THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



sively commands not of what may be done but of 

 what may not be done; they were, in psychological 

 terms, inhibitions. These canons of religious conduct 

 were based on the assumption that moral facts and 

 laws are even more certain and unchangeable than 

 natural law. They are not a code of convenience shift- 

 ing with the conventions of society as they are be- 

 lieved to be by humanitarians and pragmatists. They 

 tacitly assumed that one may do all those many things 

 which appeal to him, excepting the few which harm 

 either himself or others spiritually. With all the fail- 

 ures of the older religions, no one who reflects on the 

 history of society can fail to do homage to the results 

 which have followed from obedience to the precepts 

 of these individual teachers. These precepts are bound 

 up with the belief in free-will and that the individual 

 is personally responsible for his acts to a Divine 

 Power whose plan he is capable of understanding. 

 According to this doctrine of inhibition, society is de- 

 pendent on the individual, and reform is due to the 

 conviction of the individual that he, himself, must 

 order his own life aright. 



Now, unfortunately, the reform and progress of 

 society are being undertaken by doctrinaire sociolo- 

 gists and pseudo-biologists who imagine a system of 

 government and of ethics to be derived from a scien- 

 tific formula based on the laws of biological evolu- 

 tion. The method of this evolution is to be found, to 

 the present time at least, in Darwin's doctrine of nat- 



i: 384 1 



