760 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Dr. Van Buren Denslow, the author of "Modern Thinkers," is one of 

 the Americans who, sometimes with more of mother-wit than of eru- 

 dition, are grappling vigorously, and in a practical spirit, with the 

 great problems of the age. His work is introduced with a preface by 

 Mr. Robert Ingersoll, the foremost teacher of agnosticism on that 

 continent. The doctor is a profound admirer of Mr. Spencer, whom 

 he depicts, in grandiose language, as assisting in the majesty of science 

 at the birth of worlds. But he wants to push the agnostic principle 

 to its logical conclusion, which, according to him, is, that there is no 

 such thing as a moral law, irrespectively of the will of the strongest : 



It is generally believed to be moral to tell the truth, and immoral to lie. 

 And yet it would be difficult to prove that Nature prefers the true to the false. 

 Everywhere she makes the false impression first, and only after years, or thou- 

 sands of years, do we become able to detect her in her lies. . . . Nature endows 

 almost every animal with the faculty of deceit in order to aid it in escaping from 

 the brute force of its superiors. Why, then, should not man be endowed with 

 the faculty of lying, when it is to his interest to appear wise concerning matters 

 of which he is ignorant? Lying is often a refuge to the weak, a stepping-stone 

 to power, a ground of reverence toward those who live by getting credit for 

 knowing what they do not know. No one doubts that it is right for the mater- 

 nal partridge to feign lameness, a broken wing or leg, in order to conceal her 

 young in flight, by causing the pursuer to suppose he can more easily catch her 

 than her offspring. From whence, then, in nature, do we derive the fact that a 

 human being may not properly tell an untruth with the same motive? Our 

 early histories, sciences, poetries, and theologies are all false, yet they compre- 

 hend by far the major part of human thought. Priesthoods have ruled the 

 world by deceiving our tender souls, and yet they command our most enduring 

 reverence. Where, then, do we discover that any law of universal nature pre- 

 fers truth to falsehood, any more than oxygen to nitrogen, or alkalies to salts? 

 So habituated have we become to assume that truth-telling is a virtue, that noth- 

 ing is more difficult than to tell how we came to assume it ; nor is it easy of 

 proof that it is a virtue in an unrestricted sense. What would be thought of 

 the military strategist who made no feints, of the advertisement that contained 

 no lie, of the business-man whose polite suavity covered no falsehood ? 



Inasmuch as all moral rules are in the first instance impressed by the strong, 

 the dominant, the matured, and the successful upon the weak, the crouching, 

 the infantile, and the servile, it would not be strange if a close analysis and a 

 minute historical research should concur in proving that all moral rules are doc- 

 trines established by the strong for the government of the weak. It is invari- 

 ably the strong who require the weak to tell the truth, and always to promote 

 some interest of the strong. . . . 



"Thou shalt not steal," is a moral precept invented by the strong, the ma- 

 tured, the successful, and by them impressed upon the weak, the infantile, and 

 the failures in life's struggle, as all criminals are. For nowhere in the world 

 has the sign ever been blazoned on the shop-doors of a successful business-man, 

 " Closed, because the proprietor prefers crime to industry." Universal society 

 might be pictured, for the illustration of this feature of the moral code, as con- 

 sisting of two sets of swine, one of which is in the clover, and the other is out. 

 The swine that are in the clover grunt, " Thou shalt not steal put up the bars." 

 The swine that are out of the clover grunt, " Did you make the clover ? let 



