ETHICS IN NATURAL LAW. 



325 



excess of these satisfactions over the concomitant pain and suffer- 

 ing. The contrary assumption, he has shown, would result in a 

 reductio ad ahsurdum so complete as to be logically unthinkable. 

 The " pains innumerable and immeasurably great," which Prof. 

 Huxley finds to be the accompaniment of the highest functional 

 development of the sentient organism, are, on the whole, counter- 

 balanced by pleasures still more immeasurable and complete. 



Indeed, the " ape and tiger " surviving in human dispositions, 

 the pains and griefs, the miseries and crimes, which are a part of 

 the experience of civilized man, constituting his inheritance from 

 a myriad generations of brute ancestors, are the sine qua non of 

 all morality and all ethical progress. They furnish the pou sto 

 of ethics, the underlying conditions without which there could be 

 no such thing as a moral being. There can be no light without a 

 concomitant shadow ; all we can rationally ask is that the light 

 shall furnish the medium for seeing the picture of life as it is. 

 Without the shadows, no beauty of landscape or human coun- 

 tenance ; without the darker shadows of suffering and sin, no 

 moral beauty no ethical advancement. 



Prof. Huxley well says that " ape and tiger methods are not 

 reconcilable with the ethical principle." This is certainly true of 

 beings possessing a developed moral consciousness ; but nothing 

 is surer, from the evolutionist's standpoint, than that the sense of 

 moral obligation was sired by these very " ape and tiger niethods " 

 as they have prevailed among the lower orders of sentient beings. 

 The sense of obligation is primarily purely egoistic. The " ought " 

 of primitive man was not a moral obligation ; it was a recogni- 

 tion of something owed to himself. That impulse to self-preser- 

 vation which is proverbially the first law of Nature, out of con- 

 sciousness of obligation to self, developed, through experience, 

 the application of this sense of obligation to that larger self, the 

 family ; through gregarious association to the still growing self, 

 the herd or tribe ; and again on to the state, the nation, and in 

 the consciousness of a few the perfect flower and fruitage of 

 cosmic evolution to man as man, to all forms of sentient life, to 

 the earth itself as the teeming mother of the human race. 



The sense of duty, as we now imderstand it, was not developed 

 until the remote and indirect motive of race-maintenance and 

 altruistic service was consciously and voluntarily substituted for 

 the primary, egoistic motive of self-preservation. Yet, as I have 

 elsewhere shown, " here has been no new creation, but merely a 

 process of transformation, of evolution. The ' raw material' of 

 morality is found in the simplest orderly manifestations of voli- 

 tional activities in organic Nature ; yes, back even in those stead- 

 fast laws and tendencies which are manifest in the action of the 

 inorganic universe ... In the last analysis, it is not two things 



