frO THE DESCENT OF MAN. [Part I. 



stinctive sympathy. Lastly, habit in the individual would 

 ultimately play a very important part in guiding the con- 

 duct of each member; for the social instincts and im- 

 pulses, like all other instincts, would be greatly strength- 

 ened by habit, as would obedience to the wishes and judg- 

 ment of the community. These several subordinate prop- 

 ositions must now be discussed; and some of them at con- 

 siderable length. 



It may be well first to premise that I do not wish to 

 maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual 

 faculties were to become as active and as highly devel- 

 oped as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral 

 •sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals 

 have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely 

 different objects, so they might have a sense of right and 

 wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of 

 conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men 

 were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive- 

 bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried fe 

 males would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty 

 to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their 

 fertile daughters ; and no one would think of interfering. 

 Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in 

 our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling 

 of right and wrong, or a conscience. For each individual 

 would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger 

 or more enduring instincts, and others less strong or en- 

 during ; so that there would often be a struggle which im- 

 pulse should be followed ; and satisfaction or dissatisfac- 

 tio'n would be felt, as past impressions were compared 

 during their incessant passage through the mind. In this 

 case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it 

 would have been better to have followed the one im- 

 pulse rather than the other. The one course ought 

 to have been followed : the one would have been right 



