370 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fact of the transmissibility of mental as well as of physical character- 

 istics, if not to the children to the children's children a transmissibil- 

 ity whose sphere of influence in individual cases is not susceptible of 

 definition can not but heighten the feeling of responsibility, because 

 we are thereby made aware that the consequences of good as well as 

 of bad conduct extend further than we had supposed. 



A few adherents of the development theory, including Darwin 

 himself, have held that not the good of mankind, but the maintenance 

 of his existence, is the moral principle resulting from it ; and that 

 feelings of pleasure and of pain are only the means which Nature uses 

 to promote the exercise of life-favoring and restraint from life-injuring 

 conduct ; that the real end of all action is not pleasure and the avoid- 

 ance of pain, not the greatest possible excess of pleasure over pain for 

 as many as possible, not the greatest good of the greatest number, but 

 only the most prolonged existence of the greatest number. The 

 greatest possible endurance of species, or the mere maintenance of 

 species, not their welfare, would be according to this view the chief 

 moral principle. This position appears to us to be a difficult one. 



The chief moral principle expresses that from which all of the rules 

 of right may be derived, and accordingly means the highest rule of 

 conduct, the highest moral aim of life, or the ethical highest good, 

 and serves as the highest standard of estimation and judgment. Those 

 evolutionists of whom we have just spoken start from a teleological 

 view of the world from the view that the course of Nature is gov- 

 erned by some purpose. But the majority of the Darwinians are op- 

 ponents of teleology, or try to be. Rolph has shown that, in follow- 

 ing the history of organic development on the earth, we can really 

 perceive no tendency to an adaptation showing design, to the produc- 

 tion of forms that may be represented to human conception as higher. 

 Its result has been only to produce forms better adapted to what is 

 around them ; and the change just as often consists in a deterioration, 

 even though some advantage is always gained for the creature. As 

 not final causes, but efficient causes, working causes, have worn out 

 the river-bed and determined the course of the stream, as it has formed 

 its channel not with reference to its final outlet, but to the local con- 

 ditions, so, as Darwin and his followers have shown, it is with all or- 

 ganic phenomena. The investigator has to break with teleology in 

 all its forms ; and, even in ethics, the question of the object, of the 

 destiny of man, will have to be given up. This idea of a purpose or 

 design in Nature, when we come to analyze it, of a preconceived and 

 voluntary operation working to produce determined effects, presumes 

 by necessary implication the agency of a will behind the causes which 

 are leading up to those effects. It follows, hence, that there is purpose 

 in Nature in the domain of man and the higher animals, because men, 

 and in a certain but very much less degree the animals, form con- 

 ceptions of processes which they strive to carry through ; but that 



