IX.] IS VOLUTION AND ETHICS. 217 



In the same way, that admiration which all feel for acts 

 of self-denial done for the good of others, and tending even 

 towards the destruction of the actor, conld hardly he 

 accounted for on Darwinian principles alone ; for self- 

 immolators must but rarely leave direct descendants, while 

 the community they benefit must by their destruction 

 tend, so far, to morally del eriorate. But devotion to others 

 of the same community is by no means all that has to be 

 ''•^accounted for. Devotion to the whole human race, and 

 devotion to God — in the form of asceticism — have been 

 and are very generally recognized as " good ; " and tlie 

 author contends that it is simply impossible to conceive 

 that such ideas and sanctions should have been developed 

 by " Natural Selection " alone, from only that degree of 

 unselfishness necessary for the preservation of brutally 

 barbarous communities in the struggle for life. That 

 degree of unselfishness once attained, further improvement 

 would be checked by the mutual opposition of diverging 

 moral tendencies and spontaneous variations in all direc- 

 tions. Added to which, we have the principle of reversion 

 and atavism, tending powerfully to restore and reproduce 

 that more degraded anterior condition whence the later 

 and better state painfully emerged. 



Very few, however, dispute the complete distinctness, 

 here and now, of the ideas of "duty " and " interest," what- 

 ever may have been the origin of those ideas. No one 

 pretends that ingratitude may, in any past abyss of time, 

 have been a virtue, or that it may be such now in Arcturus 

 or the Pleiades. Indeed, a certain eminent writer of the 

 utilitarian school of ethics has amusingly and instructively 

 shown how radically distinct even in his own mind are the 

 two ideas which he nevertheless endeavours to identify. 



