SOME NEW BOOKS. 



THE SPRINGS OF CONDUCT. 



The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct. By Alexander Suther- 

 land, M.A. In two vols. Pp. xiii. + 461, vi. + 336. London : Long- 

 mans, Green, and Co. 1898. 



We need make no apology for reviewing this interesting work in Natural 

 Science, for, as the author tells us, full half of the book is a detailed expansion 

 of the fourth and fifth chapters of the "Descent of Man." " Darwin showed in 

 these chapters a noble gift of insight, but to have made good his position from 

 point to point, to have left nothing behind him unreduced, would have de- 

 manded a labour which neither his own health nor the length of an ordinary 

 life would have permitted." Mr. Sutherland has done good service in filling in 

 Darwin's scheme. Many persons have made vorlaufige Mittheilungen on the 

 same subject, but Mr. Sutherland has written a treatise of great value. If he 

 had submitted his two volumes to a candid friend at a distance, who rejoiced 

 in the exercise of the blue pencil, if he had made the two volumes into one, if 

 he had avoided such question-begging phrases as " the moral instinct," if he had 

 called his book " The Evolution of Sympathy," he would have commanded an 

 interested audience whom this treatise will never touch. We would not seem 

 ungrateful, the book is the outcome of eleven years of hard work, it is full of 

 careful erudition, it is most intelligibly written ; our regret is simply that a 

 lack of worldly wisdom or self-criticism has robbed the book of much of its 

 utility by leaving it so large. 



Nowhere else that we know of can we find such a carefully selected treasury 

 of facts bearing on parental care, conjugal affection, and the feeling of kinship — 

 all working towards a theory of the evolution of sympathy on which the author 

 believes morality to be founded. He shows, to our thinking conclusively, how 

 there was worked out among animals an inheritance of altruistic emotions 

 which became in man the springs of good conduct ; but we do not think that 

 he has been equally successful in showing how man became moral, that is, 

 became accustomed to " think the ought," to control his conduct in reference 

 to general ideas and ideals. According to Mr. Sutherland, " the moral instinct 

 is in social animals the result of that selective process among the emotions 

 which tends to encourage those that are mutually helpful, and to weaken those 

 that are mutually harmful," but what he has actually been working at is the 

 growth of sympathetic emotions, not the origin of the distinctively ethical 

 note which characterises many human actions. The evolution of altruistic 

 feelings is one thing ; the distinction between good behaviour and moral conduct 

 is another ; and the book seems to us to fail seriously in not appreciating the 

 distinction. But as a treatise on the evolution of sympathy, on the springs of 

 good conduct, it is admirable, and most useful to biologist and moralist alike. 



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