488 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sense of duty in man, so is it fatal to pure love in woman. Bring up 

 woman in the positivist school, and you make of her a monster : the 

 very type of ruthless cynicism, of all-engrossing selfishness, of unbri- 

 dled passion. 



There are eminent persons, I am well aware, to whom these con- 

 clusions will be extremely distasteful. Writers, whose names alone 

 suffice to establish a claim upon our respectful attention, discourse to 

 us of " independent morality." Professor Huxley, as I remember, 

 somewhere protests with characteristic vehemence, " I will not for a 

 moment admit that morality is not strong enough to hold its own." 

 After all, however, the vital question is not what this accomplished 

 physicist will admit, but what, from the nature of the case, is likely to 

 happen. No doubt Professor Huxley, emancipated from belief in 

 angel or spirit, still guides himself by the same ethical rules as before. 

 I do not myself know anything of the early history of this illustrious 

 man ; but I suppose that, like the rest of us, he was brought up upon 

 the Catechism. At all events I am quite sure that he is the product 

 of many generations of Christian progenitors. What M. Renan hap- 

 pily calls the moral sap of the old belief — " la seve morale de la vieille 

 croyance " — still courses through his spiritual being. His material- 

 ism takes credit for virtues springing from quite another source : 

 " Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." He knows, far better 

 than I do, the influence of heredity and of environment upon charac- 

 ter. He is well aware how deeply rooted in the past are those ethical 

 principles whereby human life is still largely governed, even among 

 materialists. The question is, Can you uproot those principles and 

 expect them to flourish upon a quite different soil ? Morality in Pro- 

 fessor Huxley, I can well believe, is strong enough to hold its own. 

 But will it be strong enough in Professor Huxley's great-grandchil- 

 dren ? " It takes several generations for Christian morality to get into 

 the blood," the missionaries in Samoa told Baron von Iliibner. It will 

 doubtless take several generations for Christian morality to get out of 

 the blood. And then ? Kant, a teacher whom Professor Huxley very 

 highly esteems, held the existence of God and a future life to be neces- 

 sary postulates of morality. Certainly, as a matter of fact, they are 

 postulates upon which morality has hitherto rested. They have sup- 

 plied the strongest incentives to duty, and to that self-sacrifice which 

 the performance of duty usually involves. What is to take the place, 

 in the generations to come, of those old spiritual dogmas ? I do not 

 know of any materialists who so much as profess to care for duty for 

 its own sake. They are all agreed that personal interest or selfishness, 

 of course enlightened selfishness, is for the future to be the foundation 

 of ethics. It is from sympathy, they tell us, that the highest virtues 

 must now spring. " Sympathy," they confidently maintain, " will im- 

 pel us to seek the agreeable consciousness that results from the healthy 

 exercise of the energies of our nature, and to promote it in others by 



