baboon which, left behind in the
rout, was calling piteously for aid. Besides love
and sympathy, social animals exhibit self-control,
fidelity to one another, and obedience to the
leader. The complex tissue of sociability is prob
ably an extension of the parental and filial affec
tions, originating, like them, in the action of
natural selection. Under the same imperious
law, sympathy, too, has been developed, if not ac
quired ; for the most sympathetic animals would
flourish best and rear the greatest number of
offspring. In case of a conflict between impulses
or instincts, it is manifest that in the struggle
for life the one most beneficial to the species
must in the long run triumph. What if con
science were but such a persistent social instinct ? f
We must turn to man to see.

Man is a social animal. And if we may argue
from the analogy of the majority of the quadru-
mana, his ancestors as far back as the simian stage

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 171

were social likewise. He inherits, accordingly, a
tendency to be faithful to his comrades and obe
dient to the leader of his tribe. But his sympa
thetic impulses are not, as in some lower animals,
crystallized into special instincts which define his
action under all circumstances. Eeason and ex
perience must, at least in later stages, be the main
guides of his conduct. But as he is a sympathetic
animal, he must also be influenced greatly by the
wishes and opinions of his fellow-men, whose ap
probation he courts, whose blame he strives to
avoid. This motive to conduct would be at its
strongest when reason was at its weakest. Hence,
while the rational philosopher of modern times
makes little of the opinion of others, and, feeling
himself the supreme judge of his own conduct,
sets his heart against violating in his person that
dignity of humanity of which he believes himself
the bearer, his savage ancestor, ignorant of the
sentiment of humanity, has just reason enough to
recognize the force of public opinion in the set
of individuals with whom he happens to be asso
ciated, without any thought of the rest of man
kind, or with the thought of them only as ene
mies. The social instinct, developed in the
struggle for existence through natural selection,
jnustj willy-nilly, have been the supreme law of

172 Grows into Moral Sense.

life for primitive man as for his ape-like fore,
fathers.

It is now in this abiding sympathetic impulse,
acquired through natural selection for the good of
the community, that we must seek the origin of
the moral sense, or conscience. Already in its
persistency over other impulses we may discern
a basis for the supremacy of the moral law. A
permanent and strong instinct in the presence of
an evanescent impulse awakens a feeling of obli
gation, which we express by saying that it ought
to be obeyed. " A pointer dog, if able to reflect
on his past conduct, would say to himself, ' I
ought (as, indeed, we say of him) to have pointed
at that hare, and not have yielded to the passing
temptation of hunting it.' " But this preroga
tive of approving and disapproving is what con
stitutes man a moral being — the sole moral ani
mal. It is, as it were, a voice lent by intelligence
to the dumb instincts and impulses to action' that
struggle in the breast of every animal. Why,
then, is conscience more than a simple expression
of the motives at play ? If the instinct of self-
preservation or of vengeance has triumphed over
the social instinct, why does a man regret that he
followed the one natural impulse rather than the
other, and why does he further feel that he ought

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 173

to regret his conduct ? Here is a profound differ
ence between man and the lower animals; but
Darwin finds an explanation of it in the immense
ly superior development of man's mental faculties. ]
Reflection is an unavoidable incident of an in
telligence so highly developed as man's. Images
of all past actions and motives would pass inces
santly through the mind of the earliest human
being. With him, as with other social animals,
the sympathetic instincts would be ever present
and persistent ; while the instincts of self-preser
vation and hunger, or the impulse to vengeance,
are in their nature transitory, or scarcely ever
present to consciousness. Accordingly, when an
impulse to vengeance has mastered man's social
instincts, he reflects and compares the now fad
ing idea of this impulse with the ever present
social instincts. On one side he finds the gratifi
cation of vengeance at the cost of his compan
ions ; on the other, the outgoings of his own ever
present spontaneous sympathy, re-enforced with
the knowledge that his comrades consider it
praiseworthy ; and the consequence is that that
feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably re
sults from any unsatisfied instinct now arises,
as soon as it is perceived that the enduring and
always present social instinct has yielded to

1 74 A ided by Reflection.

some other instinct, at the time stronger, but
neither enduring in its nature nor leaving be
hind it a very vivid impression. Thus retribu
tion comes when the strong impulse which im
pelled to revenge has grown weak in memory and
seems as nothing before the ever-enduring social
instincts and the desire to stand well with oth
ers. Hence regret, remorse, and penitential tears.
And the poor sinner will " consequently resolve,
more or less firmly, to act differently for the fut
ure ; and this is conscience, for conscience looks
backward and serves as a guide for the future."
This conscience, which thus springs by reflection
out of the sympathetic impulses to action, is
moulded by the approbation and disapprobation
of others, the appreciation of which also rests on
sympathy ; and after the power of language has
been acquired, the expressed will of the commu
nity naturally becomes the paramount guide to
individual action. Habit further confirms the
individual in virtuous conduct, until at last such
perfect self-command is acquired that he yields
instantly and without a struggle to his social sym
pathies and instincts, including his feeling for the
judgment of his fellows. It is probable that tho
habit of self-command, so laboriously attained,
may be transmitted to offspring. And thus man

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 175

finally comes to feel, through acquired and, per
haps, inherited habit, that it is best for him to
obey his more persistent impulses. These alone
give meaning to the imperious word Ouglit^
which u seems merely to imply the consciousness
of a rule of conduct, however it may have origi
nated."

Such is Darwin's famous theory of the moral
sense. Its significance for speculative ethics is
a sufficient justification of the detailed account
here given of it — an account I have striven to
make accurate, often by reproducing the very
language of the original. The next considera
tion is, whether an unprejudiced seeker after
truth can rest in Darwin's theory as a satisfac
tory philosophy of morals.

One thing must be stated at the outset. Dar
win's treatment of the phenomena of morals dif
fers essentially, not only from his treatment of the
phenomena of life, but also from his treatment of
the phenomena of intelligence. Nor is the con
trast difficult to explain. Life, as all admit, is
common to man and the animals ; and, as Dar
win adduced grounds for believing, there is no
fundamental difference between human and ani
mal intelligence. Now, if Darwin's aim was to
break down the wall of partition which unscien-

V

176 Darwin s Ethical Method Unique.

tific dogma bad erected between the various species
of living beings, it was not necessary for him to
inquire into the absolute beginning of life or of
intelligence ; and, as we have already seen, this
problem he specifically set aside. It sufficed for
his purpose that human and other animals were
alive and intelligent, however they may have be
come so ; and the only question he set himself
was how, beginning with the lower forms, the ad
vance in physical and psychical organization had
been effected. But even to this restricted ques
tion his answer is, as we have found, a mixture of
science and nescience. By far the most impor
tant part of the process of evolution is veiled
in inscrutable mystery. The development from
lower to higher life and intelligence has not been
sudden, but gradual, we are told ; yet we no more
comprehend the cause of the one than of the oth
er, and ultimately fall back upon a belief that it
is because organisms have innate tendencies to
vary. But that assumed, everything is assumed ;
for natural selection, which Darwin discovered, is
only the name for the survival of the fittest among
all those forms which nature so mysteriously
flings forth. What Darwin, therefore, maintains
of organization and intelligence amounts only to
this : given the lower phases, there is somehow

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 177

a progress to higher phases, the best of which
natural selection is constantly preserving. But
in the moral world he finds no such common
starting-point. He does not pretend that the
phenomena of conscience, like those of life and
mind, are alike exhibited by man and brute.
Had he done so, he might here, too, have con
tented himself with the assertion of a develop
ment from the one to the other by means of
natural selection, leaving the essence of the pro
cess as mysterious as he left it in the case of
life or mind. And to this assertion, were it sup
ported by analogous facts, no one could have
objected who accepts his theory of the evolu
tion of life. The germ, he might have said,
however it originated, somehow grows into the
various forms of animal conscience, and at last
culminates in the conscience of man ; and the
distance between the moral sense of the high
est animal and the lowest man, he might have
repeated, is not greater than that between the
lamprey and the dog. Unfortunately, however, \
for the consistency of this scheme, he finds no
animal conscience. With the recognition of that
blank, one might suppose the author of the theory
of natural selection, with his habitual caution,
would venture no farther. But the combined in-
12

178 Unlike his Scientific Method.

fluence of an inherited empirical psychology and
ethics and a newly discovered evolutionary biology
proved too fascinating even for the cautious, fact-
revering Darwin. Since there is no animal con
science to begin with, and since man's has to be
" accounted for, " one must be manufactured as its
antecedent. Darwin accordingly takes sociability,
which is common to man and beast, as one ele
ment, and for the other element, high intelligence,
which is peculiar to man ; and from their combi
nation, by a kind of psychological chemistry, gets
you a primitive conscience. Elsewhere the fa
mous scientist lays before you different species
with their intervening forms, many of which he
has himself actually produced ; and from a sur
vey of all the facts concludes there is no absolute
distinction between them. But here he treats
you to an imaginary psychology — imaginary facts
and imaginary processes, which have no other
warrant than his own preconception of the deriv
ative character of the moral faculty. The sure
footed investigator here roams at random over
an impalpable void that offers no foothold ; and
soaring in his flight, you may follow, but cannot
catch him. He has deserted the kingdom of fact,
which no mortal had ever half so well mastered,
and, in an incautious moment, embarked upon the

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 1 79

barren seas of speculation, with all their shoals
and quicksands, " where armies whole have stink."
This departure, in the case of morals, from the
scientific method of the " Origin of Species " is
certainly very remarkable, though no one, so far
as I know, has ever called attention to it. Had
Darwin, I repeat, treated conscience as he treated
the mental faculties, there would have been no
ground of complaint. His mental philosophy may
be summed up in the statement that the various
grades of intelligence shade into one another so
imperceptibly that it is not possible to distinguish
them absolutely, even at the point where the ani
mal differentiates into the human mind — an inter
val which, moreover, is not greater than that
between the intelligence of the fish and the intel
ligence of the elephant. This may or may not be
a tenable contention ; but it is at least supported
by facts, and so amenable to refutation. It seems
to me false from omissions rather than in the po
sitions it specifies. For, supposing the difference
between the canine or simian mind and the mind of
a savage to be no greater than the theory requires,
there is, nevertheless, a pertinent distinction too
significant to be passed over in silence — the one is
capable of appropriating the accumulated knowl
edge, culture, and civilization of the most ad-

1 80 Human and Brute Mind Different.

vanced spirits ; the other is not. This capacity
for development should count for something in
framing a genealogical table. And that I have
not overestimated it is evidenced by the uncon
scious testimony of Darwin, who, speaking of the
Fuegians as the " lowest barbarians," yet adds :
" I was continually struck with surprise how
closely the three natives on board JET. M. S.
Beagle, who had lived some years in England
and could talk a little English, resembled us in
disposition and in most of our mental faculties."
As he is, the native Fuegian may not be much
more intelligent than an elephant ; but then, he
is capable of becoming so much more ! j,

Still, whether Darwin is right or wrong in this
matter does not now concern us. My present
point is, that in his mental philosophy he makes
no attempt to derive any of the mental powers.
He takes them as he finds them, and studies their
different manifestations and gradations. Man has
more reason than the monkey : Darwin notes the
fact without pretending to explain whence that
reason came or what the essence of reason is.
The lancelet has no imagination ; the dog has :
Darwin recognizes the appearance of a new power
in the more developed animal without professing
to account for its entrance upon the field. Had

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 181

he in the same way disclaimed any knowledge of
the origin and the essence of conscience (whether
taking it for a uniquely human endowment or
not) his moral philosophy would have had the
same scientific character as his mental philosophy.
Whether he held that the moral faculty first ap
peared in man or germinated in some lower ani
mal, his position would be of the nature of a sci
entific hypothesis which could be adjudged by
the facts. But when, in violation of his own in
variable practice elsewhere, he here professes to
show us the non -moral material out of which the
moral faculty was manufactured, and the very
process of its making, we cannot resist the sus
picion that he has fallen upon the vain problem
of trying, as Lotze put it, to find out how exist
ence was made.

This attempted derivation of the moral faculty
by Darwin has, it will now be seen, no connection,
either in matter or in method, with that biologi
cal science which is often designated Darwinism.
"We must distinguish, henceforth, between Dar
win the ethical speculator and Darwin the ob
server and interpreter of facts in natural history.
The lack of this distinction has led to endless con
fusion. Naturalists have supposed that Darwin's
biology carried with it his theory of conscience,

1 82 Conscience Indefinable.

while moralists, repudiating the latter, thought
they were called upon to demolish Darwinian
science. What a chaos of absurd disputation has
been thus engendered, the Darwinian literature
of the last generation too abundantly evinces.
These fruitless contentions arise from a miscon
ception which is clearly evident in the light of
the preceding chapters. That mass of fact and
theory which naturalists and moralists have im
agined unitary is really twofold, with two distinct
centres of gravity. Without maintaining, in gen
eral, in opposition to Mr. Herbert Spencer, that
biology has nothing to do with ethics or ethics
with biology (though this is not incapable of de
monstration), we do assert with the greatest con
fidence that, even if Darwin's theory of the origin
of species and descent of man is sound, his specu
lations on morals will not, therefore, be sustained
or confirmed, since the two rest on wholly dif
ferent bases, which are at no point coincident, and
which no reasoning can bring together.

The absolutely unique treatment which ethical
phenomena received at the hands of Darwin may
be still further illustrated in yet another way. It
has been shown already that, in his own province
of natural history, Darwin makes no attempt to
derive that life whose mysteriously expanding

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 183

phases he seeks to arrange in a graduated scale.
But besides mere life there is spirit, with its
powers of apprehending the true, the good, and
the beautiful. And with regard to those mental
powers which, conversing with reality, seize upon
the truth, we have found Darwin registering
their progressive manifestations without any pre
tence of accounting for their origin. The logical
faculty, the mathematical faculty, he accepts as
ultimate facts ; and whether they are comparable
with animal activities or not, he recognizes the
futility of pretending to show how they came
into being. The same holds of his treatment of
the sense of the beautiful. Without attempting
a genesis of the aesthetic faculty, he contents him
self with observing, among animals in all stages
of development, actual instances of perception
of the beautiful. And a wonderful collection of
facts he makes, as fascinating as novel and fresh !
The observations constitute the decisive moment
in his theory of sexual selection. As natural se
lection turns upon the success of both sexes in the
struggle for life, sexual selection depends upon
the success of certain individuals over others of
the same sex in relation to the propagation of the
species. Among nearly all animals there is a
struggle between the males for the possession of

184 Sense of Beauty Left Ultimate.

the females. The slightest favorable variation
would enable the victorious possessor to propagate
it, be it a modification adapted to destroy rival
wooers or to win the coveted female. To the
first class belong those weapons of offence and de
fence — the courage and pugnacity, the superior
strength and build — in which most males differ
from the females. Still more interesting is the
second class. For courtship among the lower an
imals is far from being simply a matter of brute
force. The females appear to have much more
freedom of choice than the women of the lowrest
races of mankind. The male, therefore, has not
only to conquer his rivals, but to win the female.
And the female, such is the animal sense of
beauty, is most excited by, or prefers pairing with,
the more ornamental male, or the male which
sings best or plays the best antics. Hence, in a
state of nature, the females by a long selection of
the more attractive males have gradually added
to their beauty or other attractive qualities. And
Darwin shows in a most ingenious manner how,
owing to female susceptibility to beauty, the
charms of the males of the most different orders
and species have been acquired through sexual se
lection. His illustrations fill a volume, but none
of them are more delightful than those refer-

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 185

ring to the ornaments of male birds— their brill
iant tails, their combs and wattles, their gorgeous
plumes, their elongated feathers, their top-knots,
and so forth.

There is no need, however, of here following
farther Darwin's theory of sexual selection. It
is alone with the animal sense of the beautiful,
on which the theory rests, that we are now con
cerned. That faculty, be it observed, Darwin ac
cepts as he finds it, ready-made ; his task is merely
to trace its operations in the various orders of as
cending life. What may be the nature and the
source of the psychical organization that enables
beings to perceive the beautiful, Darwin no more
considers than the cognate question concerning
the powers that apprehend the true. But when he
treats of the faculty that discerns the good, i.e.,
conscience, he undertakes to show us whence it
came and how it ivas made ! This unique inno
vation in method is tantamount to a transition
from science to speculation.

Darwin's conjectural ethics, then, we may now
conclude, is wholly unsupported by his observa
tional biology.

The next question is, How does the theory
accord with the facts ? Surrendering the unde
served prestige they have hitherto enjoyed from

1 86 Meaning of Conscience.

association, through an illustrious name, with
evolutionary science, are the ethical speculations
of Darwin in themselves tenable ? To answering
this question the rest of the present chapter must
be devoted.

The centre of gravity of Darwin's hypothesis
is the assertion that conscience is the product of
well-marked social instincts and advanced intel
ligence. Given these, " any animal whatever," so
he tells us, " would inevitably acquire a moral
sense, or conscience." This proposition we have
now to examine. We want to understand how
and why conscience is begotten of intellect and
sociability.

Conscience, as popularly conceived, is a term
of somewhat vague signification. It comprises
intellectual and emotional phenomena, standing
at once for the power that discovers and enforces
the good and avenges its violation or rewards its
observance. It is aptly described, in Butler's fe
licitous confusion, as a sentiment of the under
standing and a perception of the heart. But what
common-sense thus unites, analytic philosophers
have disjoined. One school holds that conscience
has a purely intellectual function, the recognition
of moral law ; another insists it is nothing but
feeling, a pain more or less intense attendant on

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 187

violation of duty. It matters little in what sense
this or any other term is used in philosophical
literature, provided only the definition be given,
though there is a manifest advantage in keeping
as close as possible to popular usage. What is
of importance is that in fixing the connotation of
words the things to be named shall not be over
looked. And that all the moral phenomena re
ferred by the vulgar to conscience actually exist
will not be questioned by any thinker (whatever
his definition of the word conscience) who has
ever perceived one course of action to be right
and another wrong, who has recognized the au
thority of the right over him, and who, on defy
ing the right and choosing the wrong, has ex
perienced the pangs of remorse.

As Darwin supplies us with a theory of the
genesis of conscience, it is necessary to determine
what he means by that term. Is the function of
the Darwinian conscience the perception of right
and wrong, or the recognition of the authority of
the right, or the remorse that follows upon vio
lation of that authority ? Is it any or all of
these ?

To this question I find it difficult to obtain a
definitive answer. Darwin was a naturalist ; and
the natural sciences of which he was master do

1 88 Ambiguities of Darwin s Usage.

not stand in need of such precise definitions as
the more complex sciences of mind. Besides, for
all but experts, definitions of mental phenomena
are exceedingly difficult to frame. Perhaps we
may thus explain the ambiguity in Darwin's use
of the term conscience. In the fourth chapter
of " The Descent of Man " we are told, in the
opening sentences, that " the moral sense, or con
science, . . . has a rightful supremacy over
every other principle of human action ; it is
summed up in that short but imperious word
ought, so full of high significance. " But in a later
passage we hear " of the moral sense, which tells
us what we ought to do, and of the conscience,
which reproves us if we disobey it." Further,
conscience is described as an " inward monitor "
urging towards "one impulse rather than the
other," and again, in the same paragraph, as a
" feeling of right or wrong." To complete the
confusion it is once more coupled with remorse ;
and the man who has been visited with this ret
ribution will, according to Darwin, " consequently
resolve more or less firmly to act differently for
the future ; and this is conscience, for conscience
looks backwards and serves as a guide for the
future."

No logic, I apprehend, can extract from these

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 189

descriptions a consistent definition of conscience.
Yet, without it how are we to test Darwin's the
ory of the origin of conscience ? One way is still
open. Though we are unable to determine from
Dai-win's statements the character of the phe
nomenon to be produced, he yet furnishes us with
the elements and the process of its production.
These we may study in the expectation of dis
covering the nature of their result. Given socia
bility and intelligence as generating factors of
x (" conscience "), the problem is to find x. I
repeat, we ought to know what is meant by con
science, since this is the phenomenon whose
genesis we seek ; but, failing that, nothing re
mains but to assume the agencies and operations
posited by Darwin, 'and then examine what they
can produce and what they are incapable of pro
ducing.

Turning to the famous chapter already men
tioned for Darwin's account of the subject, we
learn there is a " main point, on which
the whole question of the moral sense turns.
Why should a man feel that he ought to obey one
instinctive desire rather than another ? . . .
Why does he regret having stolen food from
hunger ? "

This problem presents no peculiar difficulty to

190 Genesis of Conscience.

anybody not pledged to a system of derivative
morality. The answer is simple enough. Man
perceives some desires to be higher or nobler than
others, he recognizes an obligation to admit the
better and exclude the worse, and he cannot defy
this authority without incurring the penalty of
remorse. Admit there is a scale of worth and
authority among our impulses to conduct, as well
as an order of intensity, and the whole difficulty
vanishes. This, however, is what our current
evolutionary school, for reasons more conceiv
able than cogent, has persistently declined to do.
The undeniable deliverances of consciousness are
in some way to be " accounted for,'7 as though
you could explain why the whole is greater than
its part, or twice two four, or benevolence more
excellent than envy !

Let us consider Darwin's solution of the prob
lem he has raised : " "Why does man regret that
he has followed one natural impulse rather than
another ? "

In all such cases, according to Darwin, regret
is the concomitant of a violation of the social in
stincts on the part of the selfish instincts. It can
not be due to the greater strength of the former,
for, as a matter of fact, the social instincts in man
are not stronger than the instincts of self-preser-

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 191

vation, hunger, etc.; and were they stronger, it is
not easy to see how they could ever have been
overpowered by the weaker. But " the social in
stincts are ever present and persistent." And a
being with mental faculties as high as man's can
not avoid reflecting upon past actions and motives,
and comparing the satisfaction of hunger, ven
geance, etc., at other men's cost, with the almost
ever present instinct of sympathy, which " forms
an essential part of the social instinct, and is in
deed its foundation-stone." !N~ow, such desires as
hunger, vengeance, and the like, are in their nat
ure of short duration ; and after being satisfied,
are not vividly recalled. Hence, when the images
of these past and now weakened impressions are
compared with the ever enduring social instincts,
and with public opinion, the thief, or avenger, will
feel as if he had been balked in following a pres
ent instinct or habit, and find himself the prey of
remorse, regret, or shame.

It is not conscience, therefore, as popularly
understood, but only remorse, whose genesis Dar
win is really tracing. Does he succeed even in
this limited endeavor ?

The plausibility of the deduction is due to the
assumption that " the social instincts are ever,
present and persistent," while hunger, vengeance,

1 92 Fallacious Assumption.

lust, etc., are not. "What Darwin maintains about
these last impulses is psychologically true : they
may be readily and completely gratified, and nei
ther the attendant pains nor pleasures are sus
ceptible of vivid representation in consciousness.
And, on the other hand, the influence upon the
individual of the social organism or social factor
seems scarcely capable of exaggeration to those
who have taken to heart the teachings of Herder
and the great German thinkers of the eighteenth
century, or of Comte, Mill, and Lewes in the
nineteenth. Nevertheless, when the social prin
ciples of conduct are enumerated one by one, no
one would venture to assert that compassion, be
nevolence, gratitude, justice, veracity, or humanity,
is an " ever present and persistent instinct. " Man
is moved both by egoistic and altruistic springs of
action, and no psychology would imitate the Dar
winian irony of making the latter the more en
during. On the contrary, as in the Darwinian
theory, the instinct of self-preservation comes
earliest ; and as the filial, parental, and social in
stincts are derived from it by means of natural
selection ; there would be grounds for maintain
ing that the one omnipresent and persistent im
pulse is the egoistic one of self-preservation. At
any rate, it is only through the illicit comparison

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 193

of one whole class with some of the individuals
composing another that Darwin wins a primacy
for the social instincts. Compare compassion or
gratitude with lust or hunger, and you would not
say that the individual social impulse is more per
sistent or enduring than the individual selfish
impulse ; or compare the whole class of social in
stincts with the whole class of selfish instincts,
and, again, you find no difference in the times of
their presence or persistency. Take, on the other
hand, the entire species of social instincts and
only two or three individuals from the selfish
group, and, of course, you may predicate of the
former a more constant presence and greater per
sistency. It is, now, by this utterly fallacious
procedure that Darwin gains the fundamental
proposition in his deduction of the moral sense
(that is, as we have seen, remorse). Instead of
granting that the social instincts exclusively are
ever present and persistent, we must maintain
they have no title to those predicates which can
not be urged with equal or greater validity on
behalf of the selfish instincts.

But even if Darwin's assumption that the social
instincts are ever present and persistent were con
ceded, it would not enable him to educe con
science or remorse. For, suppose these instincts
13

194 Further Objection. <

located in a being of high mental powers — and
that is all the theory postulates — what is there
to carry the non-moral possessor over into the
status of a moral agent ? Evolutionists of' the
current school are apt to slur over this step, and
the hiatus is not observed by their readers be
cause, for the most part, they fail to realize that
the moral has here been made to emerge, not from
an antecedent kindred germ, but from the ab
solutely non-moral. When Darwin tells them
that a highly intelligent being, reflecting upon the
past triumphs of lust, vengeance, or hunger, over
more benevolent impulses, cannot escape the bit
terness of remorse or shame, they assent to the
proposition as expressing a fact of their own ex
perience. But they overlook the all-important
difference that they are already moral beings, and
that the highly intelligent animal Darwin speaks
of is not. Why, then, should this non-moral in
telligence experience remorse? The selfish in
stinct of hunger or lust had its way only because
it was at the time stronger than the social check.
And in this superior intensity a reflecting, non-
moral being could not fail to find its justification.
Had the more powerful impulse been restrained,
there would have arisen (to appropriate language
of Darwin's) " that feeling of dissatisfaction, or

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 195

even misery, which invariably results from any
unsatisfied instinct." And as this misery is pro
portionate to the intensity of the impulse sup
pressed — greater when this is stronger, lighter
when it is weaker — every reflecting being, unin
fluenced by moral considerations, and governed,
therefore, only by a Benthamite calculus of pleas
ures and pains, would be driven to the inevitable
conclusion, that true wisdom consisted in fol
lowing the strongest impulse (except when it
might entail a future balance of pain — a con
tingency rarer for non-moral than for moral
beings). The case may be represented as fol
lows : At a certain moment in the past, a selfish
instinct, being stronger than a social instinct, was
gratified by the corresponding conduct, and pro
duced a clear surplus of pleasure over the pain at
tendant upon the violation of the weaker social
instinct ; had the latter been satisfied to the
suppression of the former, there would, for the
same reason, have been a surplus of pain over
pleasure. This actual state of things, now, can
not be altered by the most arduous reflection upon
it. Hence those images of past actions and
motives which, according to Darwin, incessantly
pass through the minds of highly intelligent ani
mals must3 so far as this particular case is con-

196 No Escape From It.

cerned, generate a pleasurable consciousness akin
to that formerly produced by the remembered
events themselves.

The non-moral intelligent being, then, that
followed the strongest impulse, be it an egoistic
or an altruistic impulse, would have the best
reasons for self-gratulation. One consideration,
however, as already hinted, might suffice to give
him pause. The strongest instinct, though pro
ducing the most pleasure momentarily by its
gratification, might not produce the greatest sur
plus of permanent pleasure. And if so, this
would be a reason for a non-moral being sup
pressing it. But Darwin makes no such supposi
tion ; nor would it in the least serve his purpose.
For his problem is to generate conscience, and he
rightly saw that, though a non-moral being who
preferred a momentary to a permanent pleasure
might, on reflection, deem himself short-sighted,
imprudent, or even foolish, such a being could have
no experience of that heart-breaking emotion of
remorse which Darwin identifies with conscience.

Darwin makes remorse the concomitant of the
recollection of suppressed social instincts ; yet in
the results, actual or possible, entailed by the
suppression we find no ground for remorse, while
as regards the act of suppression, due as it was

Darwin s Ethical Theory. 197

to the pleasure-giving triumph of a selfish in
stinct, we have seen that a non-moral being, re
flecting upon it, could have no other feeling than
self-complacency. But (it will be objected) the
non-moral being who formerly gave way to sel
fishness is supposed by Darwin to be, at the
moment of reflection, under the influence of the
ever present and persistent social instincts and
sympathies ; and it is in their reinstalled light
that the former outburst of egoism now appears
shameful and fills the reflecting agent with re
morse. This supposition, which is manifestly
borrowed from the experiences of a moral being,
presupposes one of two conditions, either of
which is absolutely destructive to the ethical hy
pothesis of Darwin. If reflection upon violated . \
social instincts could engender such sentiments in
a non-moral intelligence, either the reflection1!^.
very inadequate or a worth is attributed to the
social sentiments hitherto denied them by the
theory. Suppose the reflection thorough and
complete, then what avail the solicitations of
present sociability to color and distort the images
reflection evokes ? A developed intellect wilft
not confound the present with the past, or fool-1
ishly dream that, because at this moment a tri
umph of the social instincts would be pleasur-

198 Egoism versus Sociability.

able, it would always have been pleasurable in the
past. It could not but recall that just as at pres
ent the social impulses happen to be dominant, so
at other times hunger, vengeance, and lust hap
pen to be dominant ; and to slip the one force is
as natural and as praiseworthy, from this non-
moral point of view, as to slip the other. But
the social instincts, says Darwin, are more present
and enduring than the selfish instincts. . Even if
this contention, which I have already adduced
grounds for rejecting, be for the moment con
ceded, it will not help out the demonstration.
For you cannot argue that because selfish im
pulses do not come so often or stay so long as so
cial impulses, they have therefore less right to the
field when they actually do put in an appearance.
Granting that the times of sociability are greater
than the times of selfishness, this time-measure
does not explain why I feel remorse over acts of
vengeance or robbery. And if the meaning is
that I shed penitential tears over them solely be
cause I am at present transported by a wave of
sociability, this would lead to the absurdity that
when the egoistic instincts had the upper hand,
reflection would then produce remorse for pre
vious acts of benevolence and compassion involv*
ing sacrifice to myself !

Dawviri s Ethical Theory. 199

Thorough-going reflection, then, will not gener
ate remorse in a being that recognizes no differ
ence in impulses to action except degrees of dura
tion and intensity. The Darwinian hypothetical
moral ancestor does feel remorse. He must
therefore have already arrived at a perception of
the relative worth of competing springs of con
duct. What Darwin calls the social impulses this
incipient moral agent already recognizes as higher
and nobler than what Darwin calls the selfish im
pulses. The one has a claim upon him, the other
has not. That claim, the mute though awful ap
peal of goodness to a free moral agent, he may
defy ; but, unless his heart is hardened, that de
fiance brings the terrible yet blessed retribution
of remorse. How all this is so, why all this is so,
we know not. Voltaire's words deserve, in these
days of derivative and genetic philosophy, to
be written in letters of gold : " "What inconsist
ency ! We know not how the earth produces
a blade of grass, or how the bones grow in the
womb of her who is with child, and yet we would
persuade ourselves that we understand the nature
and generation of our ideas."

Darwin attempts to derive remorse (which he
calls "conscience") from measuring sociability
against selfishness in the mind of a non-moral

2OO Conscience presupposed.

being. The derivation, I think we have shown,
is a failure. It becomes plausible only when we
grant, as Darwin does not, though the reader
generally does, that our hypothetical ancestor has
an intuitive perception of the superior excellence
of social over selfish instincts. And so it appears
that it is this inderivable moral consciousness,
this sense of right and wrong, this conscience,
and not any psychological play of egoistic and
altruistic impulses to action, that^ constitutes at
once the possibility and the foundation of re
morse. Darwin's derivation of it turns out a
gigantic varepov irporepov.

CHAPTER VL

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL IDEALS AND IN
STITUTIONS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE
FAMILY.

The history of moral ideals and institutions,
though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to
me the most important topic in the whole realm
of ethics. Therein is to be found, along with a
fuller comprehension, the solution of many of
those vexed questions which have never failed to
stimulate, and have always baffled, the ingenuity
of all the schools of analytic philosophers. To
have aroused interest in a matter so significant
is no trifling addition to the crown of Darwin's
glory. But it was really almost by accident that
Darwin stumbled upon the subject. As Saul, the
son of Kish, was looking for his father's asses
when he found a kingdom, so Darwin, the epigon
of speculative utilitarianism, was casting about for
supports to his more than dubious theory of con
science when his glance fell upon this vast, prom-

2O2 Darwin as Moralist.

ising, though yet uncultivated domain of histori
cal ethics. Indirectly, indeed, he suggested the
way which a positive "science" of ethics would
have to follow ; but for himself, he remained an
ethical speculator of the old-fashioned type, with
all the preconceptions and with the same compla
cent confidence of the derivative school whose
traditions he had inherited. But his procedure
enables us to illustrate, in a concrete instance,
the difference between science and speculation
in ethics. The observation and classification of
ethical facts, whether manifested in the individ
ual or in the race, constitute the business of the
" science " of ethics ; all else is hypothesis, specu
lation, fancy. The phenomena of the individual
moral consciousness, Darwin presumably turned
over to the writers of systematic text-books ; and
the phenomena of the historical development of
morality among mankind he drew upon only
to illustrate his speculations on the origin of
conscience — speculations which he followed his
school in supposing the principal subject-matter
of ethics. From infection with this speculative
spirit evolutionary moralists have not yet recov
ered, and they still put upon us as " science " con
jectures and phantasies as far removed from fact
as the republic of Plato or the paradise of Mil-

The Evolution of Morality. 203

ton. This must serve as excuse for repeating
here the main conclusion of our first chapter —
namely, that ethics, if it is to become truly a sci
ence, must shun the path of speculation and fol
low closely the historical method.

The citation of facts from savage morality,
though merely for purposes of illustration, consti
tutes, I have said, Darwin's most worthful contri
bution to morals. His speculative ethics is, in
deed, generally supposed to be an organic part of
that evolutionary science whose basis he laid in
biology ; but it has been shown in the preceding
chapters that Darwinian biology is absolutely in
different to every philosophy, and has no more
logical connection with the metaphysical and eth
ical views that have been grafted upon it by Dar
win and others than with the opposite views.
Further, it has been shown that, in themselves
considered, Darwin's ethical speculations, whether
judged by their internal self -consistency or their
adequacy to the external facts, are wholly unsat
isfactory and untenable. To the arguments on
which these conclusions were based we need not
here recur. But another point remains, which
might, indeed, be passed over in a mere examina
tion of Darwinism, but which, as it is suggested
by Darwin's appeal to savage morality, cannot be

204 History in Ethics.

beyond the scope of our present inquiry, while it
is, besides, of such transcendent significance for
the future of ethics that I could not in any case
decide to omit it altogether. I allude to the bear
ing of the history of morality among civilized and
uncivilized races upon current systems of moral
philosophy. What light does our present knowl
edge of the development of moral conceptions,
ideals, and institutions among mankind throw
upon that fundamental problem of ethical specu
lation, the nature of the moral law ?

This question, unfortunately, has not hitherto
been considered in exclusive relation to the his
torical facts. As was inevitable from the lack of
a positive science of ethics, founded upon the act
ualities of history and of life, it was prejudged
by theoretical moralists according to the specula
tive standpoints which they happened to occupy.
Now, as all the diversities of ethical thought may
be reduced to two main types, represented respec
tively by the hedonistic and the intuitive schools,
the facts of historic morality were forced into
the service of these opposing systems. Accord
ing to the one party, they showed that morality,
in itself eternal arid immutable, was universally
recognized and practised among men ; according
to the other party, they confirmed the theory

The Evolution of Morality. 205

that moral laws were but the empirically estab
lished prescripts for securing the largest quantum
of pleasure to the greatest number of individuals.
It may indeed be questioned whether historical
ethics ever really touches, much less confirms, the
point which either of these parties has most at
heart. If the main issue between them turns
upon the question of the chief end of life, the
summum ~bonum, then whether it is pleasure, as
the hedonist assumes, or goodness, as the intu-
itionist assumes, cannot, I apprehend, be deter
mined by a study of the morals of savages and
barbarians any more than by a study of the
morals of Christians. And if the issue turns
rather on the absoluteness or relativity of the
moral law, then if by " absolute " is meant valid
for all spirits, human and divine, and if by " rel
ative" is meant dependent upon circumstances,
I do not see how comparative morals, in this
case either, can decide the controversy. But if,
dropping these speculative puzzles, we shift our
position altogether and raise the simple induc
tive inquiry, What acts have men everywhere
and at all times considered right or wrong re
spectively, and what acts have some considered
right or indifferent and others wrong ? tables of
agreement and difference can be drawn up to

2o6 What it can tell Us.

show what mankind at least has regarded as the
essential content of the moral law (and some ex
planation might even be suggested of the diver
gence in the outlying area beyond this common
circle), though we should still be unable to say
whether the end of life was pleasure or some
thing else, or how this common human morality
might be regarded by other spirits, as, for ex
ample, by God. For the rich harvest which this
treatment of the moral field is sure to yield we
shall have to wait until the spirit of science has
exorcised the spirit of speculation from our con
tending schools of ethics. Only a single plot of
the field has as yet been cultivated, and that not
by moralists, but by anthropologists, philologists,
jurists, historians, and observant travellers. I
may mention especially the works of McLennan,
Morgan, Tylor, Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, Sir
Henry Maine, Robertson Smith, Hearn, Lyall,
Letourneau, Coulanges, Schmidt, Floss, and Lip-
pert. The investigations which they .have con
ducted, within recent years, into the origin and de
velopment of the family relations constitute an
important chapter in the yet unborn science of
historical ethics.

Among all the virtues, none is more sacred to
Christendom than chastity, and none has been.

The Evolution of Morality. 207

supposed more primitive in its history or intui
tive in its nature. The views and sentiments en
tertained by all Christian nations toward it are
expressed at once, with accuracy of delineation
and nobility of style, in a fine apostrophe in the
fourth book of Milton's " Paradise Lost : "

" Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else !
By thee adulterous lust was driven from men
Among the "bestial herds to range ; by thee,
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother, first were known.
Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced,
Present or past, as saints and patriarchs used.
Here love his golden shafts employs, here lights -
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Keigns here and revels ; not in the bought smile
Of harlots — loveless, joyless, unendeared,
Casual fruition. "

In this sublime passage are voiced assumptions
that were universal in Milton's time and all but
universal to-day. It is implied that in the begin
nings of human life, while everything else was
common, women were already individually appro
priated by men, or, in other words, that mo-

208 Assumptions about the Family.

nogynous and monandrous marriage obtained ; it
is further implied that this is the only natural
form of relation between man and woman, Hy
men excluding the very idea of casual connec
tion ; and it is finally implied that from this ex-
clusiveness in " wedded love " alone could spring
a tree of family relationship with its flower of
domestic virtues. Whether these assumptions are
facts, or uncritical dogmas having no other sup
port than the inertia of incurious tradition, is
the first question we have to consider. And
should it appear from the investigating torch of
history that the assumptions are illusory, we
should then have to determine in what way the
ories of ethics were affected by the discovery.
Having rejected Darwin's supposition of a meta
morphosis of the absolutely non-moral into the
moral, it would be incumbent upon us to find
some other interpretation of the late emergence
of chastity, should history show that chastity was
not at the first universally recognized as a virtue.
The first scientific study of the history of mar
riage was made by the late Mr. J. F. McLennan
in an interesting and highly original work, pub
lished in 1865 under the title of "Primitive
Marriage," and republished in 1876 as " Studies
in Ancient History." The object of the work is

The Evolution of Morality. 209

to determine the development of conjugal rela
tions among mankind by an examination of the
origin and meaning of the symbol of capture in
marriage ceremonies. The next epoch-making
work was Mr. Lewis H. Morgan's " Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Fam
ily," which appeared in 1871 in the " Smithso
nian Contributions to Knowledge " (vol. xvii.),
and was afterward reproduced in a condensed
and more readily available shape in " Ancient
Society " (pt., iii., pp. 383-521). It is an attempt
to trace the growth of the family by a compara
tive study of the methods of reckoning relation
ship. These investigations into the early history
of the family are in themselves so valuable, and
in reputation so classic, that we cannot do better
than set out with them. They give us facts and
theories together ; but it will not be hard to sep
arate these and form an independent judgment
on the amount of support the facts give to the
theories.

McLennan starts with the existence and preva
lence of the form of capture in marriage cere
monies. It must .be a survival, he thinks, of a
system of actual wife-stealing. If the members
of a tribe were allowed to marry within the
tribe — that is, in the felicitous mintage of Mc-
14

210 McLennan s Theory of the Family.

Lennan, if the tribe is endogenous— ihe symbol
of capture could not conceivably come into being.
But if marriage within the tribe were prohibited
— that is, if the tribe were exogamous — and if a
state of war usually prevailed between neighbor
ing tribes, as was the case in primitive times, each
tribe could get wives only by theft or force ; and
the reality of capture would, when friendly re
lations came to be established, degenerate into
the form of capture. Now, it is a fact that ex
ogamous tribes exist and have existed. And of
the. prevalence of capturing wives de facto savage
and barbarous tribes still furnish abundant illus
tration. It is also found that the rule against
marriage between members of the same tribe
coexists with the practice of capturing wives de
facto and with the form of capture in marriage
ceremonies.

If, then, the capture of women for wives and,
consequently, the form of capture in marriage
ceremonies are to be referred to exogamy, what,
we must next ask, is the origin of exogamy ? A
survey of the facts of primitive life forbids the
supposition that it originated in any innate or
primary feeling against marriage with kinsfolk.
It may, however, be connected with the practice
of female infanticide ; and it was this, says Me-

The Evolution of Morality. 211

Lennan, " which, rendering women scarce, led at
once to polyandry within the tribe and the capt
ure of women from without" ("Ancient His
tory," p. 111). In the struggle for life the
instinct of self-preservation triumphed over the
Jove of offspring ; and while male children were
reared to grow up as braves and hunters, female
children, in youth as in maturity a mere burden
to the community, were destroyed. And this
disturbance of the balance of the sexes involved
wife-stealing and polyandry.

Another consequence, affecting ideas of kin
ship, must be noticed. In the earliest times,
according to McLennan, the unions of the sexes
were " loose, transitory, and in some degree pro
miscuous " (p. 131). There may then have been
no perception of relationship, for relationship is
rooted in a physical fact — the fact of consanguin
ity ; and this, like other objects of observation
and reflection, was probably long overlooked.
But when it was first perceived, the idea of blood-
relationship was embodied in a system of kinship
through females only — as was natural when pa
ternity was absolutely uncertain. Now, however,
when the original polyandrous and polygynous
promiscuity was so far qualified, in consequence
of the killing of female children, as that several

2i2 Its Actual Facts.

men were assigned to one woman and she to
them, exclusively, and when to this rudest form
of polyandry succeeded that (practised by the
Tibetans) in which the husbands are all brothers,
it became for the first time possible to determine,
if not the father, at least the blood of the father ;
and as a consequence there began to emerge a
system of kinship and inheritance through males,
which received its full development when mar
riage became monogamous and paternity, there
fore, indisputable. How this new system of
reckoning relationship adapted itself, in the case
of exogamous tribes, to the practice of marrying
within the tribe, which was permissible under
the system of female kinship and had practically
made the tribe endogamous, it does not concern
us here to explain. We are interested in Hc-
Lennan's speculations only in so far as they con
cern the forms of family relations and the mo
rality of them.

]STow, for that purpose, nothing is of more con
sequence than the facts ; and McLennan has put
it beyond doubt that the phenomena of infanti
cide, wife-stealing, exogamy, polyandry, kinship
through females as well as through males, and
tribal intermarriage or endogamy, are all to be
found within the area of savagery and barbarism.

The Evolution of Morality. 213

A new theory may of course be formed of the
order of their connection, or sequence ; but it
is the indisputable merit of McLennan to have
shown the existence and prevalence of the phe
nomena themselves. One could almost wish that
so keen an observer had contented himself with
collecting and grouping facts of savage life, an
increase of which would scarcely have failed to
sober his speculations. For nothing is more
striking in his work than the disproportion be
tween the vastness of his hypothesis and the
comparative scantiness of the facts adduced to
support it. It does not appear unreasonable to
suppose that among savages who generally mar
ried within their own tribe wives should, when
opportunity offered, have been stolen from other
tribes; and even descent through females may
always, as it does to-day, coexist with descent
through males. In any case, we shall require a
much larger collection of evidence than has yet
appeared to convince us that every branch of the
human family has gone through precisely the
same course of development. Yet this supposi
tion seems to underlie current investigation into
the history of family relations. The a priori fal
lacy would seem to have arisen from confound
ing facts with the mind's method of apprehend-

214 Is Development Uniform?

ing them. Knowledge, indeed, proceeds from
the vague to the definite, but, as Lotze used
to say, existence is under no obligation to con
form itself to our method of cognizing it ; and I
see no warrant for the current assumption, that
the relations between the sexes began everywhere
with indefinite promiscuity, and were gradually
determined, in the manner of an abstract notion
in logic, into more regulated forms, which at last
culminated in monogamy. The inexhaustible
life and variety of historical movements must not
be sacrificed to the dead, monotonous mechanism
of the logician's art, whether it be attempted by
Hegel or by those who criticise him. And the
elimination of circumstance and accident, which
experience shows us are so potent in the forma
tion and development of contemporary institu
tions and habits, is all the more unjustifiable in
the early history of mankind, when human beings
were more than now the prey of contingency, and
yet possessed fewer ideas for extricating them
selves from its clutches. Our antecedent expec
tation, therefore, would be that the social insti
tutions of savages would everywhere be condi
tioned by their environment ; and that while in
one section of the vast area of savagery, where
women happened to be scarce, polyandry might

Evolution of Morality. 215

be practised, in another, under more normal con
ditions, polygyny, or even monogamy, would be
the general rule. And it is surely a subject of
amazement in McLennan's theory that polygyny
does not appear as one of the earliest stages in
the evolution of the family. When the ances
tors of man had most of the animal in them, they
could scarcely have gone by an arrangement
which power and sexual jealousy make natural
for the lower animals. And of the primitiveness
of polygyny neither biology nor history leaves
us in doubt. But the coexistence of other forms,
under different conditions, need not be disputed.
Indeed, even in McLennan's argument there is
a tacit confession that endogamy, which with
polygyny and the family he would make the out
come of the long development, must have been
as archaic as exogamy ; for he observes that the
separate endogamous tribes are not only as nu
merous, but " in some respects as rude, as the
separate exogamous tribes" (p. 116).

McLennan imagines primitive men to have
wandered about in hordes without any concep
tion of family relations. Their sexual condition
was one of unqualified promiscuity, in the restric
tion of which, through polyandry, he conceives
all advance to have been made. But although in

2i6 Darwin versus McLennan.

this assumption of " communal marriage," or ab
original hetairism, McLennan is followed by Lub-
bock, Bachofen, and Morgan, the theory receives
no confirmation either from the physiology and
psychology of man and other animals or from the
known customs of savage and barbarous peoples.
" We may indeed conclude from what we know
of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds," says Dar
win, " that promiscuous intercourse in a state of
nature is extremely improbable. . . . There
fore, looking far enough back in the stream of
time, and judging from the social habits of man
as he now exists, the most probable view is that
lie aboriginally lived in small communities, each
with a single wife, or if powerful with several,
whom he jealously guarded against all other men "
(" Descent of Man," pp. 590, 591). In archaic
times there prevailed

u the simple plan,

That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can."

In the struggle for life and survival of the fittest
we expect the selection and evolution of power
and sexual jealousy. It seems incredible that,
as a general rule, equal and indiscriminate co
partnership in the possession of women should
have been the outcome of that war of all against

The Evolution of Morality. 217

all. And, indeed, actual evidence of the forma
tion of rudimentary societies, by an ^observer so
competent as Sir A. Lyall, shows that if the per
plexed jungle of primitive society springs out of
many roots, " the hero is the tap-root from which,
in a great degree, all the rest were nourished and
grown " ("Asiatic Studies," p. 168). Nor do we
find in the known habits and customs of savages
any evidence of the very unheroic practice of com
munal marriage. McLennan does not attempt to
establish the point, which is simply postulated as
a background for the unfolding of his theory.
In fact, however lax the marital arrangements
among savages, some kind of permanent union,
some appropriation of individual women by in
dividual men, is always to be found or inferred.
If the Esquimaux lend their wives, they must
have wives of their own whom others cannot ap
propriate without their consent. Even the Aleu
tian Islanders and Fuegians have fixed marital
relations, and it would be difficult to find more
degraded tribes than these.

Promiscuity in McLennan's system is followed
by infanticide of females, which would naturally
evolve polyandry and, if carried far enough, wife-
stealing too. But in considering this practice as
universally prevalent, McLennan manifestly goes

218 Infanticide Misinterpreted.

beyond the limits of possibility. If all clans
killed their infant daughters, where could women
be found even to steal ? Under the stress of cir
cumstances making it impossible to procure suffi
cient subsistence, it is conceivable that savages
should destroy their young ; but, knowing the
savage's incapacity for providing against the fut
ure, I find it hard to believe that, in the cruel
grasp of the present, he should discriminate be
tween boys and girls when both alike are equally
burdensome. And Sir John Lubbock assures us,
that while infanticide has widely prevailed among
savages, " boys were killed as frequently as girls.
Eyre expressly states that this was the case in
Australia " (" Origin of Civilization," p. 81). It
should further be noted that if, as McLennan
supposes, female infanticide coexists with exog
amy and wife-stealing, it would be difficult to
explain, not why so many female children are
killed, but why any are spared, seeing that none
can be married within the tribe.

~No doubt, again, infanticide of females would
be sufficient to account for polyandry ; but neither
infanticide (whether of girls or boys or of both)
nor polyandry can be shown to be practices of uni
versal prevalence. It is possible, though not, I
think, verifiable, that in special circumstances the

The Evolution of Morality. 219

killing of female infants may have led to polyan
dry ; but more natural explanations may easily
be found. Sir Henry Maine tells us of the origin
of a modern case of polyandry : " It is known to
have arisen in the native Indian army " (" Early
Law and Custom," p. 121). And if we suppose
in primitive times, similarly, a number of men
torn away from their original seats (in which the
balance between the sexes may have been even)
with only a few women among them, we have,
judging from the analogy of the Indian army,
all the conditions required for the emergence
of polyandry. Now, as Sir Henry Maine has
pointed out (Op. dt., p. 212), our earliest glimpses
of a great part of the human race reveal it in a
state of movement. Fighting, or wandering for
food, it is not unreasonable to suppose that in
many cases they settled in new seats with only a
comparatively small number of women ; and there
is evidence that some of the islands of the Pacific
were settled by boat-loads of men with only a few
of the other sex. Polyandry could thus be ex
plained without denying to primitive man those
instincts of power and jealousy which biologists
and psychologists alike attribute to him. But, of
course, it could make no pretence to being an in
variable stage for the whole human race in the

2 2O Wife-stealing and Polyandry.

course of its development. On the contrary, it
would be seen to have originated, under excep
tional circumstances, with the strays and waifs
of humanity. As the only steady cause of ine
quality between the sexes was war, which would
tend to leave the women in excess, it would seem,
in the absence of other evidence, that polygyny
was in all probability more primitive and more
universal than polyandry.

It is also a fair assumption that female infan
ticide should lead to wife- stealing, which might
ultimately crystallize into the system of exogamy.
Certainly wife-stealing, like infanticide and poly
andry, actually exists ; and, as McLennan was the
first to point out, the form of capture attests its
decay among tribes who once practised it. "We
do not, therefore, dispute the facts ; but we do
question the significance with which McLennan
endows them. There is no evidence that wife-
stealing and exogamy were universal stages in the
evolution of humanity. In fact, the connection
between infanticide, polyandry, and the capture
of women is arbitrarily assumed by McLennan.
Infanticide may coexist with polygyny or mo
nogamy. Polyandry and wife-stealing we should
not expect to find conjoined ; for if tribes are
brave enough to steal wives, they would not cease

The Evolution of Morality. 221

stealing till they had one or more for each man.
And Mr. Herbert Spencer is authority for the as
sertion that " where wife-stealing is now practised,
it is commonly associated with polygyny ; while,
on the other hand, polyandry is a trait of certain
rude peoples who are habitually peaceful " (" Soci
ology," i., pp. 646, 647). Thus wife-stealing tribes
would soon cease to be polyandrous ; and McLen
nan is left without a basis for his imaginary
evolution of Nair and Tibetan polyandry, with
their ultimate outcome of monogamy and descent
and inheritance through males. Polyandry is a
permanent and universal stage in McLennan's
scheme of family development. Yet we have
only to remember that women captured by the
stronger tribe were lost to the weaker to see that
with the .growth of strong tribes, who must have
had women in excess, there was a concomitant
decay of weaker tribes, until none but the strong,
polygynist tribes remained. The polyandrous
condition was never general, and where it did ex
ist, was often so unstable as to pass almost at
once over into its opposite.

Similarly, the opposition between exogamy and
endogamy resolves itself into a vanishing differ
ence. It was perhaps inevitable, in the first flush
of a new discovery, that McLennan should have

222 Exogamy and Endogamy.

overlooked facts equally important. It was of
course known, both from Eoman and Hindoo law,
that persons within a certain degree of relation
ship (theoretically, in Hindoo law, persons de
scended from the same male ancestor), could not
intermarry. But McLennan was the first to show
the prevalence of a similar restriction among
savage and barbarous tribes. Unfortunately, he
made no study of their social or governmental reg
ulations ; and the fact that the members of a cer
tain group could not intermarry, taken along with
the fact of wife-stealing, seemed to him equiv
alent to universal prohibition among kindred.
But the study of the government of savages is
tending to the same result as we have just noted
among the Aryans. Many of the tribes quoted
by McLennan as exogamous are found to be
made up of divisions, or cjentes (as Morgan calls
them) ; and while a member of a division is for
bidden marriage within it, he may marry in any
of the other divisions of his tribe. Thus among
the Iroquois, a Wolf may not marry in the Wolf
clan, but he may marry a woman of any of the
remaining seven clans among the five tribes of
the Iroquois ; and Sir Henry Maine notices the
same external circle among the Chinese. It is
coming, therefore, to be established, that as

The Evolution of Morality. 223

among the Romans a man might not marry
within the prohibited degrees, yet must marry a
Roman, so among savages there is an endogamous
as well as an exogamous circle ; and while any
particular division is exogamous with regard to
itself, it is endogamous with regard to the re
maining divisions of the tribe.

A word with regard to kinship through females
must end this survey of McLennan's account of
the family. That it exists among certain savages
is undeniable. That it ever existed as a rule for
the whole human race is an assumption that has
no probability in its favor, and an assumption we
have no motive to make when polyandry is found
not to be an invariable stage in the development
of marital relations.

The facts McLennan has brought together are
eminently valuable. His speculative interpreta
tion of them, everywhere ingenious and original,
is sometimes fanciful and commonly open to the
charge of unwarranted generalization.

A somewhat similar verdict must be pronounced
upon Morgan.

Morgan undertook to determine the sequence
of family institutions from systems of reckoning
relationship. Comparing the systems of many
tribes, he held that the entire development of the

224 Morgans Theory.

human family is represented by three great sys
tems of consanguinity, which he designated the
Malayan, the Turanian, and the Aryan. These
systems rest, not upon nature, but upon marriage ;
so that, given the system, we may infer the form
of marriage. It is assumed that each relationship,
as recognized in language, is what at one time act
ually existed under a certain form of marriage.
The Aryan system is descriptive — that is, it makes
the relationship of each person specific (as, e.g.^
brother's son, father's brother's son). The Ma
layan and Turanian systems are dassijicatory —
that is, they arrange in categories according to
generation (" brothers," e.g.7 including not only
my own, but the sons of my father's brothers, and
" sons " including not only my own, but my
brothers' also).

A system of consanguinity is naturally slower
to change than the form of the family whose re
lationships it expresses. And thus it is that the
Malayan system of consanguinity and affinity,
outliving for unremembered centuries the mar
riage customs in which it originated, remains to
attest the fact that such a family existed when
the system was formed. This system, though its
raison d'etre is gone, survives in daily use among
the Hawaiians and other Polynesian tribes. Un-

The Evolution of Morality. 225

der it, all consanguine!!, near and remote, are
classified into five categories. Tims, myself, my
brothers and sisters, and those whom we call first,
second, third, and more remote cousins, are all
without distinction brothers and sisters. My
father and mother, together with their brothers
and sisters, and what we call their first, second,
and more remote cousins, are all without distinc
tion my parents. Similarly of grandparents.
And, below me, my sons and daughters, with
their several cousins, as before, are all without
distinction my children. And similarly of grand
children. Moreover, all the individuals of the
same grade are brothers and sisters to each
other.

Now, if this system, as we must assume, ex
pressed relationships which once actually existed,
we may deduce from it the form of the family in
which it originated. This can be no other than
what Morgan calls the consanguine family — that
arising from the intermarriage of brothers and
sisters, own and collateral, in a group. Since
the relationships recognized in the system are
identical with those emerging from the consan
guine family, the latter must have been the ba
sis of the system of consanguinity. An illustra
tion or two will make this clear. The system
15

226 Consanguine Family.

makes the children of my several brothers and
sisters my sons and daughters : the reason lies
in the consanguine family, in which all my sis
ters and my brothers' wives are my wives. Were
I a female, the foregoing relationships would be
the same; for, in the consanguine family, my
several brothers being my husbands, their chil
dren by other wives would be my step- children,
which relationship being unrecognized, they nat
urally fall into the category of my sons and
daughters. Every relationship of the Malayan
system is explicable on the assumption of the con
sanguine family, and no other ; consequently the
system is evidence conclusive of such a family.

Under the Turanian system of relationship,
while my brothers' children continue to be mine
as well as his, and mine his as well as mine, there
is a departure from the Malayan system in mak
ing my sister's children my nephews and nieces,
and my children her nephews and nieces. From
this initial difference between the two systems fol
low all other differences. Without noticing them,
let us ask at once what kind of family does the
Turanian system of consanguinity presuppose as
its basis ? And the answer is clear : A family
differing from the consanguine only in its pro
hibition of marriage between own brothers and

The Evolution of Morality. 227

sisters. That is to say, it is a family founded
upon the intermarriage of several sisters, own and
collateral, with each other's husbands in a group,
the joint husbands not being necessarily kinsmen
of each other ; and, also, on the intermarriage of
several brothers, own and collateral, with each
other's wives in a group, these wives not being
necessarily of kin to each other. It is designated
by Morgan the punaluan family, from a Ha
waiian analogue. And he supposes it to have
developed from the consanguine family as soon
as the evils of close inbreeding came to be gen
erally recognized. And from it, as he holds,
sprang the organized " Gens " — " the exogamous
totem-kin " of McLennan — whose first germ con
sisted in the systematic exclusion of brothers and
sisters from the marriage relation.

Now, as there is a complete parallelism (which
we have not here space to illustrate) between the
relationships recognized by the Turanian system
and those growing out of the punaluan marriage,
it is inferred that the latter is the ground of the
former. The Turanian system of consanguinity
and affinity was universal among the North Amer
ican aborigines, and has been found in South
America and Africa ; it still prevails in India and
Australia. Like the Malayan, it survived after the

228 Punaluan Family.

form of family in which it originated had passed
a way. The form of family advances of necessity
faster than systems of consanguinity, which follow
to record the family relationships. And it takes
something like a revolution to bring the system
of consanguinity into line with the changing
structure of the family. It was through the or
ganization into " Gen tes" that the Malayan sys
tem was changed into the Turanian. But the
Turanian did not undergo further development ;
and being false to the evolving forms of the fam
ily, it was finally superseded by the Aryan sys
tem, which is founded on facts of consanguinity
in the monogamous family. But between the
punaluan and the monogamous family Morgan
intercalates two other forms. The higher is the
patriarchal family, which is founded on the union
of one man with several wives, the entire house
hold being organized under paternal power ; and
the lower is the syndyasmian QIC pairing family,
which was founded upon marriage between single
pairs, but without an exclusive cohabitation, and
continuing only during the pleasure of the parties.
The pairing family is a development of the pu
naluan, under the favoring influence of improve
ment in the arts of life, in house-building, in the
means of subsistence, etc. And the patriarchal

The Evolution of Morality. 229

family springs out of the syndyasrnian when
pastoral life begins, with the holding of lands and
the care of flocks and herds. Lastly appears the
monogamous family, which must be associated
with the rise of individual property and the de
sire of fathers to establish lineal succession to es
tates. As the form of the family has changed in
the past, so must it in the future keep pace with
the advance of society. But should the monog
amous family fail to answer the coining require
ments of society, it is impossible to predict the
nature of its successor.

Thus the theory of Morgan, like that of Mc
Lennan, reaches out into a past and a future as
distant as each is hypothetical. Hence some of
the objections urged against McLenrian's theory
are equally applicable to Morgan's. There is, for
instance, not the slightest ground, apart from the
exigencies of a theory, for the assumption of an
aboriginal promiscuity in sexual relations, which,
indeed, both archaeology and biology tend to dis
prove. And it may be reiterated, once more, that
it is a gratuitous concession to our methodology
when the facts of the world are supposed to ar
range themselves according to our mode of appre
hending them. We have no evidence whatever
that all branches of the human family passed

230 Morgans Great Achievement.

through precisely the same stages of develop
ment, either in general or, still less, in the details
of their social institutions. This is the TT/HWTOZ/
iJreOSo? of the theory before us. And not only
does this baseless assumption determine the ini
tial stage of the theory, it colors it from begin
ning to end.

Nevertheless, it is not possible to deny the
value of the facts collected by Morgan. It was,
indeed, a stupendous achievement to tabulate and
explain the systems of consanguinity and affinity
of one hundred and thirty -nine tribes and nations,
representing, numerically, four-fifths of the en
tire human family. And, in the comparative
study of institutions, the facts, if rightly under
stood, are of vital significance. They become
misleading only when, apart from history, they
are supposed to tell us anything about the order
of development of human institutions. Even if
it were granted that Morgan's " conjectural solu
tion " of the facts is correct, and that the several
systems of consanguinity really imply the correl
ative existence of several forms of the family, it
would have to be conceded that there is no evi
dence of the whole human family having passed
successively through all these stages, or, indeed, of
any very necessary connection between the stages

The Evolution of Morality. 231

themselves. " They stand to each other in a logi
cal sequence " (p. 413), says Morgan ; and, indeed,
that is just why we suspect them. They seem
the creatures of successive logical determination,
rather than the footprints of infant humanity.
Some such acknowledgment is implied in Mor
gan's confession that promiscuous intercourse has
not been practised " within the time of recorded
human observation,'7 and that it can only be " de
duced theoretically as a necessary condition ante
cedent to the consanguine family" (p. 502).
And, again, the Malayan system, which expresses
the relationships existing under the consanguine
family, is pronounced the oldest form 'because it
is the simplest (p. 403). Thus the consanguine
family is really the starting-point of the whole
system ; from it promiscuity is inferred to have
preceded, and without it the punaluan family
could not emerge in the sequel. I proceed, there
fore, to examine this crucial point — the evidence
for the existence of the consanguine family, on
which the whole theory depends.

As a family organization, Morgan himself tells
us it nowhere existed in historic times. The
marriage of sisters and brothers, own and collat
eral, in a group, is, as we saw, solely an infer
ence from the Malayan system of consanguinity

232 Marred by Speculation.

and affinity. That system is classificatory ; it
groups all individuals of the same generation into
a class and calls them children, or parents, or
grandchildren, or grandparents, without further
distinction than that of sex. Now, it must be ad
mitted that Morgan's hypothesis satisfies the first
condition of any hypothesis : it is sufficient to
account for the facts. But when we ask if it
is in itself a probable assumption, or if taking
promiscuity as established this form of family
was likely to succeed it, it is impossible to an
swer in the affirmative. "We must therefore seek
a more probable explanation of the facts repre
sented by the Malayan system than the consan
guine family affords. A natural supposition is
that the Malayan system of relationship arose
solely from a poverty of language among savages.
Some qualification will, however, be necessary in
this hypothesis, since Morgan tells us that many of
these languages are rich in discriminating terms
of address. There is one word for brother or
sister when a younger is addressing an elder,
and another in the converse case. It must there
fore be admitted that their concrete terms, of
daily and hourly use, are abundant and emi
nently significant. But may we not assume that
abstract terms of relationship are scanty ? Is not

The Evolution of Morality. 233

that what our science of comparative language
leads us to expect ? They are rich in concrete,
poor in abstract, terminology. But what then
follows ? Why, that this so-called Malayan sys
tem of consanguinity and affinity is not based on
blood-ties (these not being, as later investigations
show, facts of primary perception), and has noth
ing at all to do with any particular form of the
family, but is simply a rough way of classifying
all the generations which might ever be known
to any individual. Under this system " brother "
is not one of the same blood, "father " is not one
wko begets, " mother " is not one who bears ; all
alike are descriptions of classes. Is there, then,
no method of describing relationships nearer?
The objection implied in the question touches
our hypothesis not more than the other. But,
fortunately, Morgan himself supplies an answer.
" A descriptive system precisely like the Aryan
[i.e., the one we use] always existed both with
the Turanian and the Malayan " (p. 484). The
latter would therefore seem to be merely a classi
fication of generations, to which, naturally enough
among communal societies, the same names were
applied.

Besides, Morgan's hypothesis does not give an
unquestionable explanation of all the facts, though

234 Mythical and Unsatisfactory.

the contrary has so far been assumed. There is
one part of the so-called Malayan system in regard
to which his account does not satisfy me. If there
are several brothers, A, B, 6y, and several sisters,
a, &, c, then, no doubt, in the consanguine family,
where A, B, C, and a, b, c, are intermarried, a's
children may be called children of A and B and
6, and similarly of &'s children and c's children ;
but why should a's children be called 5's and c's,
and J's children a's and c's, and c's children a's
and 5's, as they are designated in the Malayan sys
tem ? Because, says Morgan, A, B, and C being
husbands of a, their children by 5 and c would
be <z's step-children, which relationship being un
recognized, they naturally fall into the category
of a's sons and daughters (p. 410). But this is
surely to attribute to primitive savages our own
modes of tracing relationship, founded upon mo
nogamous marriage. And when Morgan observes,
by way of proof, that "among ourselves a step
mother is called mother, and a step-son a son," he
overlooks the fact that there is with us no other
mother, and the father is always the same. Nor
does the case have any analogy with that of call
ing A and B and (7 fathers. They are so called
because, although only one of them can be the fa
ther of the child, any one of them may have been,

The Evolution of Morality. 235

and the paternity is supposed to be unknown.
But there can be no doubt that a is the mother of
her child, and that l> is the mother of hers. Pater
nity is doubtful, because it is inferred ; maternity,
being a fact of perception, does not admit of
doubt. Why, then, does <z's child call Z> mother, and
5's child call a mother ? This cannot be explained
by the consanguine family. But it is a species
of relationship recognized in the Malayan system ;
therefore, that system is not based on the consan
guine family. If, on the other hand, that system
be supposed a mere classification of the genera
tions known to most individuals, then the term
" mother " must be applied by a child to the
women a, Z>, and c, because they all belong to the
same generation.

With the disproof of the existence of the con
sanguine family, Morgan's theory of the devel
opment of marital relations falls to the ground.
The punaluan family, by which he accounts for
the Turanian system of relationship, is evolved
from the consanguine by excluding own brothers
and sisters from the marriage union. But if there
never was a consanguine, there could be no puna
luan family developed from it. And, accordingly,
some other account must be given of the Turanian
system of consanguinity. If we admitted the

236 Facts Otherwise Explained.

punaluan family as an explanation, it would be
open to most of the objections already urged
against the consanguine. Excluding it, then, how
are the phenomena to be explained ? It would
be aside from our present purpose to enter fully
into this matter. But as the main difference
between the Malayan and Turanian systems lies
in the fact that the one designates my sister's
children as my children, and the other • as my
nephews and nieces, an explanation of the di
vergency may be found in the supposition that
while the old classificatory system, in general, re
mained in vogue, it became modified under the
organization into classes, through the separa
tion established between brothers and sisters by
the system of reckoning descent and inheritance
through females only. My sister's children be
long to her clan, mine to the clan of my wife.
A new designation, therefore, was needful, when
a rule broke up the old communal system in
which brothers' and sisters' children all belong to
the same group and, being of the same genera
tion, were designated by the same name.

While the consanguine and punaluan families
supply an imaginary raison d'etre for the Malayan
and Turanian systems of relationship, the syndy-
asmian and patriarchal families have not even

The Evolution of Morality. 237

such shadowy support. They are assumed, not
because any particular system of kinship implied
them, but because they mediated the logical pro
gression from the punaluan to the monogamous
family. We know, of course, from history and
observation that such unions have been practised ;
but there is no reason, save the symmetry of log
ical development assumed in Morgan's theory,
for making them universal stages in the progress
of mankind. As they do not profess, like the
other three forms of the family, to be established
from systems of consanguinity, and are only spe
cies of logical determination of the punaluan,
we need not consider them further.

I^or is much comment required on the Aryan
system of consanguinity and affinity. It differs
from the preceding systems in being descriptive
and not classificatory. It is founded on the mo
nogamous family, whose existence, known to us
for three thousand years, does not need to be in
ferred from any system of consanguinity. This
Aryan system is not, according to Morgan, a de
velopment of the Turanian as the Turanian was
of the Malayan. It is an entirely different sys
tem, having no sign of connection with the
others. Yet Morgan supposes that all peoples,
now having the Aryan system, formerly had the

238 Distrust of Theories.

Turanian. This presumption is, however, largely
founded on the assumption that the monogamous
family is developed from the punaluan. But we
have shown that there is no satisfactory evidence
of a punaluan family. Morgan adds, it is true,
that the "impoverished condition of the original
nomenclature of the Aryan system," limited as it
was to " father and mother, brother and sister,
and son and daughter, and a common term ap
plied indiscriminately to nephew, grandson, and
cousin " (p. 481), could not possibly have been
the sole nomenclature of relationships used by a
people in so advanced a condition as the Aryans ;
and he therefore assumes that at that time the
Turanian system was just dying out among them.
But this is little better than begging the question.
What was there in the simple relations of primi
tive Aryan society that demanded a complex sys
tem of consanguinity ? There is no ground for
supposing, as there is absolutely no evidence, that
the beginnings of the Aryan system were syn
chronous with the disintegration of the Turanian.
This protracted examination of the theories
which have been furnished by Morgan and Mc
Lennan of the evolution of conjugal relations
cannot fail, I think, to induce a sceptical state of
mind in relation to all such speculations. The

The Evolution of Morality. 239

data are so scanty, the lacunce so numerous, that
almost any hypothesis, it would seem, might es
tablish some claim to verification. Our informa
tion is made up of a collection of scattered
observations on the marriage customs of a small
part of the human family. Moved by the scien
tific impulse, we attempt to discover their origin
and causes. But if even in physical investiga-
gations, where complicating conditions may be
eliminated, we are always liable to error from the
possibility of a plurality of causes, how much
more so in dealing with social phenomena which
are inextricably entangled and intertwined. The
ignoring of this limitation is the weak point in
the argument of Professor Robertson Smith,
whose " Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia "
is otherwise (if I may say so) a model of philo-
logico-historical research. "When Professor Smith
lays down (p. 132) that " the very object of hy
pothesis is to inquire whether a real cause (vera
causa) has not had a wider operation than there
is any direct evidence for," his position may not
be disputed ; but when he adds " the necessary
and sufficient proof that this is so is the wide
prevalence of effects which the cause is adequate
to produce," he overlooks altogether the possi
bility, and, indeed, in human affairs the proba-

240 Robertson SmitJis Logic.

bility, of the same phenomenon having different
causes. The " necessary and sufficient proof " must
show, not only (1) the prevalence of the effects,
and (2) the adequacy of a certain antecedent to
produce them, but also (3) the impossibility of
their being produced by any other antecedent or
antecedents. This last all-essential link in the
demonstration is what is wanting in current
theories of the development of the family. And
with the omission of it goes a corresponding
neglect of the environment and circumstances,
physical, social, and especially historical, in which
any particular form of marriage appears. Iso
lating the various conjugal relations from their
historic settings, in which alone an explanation of
each is to be found, the theorist generally puts
them in an arbitrary row, as one might string
beads, and then asseverates that this linear ar
rangement of contemporaneous phenomena in
space corresponds to the successive order of their
evolution in time ! Meanwhile, no one knows that
there has been such a universal development ; or
that there ever was a time when all the forms of
the family did not coexist as they do to-day.

It would seem, therefore, that even the most
conservative school of moralists need sacrifice
nothing to the current theory of the evolution of

The Evolution of Morality. 241

the family. There can be no settlement of any
ethical question by an arbitrary deduction of all
forms of conjugal relations from a single imagi
nary source along a single imaginary path. No
light is thrown upon the study of morals by an
appearance of deriving historic from prehistoric
institutions. Yet, in the study of the family, this
unfruitful method has for the most part been
followed ; and from McLennan's "Primitive
Marriage " to Xippert's recent valuable " Ge-
schichte der Familie " simple facts are obscured
by overshadowing speculative theories. What
forms of marriage now exist we know or may
know; what existed in historic times we have
some report of ; but beyond this horizon all is
darkness, and remains darkness, though Morgan
and Lippert would fain con jure up the unrecorded
past, and Letourneau in prophetic vision predict
the course of the yet unborn future.

It is not, therefore, with theories of the evolu
tion of the family that moralists have to reckon.
Like other phantasies and bold guesses, these may
be passed by. But it is different with facts —
actual observations made within the historical
horizon. These have a vital interest for the
moralist. And it is the merit of the evolu
tionist to have recognized their significance,
16

242 Ethics need Facts, not Theories.

though iii general he managed to eviscerate it
by adapting them to some extraneous speculation,
cosmic or sociological.

Many of the more striking facts known in re
gard to family relations have already been men
tioned in connection with the theories into which
they have been woven. If these theories have
been rejected, it was not from any desire to min
imize the revolting character of the marital con
nections between men and women in many savage
or barbarous tribes. There is no evidence that
every people once lived in absolute promiscuity
or in consanguine families ; but it is a fact that
among the Todas of the NeUgkerry Hills the
husband's brothers become husbands of the wife,
and the wife's sisters become common wives of
all her husbands.

The custom of reckoning kinship through fe
males may not always have preceded the cus
tom of reckoning kinship through males, but
McLennan, Bachofen, Eobertson Smith, and Lip-
pert have shown that it was at least a widely ex
tended practice. It is found among the natives
of America, Australia, and Africa. It prevailed
also in the ancient world. The Egyptians long
held the mother's name indispensable ; the Ly-
cians, as Herodotus narrates fully, traced gene-

The Evolution of Morality. 243

alogies through mothers ; the Germans, according
to Tacitus, considered the relationship between
children and their mother's brother closer than
that between children and their own father. In
Hebrew, em, the word for " mother," also means
" stock, race, community,'' and similarly with the
Arabic omm^ ornma • while in either language,
again, the bonds of relationship are designated by
a word connoting the " womb." And Professor
Smith makes the highly original suggestion that
Eve, "the mother of all living" (Gen. iii. 20),
is "the universal eponyma, to whom all kinship
groups must be traced back. Eve is the person
ification of the bond of kinship (conceived as ex
clusively mother-kinship), just as Adam is sim
ply ' man,' i.e., the personification of mankind "
(Op. tit., p. 177). Lastly, in the " Eumenides "
of JEschylus, Bachofen saw (like Gervinus with
regard to "Hamlet") a tragic conflict between two
world-epochs: the hoary age of mother-kinship,
represented by the Erinnyes, and the dawning
age of father-kinship as announced by Apollo and
certified by Athene in the judicial acquittal of
the matricide Orestes.

Along with mother-kinship goes the custom of
a husband settling in the family of his wife.
Livingston found an isolated example of it not

244 Woman the Head of the Family.

far from Zululand. The main features were
that the man, in order to marry, had to move
to the craal of his wife, promise constantly to
provide the mother-in-law with wood, never un
dertake service elsewhere without her consent,
and, in case of separation, leave all the children
as property of the wife. Among ancient Arab
tribes, the husband also went to the tent of the
wife ; and when she wished to dismiss him (for
he stayed at her pleasure) she turned the tent
round so that the door faced opposite its former
direction, " and when the man saw this he knew
that he was dismissed and did not enter." And
in Syriac and Hebrew, as well as Arabic, the hus
band is said to "go in " to the bride. It will be
remembered, too, that the tent to which Isaac
took Hebekah was "his mother Sarah's tent"
(Gen. xxiv. 67), and that Sisera fled " to the
tent of Jael the wife of Ileber the Kenite "
(Judges iv. 17), and that Samson's wife remained
with her people, and received there the visits of
her husband (Judges xv. 1). These all embody,
in a modified form, what seems to have been the
universal rule of primitive marriage among the
Hebrews : " Therefore shall a man leave his fa
ther and his mother, and shall cleave unto his
wife"(Gen,ii. 24).

The Evolution of Morality. 245

But the custom of reckoning kinship through
women, and that of men joining the family of
their wives, do not imply promiscuous relations
between the sexes, of which, as we have already
seen, there is absolutely no evidence. Never
theless, there are found in the whole area of
savagery, side by side with marriage relations
and domestic virtues like our own, practices and
sentiments wholly unlike, and even opposed to
them. Nothing can be more striking than the
variety of arrangements in regard to the sexes.
Very frequently wives and maidens are distin
guished, and while conjugal fidelity is required
of the former, no importance is attached to maid
enly chastity. Even in marriage some Arab
women are bound for only four days of the week,
being free to go with anyone they like during
the off days. And once a year, on the night of
a certain festival, a similar liberty was enjoyed
by the wives of the Nicaraguan aborigines.
Again, wives, as the property of the husband,
might occasionally be put at the service of oth
ers ; and Cato's conduct in lending Martia to his
friend Hortensius is nothing more than the laws
of hospitality require among the Esquimaux,
Greenlanders, and other tribes. Still, the rule
is that the strictest fidelity is demanded of mar-

246 Lax Fidelity.

ried women. A Peruvian maiden might live a
loose life ; but if as wife she were guilt j of infi
delity, the punishment was death. A similar
fate awaited the unchaste wife in Mexico, where
divorce was reserved for such slight faults as bad
character, dirty habits, and the like. Farther
north, among the Comanches, the wife was pun
ished by cutting off her nose. Still, it is not pre
tended that infidelity was always regarded as a
heinous offence. And, on the other hand, a wife
might be divorced for much less weighty reasons.
This brittleness of the marriage bond is a very
striking characteristic of savage family life.
Among the Iroquois and the Tahitians a marriage
might be dissolved when either of the parties
wished it ; but the right of effecting a separation
generally inhered in the husband, who exercised
it freely and often most cruelly. In East Africa,,
as in !N~ew Zealand, it consisted simply in turning
the wife out of doors, to which the American
Chippewayans added a "good drubbing." Prop
erty and children remained with the husband,
thoughto this rule there may be found exceptions
in the customs of the Dakotahs, Samoans, Kar
ens, and others.

AVhile restrictions are generally put upon mar
ried women, whose conjugal fidelity is the natural

The Evolution of Morality. 247

outgrowth of their position as property or chat
tels of the husband, the greatest laxity is often
allowed to young unmarried girls, or even forced
upon them. In West Africa there are public
halls where every maiden is exposed prior to
marriage, often for a period of several months.
And the instances mentioned by Herodotus and
Strabo show that among the Lydians, Assyrians,
and Babylonians a woman was not free to marry
till she had offered herself once in the temple
of Yenns. The Jews seem to have been ac
quainted with this custom, but rejected it (Deut.
xxiii. 18). A somewhat similar usage obtained
in the Balearic Islands, where the bride became
the exclusive wife of her husband only on the
day after the wedding. And among the Santals,
a hill tribe of India, marriage is now brought
about by turning all the young people promis
cuously together, and requiring them, after six
days' license, to pair off as man and wife. Nor
must it be supposed that such revolting practices
are limited to marriage ceremonies. It would be
easy to enumerate examples of female licentious
ness continuing throughout the entire period of
unmarried life. But I think it will be enough
to mention what was narrated to me last summer
by a missionary who had spent several years at

248 Maidenly Chastity unknown.

Aneityum, and is now about to settle on Santo,
both islands in the New Hebrides. Maidenly
chastity was there, according to this unimpeach
able authority, an unknown conception, unlimited
hetairism being the normal condition of every
unmarried woman from earliest girlhood. And
licentiousness had so colored their modes of
thought and speech that it seemed impossible to
initiate them into Christian purity without, at
the same time, teaching them a new and cleaner
language.

It is facts like these that moralists, especially
of the intuitive school, are called upon to face.
Nor are these the only perplexing facts bearing
upon the morality of the family. It must be
recognized that among savages marrying is, for
the most part, but the acquisition by the man of
a new object of gratification, a chattel which may
at once minister to his appetite and conduce to
his profit. Wives are, accordingly, stolen or
bought like any other property, though purchase,
which is at least as old as the Iliad and the Pen
tateuch, is far more prevalent at the present day
than capture. It is still the theory of Moslem
law. Among certain savage tribes a man with
several daughters is esteemed rich ; and when
among such people infanticide is practised, girls

The Evolution of Morality. 249

are spared oftener than boys, as Dobritzlioffer re
lates of the Abiponians. And this conception of
women as property naturally leads, were there
not other motors, to polygyny. Thus Clavigero
relates that among the Mexicans the possession
of a large number of wives was regarded as a sign
and proof of superiority. And there is similar
testimony regarding many savage tribes, in which
a direct relation may be observed between the
means and standing of the husband and the
number of his wives. In Ashantee the king is
allowed by law three thousand three hundred and
thirty-three. The king of Yoruba boasted that
his wives, of whom some composed his body
guard, would, linked hand in hand, reach clean
across his kingdom. And polygyny, though
necessarily on a smaller scale, is practised in all
parts of the earth — from the frigid to the torrid
zone, over connected continents, and on solitary
ocean isles. And as it prevails over vast areas of
space, so it spans ages of time, appearing with
the first dawn of history and flourishing to this
day among a large part of the human family.

To these deviations from our own marriage
practices must be added examples of incest.
These occur, naturally, in endogamous tribes. The
Yeddahs of Ceylon had a custom, not yet ex-

250 Incest.

tinct, sanctioning the marriage of a man with his
younger sister, though they held it revolting to
many an elder sister or aunt. The same prac
tice is found in the Sandwich Islands, where the
king sometimes married his sister, as among the
Peruvians the Incas always did. According to
Hearne, the Chippewayans frequently espoused
their own daughters, giving them over, after some
time, to their sons. Other savages have certain
bars to marriage, some of them corresponding
almost to our table of prohibited degrees. But
the field of choice for wiving is exceedingly va
ried. Where a tribe is at once exogamous and
cndogamous, and has at the same time no sense
of consanguinity, there is no limit whatever; so
that a man's wife may be a remote foreigner or
his own sister, or if he be polygamous, both may
be his wives. If the tribe be purely exogamous,
he may marry anyone outside it, except in that
restricted exogamy which limits him to his own
confederacy. And if the tribe be purely endog-
amous, his choice is narrowed to its own female
members, including or excluding, according as a
sense of blood-relationship is developed or not,
his own immediate kin and affinity.

There are other peculiar features of family life
among the uncivilized, which could not be omit-

The Evolution of Morality. 251

ted from a picture making any pretensions to
completeness. But for a comparative study of
the ethics of the family the details already men
tioned will perhaps be sufficient.

This survey, brief as it has been, can scarcely
have failed to generate a suspicion of the histori
cal character of those moral ideals which draw
their nourishment from the relations established
between the sexes. Were these relations every
where the same, our domestic morality would
seem as ultimate and as final as justice or benev
olence. But it is despoiled of its absoluteness
when the discovery is made that our own form
of marriage is but one of several competing
types, that the "relations dear of father, son,
and brother" have different foundations among
different peoples, and that chastity and fidelity
are so far from universal virtues that many peo
ples have no conception of them, and when they
have appeared they seem to have grown out of
rights in women as property — adultery in Mada
gascar, e.g., having the same punishment as theft
—and are consequently never, or seldom, required
of savage men. The rights, duties, virtues, and
sentiments associated with our idea of the family
cannot, therefore, be considered a part of the
content of the moral law universal.

252 Opposing Eth ical Schools.

This seems to me a result of considerable im
portance for moral philosophy. And it is a re
sult that cannot be gainsaid by any school, since
it is not a speculation, not even an inference, but
an undeniable statement of actual facts.

Moralists have divided into opposing camps on
the question of the ultimate or the derivative
nature of morality. While one party recognizes
in moral laws nothing but means to ends, the
other finds in them the expression of uncreated
and unchanging relations, whose closest analogue
is presented by mathematics. "When this time-
worn controversy is stripped of the accidental
features by which party rage has heightened the
contrast, it will be seen that these positions are
not mutually exclusive. If a moral law is but a
maxim for the attainment of an end, then, unless
the theory is suicidal, there must be some ulti
mate end or ends for the sake of which maxims
are enjoined ; and this absolute object might very
properly be described as eternally desirable, self-
evidencing, and standing in the same relation to
the conscience (which recognizes its authority) as
a mathematical principle to the understanding
(which recognizes its truth). In other words, the
relativist cannot logically escape the admission
that at least some moral principle or principles

The Evolution of Morality. 253

are intuitive, self-evident, and underived. And,
as a matter of fact, the principle of universal
benevolence has been so treated by relativists, at
least since the time of Bentham. But the impli
cations of their logic have been hidden from
themselves, through emphasis upon irrelevant
issues. Holding the happiness of mankind as
the sole ultimate good, they delighted to dwell
upon the relativity of sundry virtues, and to
show their emptiness and worthlessness apart
from a tendency to promote the general welfare.
And with still more ardor they proclaimed that
the supreme good, or happiness of mankind, con
sisted in pleasure, which alone they declared
truly desirable, if, indeed (as they generally de
nied), anything else could really be the object of
human desire. Now, these highly speculative
and dubious positions should not obscure to our
view the underlying intuitional groundwork.
Something at least is recognized as self-evident,
primitive, and inviolably obligatory — the welfare
of mankind. It is not, therefore, upon the ex
istence of primitive intuitions, but upon their
number, that the difference turns between the
relative and the absolute moralist. They agree
that there are primal and underived moral prin
ciples; but they cannot agree in determining

254 How Related and Contrasted.

what they are. Universal benevolence, according
to Mill; benevolence, justice, veracity, and many
others, according to Butler. But whether one
intuition or many, the defender of either position
is essentially an intuitioriist.

Still, though not so great a difference as has
been supposed, a difference very real yet remains
unadjudicated between the two schools. I need
scarcely point out, at the close of this volume, the
futility of submitting it to the equivocal arbitra
ment of many-voiced speculation. The results of
this procedure are too sadly evident in the med
ley of personal prejudices, guesses, and vagaries
that pass with us for ethical science. As specu
lation has its source in a personal need, and de
rives its form from the nature of the personality,
so, as Lotze was ever ready to recognize, the sat
isfaction it gives and the validity it can claim are,
primarily, only individual. But science must
consist of propositions objectively established —
valid for you as well as for me. Moral phenom
ena have hitherto been the subject of speculation ;
and the contents of the moral law have been
formulated according to individual caprice. Now,
what I propose is that we shall pass by this fruit
less method and proceed scientifically to deter
mine the point here at issue— the nature of the

The Evolution of Morality. 255

moral law, the comparative primitiveness of moral
principles, the derivative or inderivative character
of morality. And after the methodological con
siderations in the first chapter, it will scarcely be
necessary to remark that, in my opinion, the ques
tion can be settled only by an appeal to observa
tion and history.

It may be objected that ethics deals with what
ought to be, not what has been. But the objection
ignores the fatal consideration that NO SCIENCE CAN

DETERMINE WHAT OUGHT TO BE ; that W6 kllOW it,

as a mathematical friend of mine is wont to say,
in language as aptly expressive as Wordsworth's
ode, only by "feeling it in our bones ; " and that
any speculation on the subject has no authority
or validity beyond the speculator himself. Be
sides, the problem of the science of ethics, or of
historical ethics, is not adequately described in
the foregoing objection. That problem is, if not
what ought to be, at least what ?nan has thought
ought to l)e.

Unfortunately, data are not yet at hand for the
complete solution of this scientific problem. The
science of historical ethics is still too young to
have established what moral principles are ulti
mate and fundamental — that is, what principles
man, everywhere and at all times, has considered

256 History as Arbiter.

binding. But though it is not yet discovered
what morality is primordial and universal, it has
been settled beyond doubt that the so-called in-
tuitionist school, or certain members of it, have
erred in supposing all the virtues to be of that
description. History and observation have alike
demonstrated the absence of the ideas of chastity
and fidelity in the moral furnishing of the minds
of many savage and barbarous tribes. By follow
ing the same method, similar inductions might be
established, until ethical science had completely
made out the number and the nature of the prim
itive and universal moral intuitions.

But though domestic morality is certainly a
derivative and occasional growth, I do not hold
that other important virtues have had a like
historical origin. On a field in which there has
been so little investigation, opinion, it must be
borne in mind, cannot pretend to finality, or
even to much solidity. But some gropings amid
the general darkness incline me, at least tenta
tively, to the belief that, apart from the domestic
virtues, there is no such great difference between
the morals of Christians and the morals of sav
ages. Observers are naturally struck with what
is new and unlike their own modes of thought
and conduct; and so it often happens that the

The Evolution of Morality. 257

most superficial dissimilarities produce a pro
found impression, while the great body of com
mon morals escapes notice. This want of per
spective is manifest alike in the oral and written
descriptions of travellers, as everyone will have
felt who has tried to digest their information and
arrange it into a distinct system. When I first
inquired of the missionary, already referred to,
into the moral condition of the natives of the
New Hebrides, he described them as a gross,
debased people with scarcely any sense of mo
rality. This is the popular view of the North
American Indians, though it is certainly errone
ous ; and the reader of Parkrnan's brilliant vol
umes may suspect that one great social evil — the
condition of the poor — they disposed of with
more compassionate equity and with more success
than their later civilized maligners. I found, too,
on going into details with my missionary friend,
that the New Hebridean natives, among whom
he had spent many years, were, in their deal
ings with one another -, severely just, scrupulously
truthful, compassionate toward the wretched
and unfortunate, so honest that an individual on
going off to pay a visit of some weeks would
leave his tent, containing all his possessions, open
and untenanted, without any fear of theft, and
17

258 Christian and Savage Morality.

that they were in general endowed with all that
virile morality by which men regulate their con
duct towards one another and make living together
in society possible. What, then, was the founda
tion of the missionary's general depreciatory
judgment ? It was not a baseless verdict. His
opinion had been formed in the light of an ob
servation that astonished and appalled him. He
was surrounded by a community that had not the
faintest conception of the virtue of chastity, and
chastity has been so exalted and glorified by the
Christian Church that its absence might well
strike a Christian missionary as the collapse of
all morality.

It has now been shown that the morality of
the family is varied and changeable. It has fur
ther been suggested that, when women are put
aside, a remarkable agreement may be found be
tween the morals of savage and civilized man.
But this last statement requires some qualifi
cation. The modern American owes duties to
every man as man ; the primitive American owes
none outside the circle of his own tribe. This
contrast, however, is rather apparent than real.
For, in times of war, Christian nations think it
right to kill and plunder their enemies ; and the
normal condition of the savage is one of war,

The Evolution of Morality. 259

with the rest of mankind as enemy. We may,
therefore, say that under the same conditions the
morality of savage and of civilized .peoples is
fundamentally the same. There is, however, a
further limitation. Life has no sacredness^r se
among many savages ; and children and old men,
as useless members of the community, are, under
the stern law of necessity or of custom, crystal
lized from it — frequently put to death. This,
however, must not be confounded with murder ;
since among primitive peoples children fall under
the category of property, and are, therefore, like
slaves or other chattels, at the absolute disposi
tion of the head of the house, as is very forci
bly illustrated in early Roman law. With these
qualifications and explanations, our proposition
in its final form may be thus expressed: The
fighting men, actual and potential, in every un
civilized community recognize the same rights,
obligations, and duties towards one another as
constitute the essence of civilized morality. You
never find man without a moral nature, a nature
essentially like our own ; but the objects he in
cludes within the scope of its outgoings vary, and
as women and children were (sometimes at least)
regarded as property before they were regarded
as persons, the ethics of the family may be called

260 The Position of Woman.

an acquisition or, better, an outcome, a late flower
of the ineradicable root of morality.

If, as Plato supposes, reverence and justice were
the primal gifts of God to man, then it was not
until there had been some tillage in earthly life
that they blossomed into fidelity, chastity, and all
the charities of the family. How this quickening
of moral discernment is brought about we cannot
always explain ; but the process of development
may in some cases be actually traced, notably in
the history of Rome. At the foundation of the
city, wife-stealing was the practice ; this was fol
lowed by purchase and legalized dominion under
patria potestas • but in the course of several cen
turies the equal personality of woman came to be
recognized, and Roman jurisprudence secured her
a position as exalted as ever she has occupied
in the history of the world. Her glory was of
short duration, perishing with the fall of the
empire ; but it has been regained under the in
spiration and teaching of a religion which pro
claims the infinite worth and, consequently, the
fundamental equality of every human being, and
which exacts in the relations between the sexes
such perfect purity that all distinction vanishes
between the look of lust and the act of adultery.

As conjugal relations among mankind are not

The Evolution of Morality. 261

of one but of various forms, and as at least some
of them have undergone change and development,
curiosity and, even, apprehension may be felt
about the finality of our own system of monan-
drous and monogynous life-marriage, with its fair
train of sweet and pure domestic virtues. Is it to
remain forever, or is it destined to suffer the
common fate of those evolutionary potencies
which, in spite of seeming fixedness, turn out but
moments in the life of an eternal becoming,
fleeting shadows of something that never is, but
always strives to be ? To this question, answers
have been given by evolutionists of a speculative
turn of mind. And no objection need be taken
to their intellectual gymnastics, provided only
it is understood they are merely indulging in
guesses concerning a matter which does not admit
of even probable determination. One needs not
to be especially sensible to what Bishop Butler
described as the doubtfulness in which things are
involved, it is enough to consider our absolute
ignorance of futurity, to have the conviction that
nothing whatever can be known about the com
ing development of society, or of any part of its
organization.

Our knowledge of the family is restricted to
the period of its actual existence. This, surely,

262 How Affected by Divorce.

is a field vast enough for scientific cultivation.
And of late considerable progress has been made
in the investigation of the domestic life of primi
tive times. Much yet remains to be done in
comparing, arranging, and interpreting what
passes before our own eyes. It is a remark of
Burke's that the generality of people are fifty
years at least behindhand in their politics. And
of social phenomena, still more than of political, is
it true-that men are " wise with but little reflec
tion " in the understanding of all times but their
own. While we have been ransacking the past,
and forecasting the future, a change is actually
going on in the form of our own system of con
jugal relations, the significance of which seems
altogether to have escaped attention. The effect
of divorce, which has now been legalized in the
greater part of Europe and America, has been to
transform, within the area of its actual operation,
civilized marriage into a casual bond essentially
indistinguishable from that which formed the
basis of what Morgan has called the " syndyas-
mian or pairing " family — the family of the Iro-
quois and other North American Indians. The
legal forms, the technical procedure, the solemn
plausibilities of the court, unessential and sub
sidiary as they really are, serve to hide from

The Evolution of Morality. 263

us the essential object to which these are but
convenient instruments. The virtue, soul, and
essence of the whole business is the existence
among us of a family ethics admitting casual
unions and separations of the sexes with the same
facility and frequency, and with as little loss of
respectability, as is wont to obtain among savages
and barbarians. It would doubtless be considered
paradoxical to declare we had become converts
to Milton's theory of divorce. But, as a matter
of fact, we have, both in practice and in legisla
tion, gone considerably beyond it. Every day's
newspaper supplies fresh examples, and it would
be musty to cite the now obsolete scandal of last
week in the divorce-history of Rhode Island.
Blind to the havoc which divorce is making in
the old family system, we atone for our man
ners by embodying the principles of our fathers
in denunciation of the Mormons. Unfortunate
ly, this application of our retrospective wisdom
and orthodoxy serves only to distract attention
from the anomaly of our own practice, which
(if polygamy be the name for " much-marriage "
successively as well as synchronously) may be
justly described as essential polyandry and po-

This change in the constitution of the civilized

264 Science Indifferent to It.

and Christian family, with the consequent ob
scuration of domestic virtue, receives no counte
nance from ethical science. On the contrary,
comparative and historical ethics show that the
" pairing " family has hitherto always been as
sociated with a stage of culture immensely infe
rior to our own. And, from the interrelation of
social forces, it might not unreasonably be ap
prehended that a return to the barbarous system
of conjugal relations would entail general social
deterioration. If ethical science does show that
the family, and the morality of the family, have
had an historical growth, and that they vary
with time and place, it does not thereby really
derogate from their sanctity or authority within
a civilization that has once absorbed them. Sci
ence, indeed, can tell us nothing of the validity
of virtue, duty, or good. And if speculation in
the guise of moral philosophy takes up the prob
lem, it will find that the domestic virtues have
the same warrant as justice or benevolence — that
warrant being, in a last analysis, an inexpugnable
consciousness of their right to us and authority
over us.

.sin

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

Schurman, Jacob Gould

Ethical Import of Darwinism

-