656 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



is composed. Morality is not an abstraction; it is neither 

 religious nor metaphysical. It forms the unwritten funda- 

 mental law on which society is founded" (207, I: IX). 



Moreover Westermarck's extensive and analytical study of 

 human morals (SOS), from the most primitive to the most 

 advanced, clearly shows that in the process of their gradual 

 evolution entirely opposite views have often developed and 

 have become rigid rules among different peoples. These 

 originate usually as customs or observances, then they be- 

 come accepted principles, and at length binding laws. Thus 

 theft, human sacrifice, slavery, prenuptial purity, and other 

 moral attitudes have undergone totally opposite and diverg- 

 ing stages of evolution amongst different peoples, according 

 to the proenvironal efforts that each exhibited. So in the 

 concluding chapter to his exhaustive work he rightly observes 

 (p. 742): "The general uniformity of human nature accounts 

 for the great similarities which characterize the moral ideas 

 of mankind. But at the same time these ideas also present 

 radical differences. A mode of conduct which among one 

 people is condemned as wrong is among another people viewed 

 with indifference or regarded as praiseworthy, or enjoined 

 as a duty. One reason for these variations lies in different 

 external conditions. . . . But the most common differ- 

 ences of moral estimates have undoubtedly a psychical origin." 



Such a position must be distinctly, fully, and finally ac- 

 cepted by all apologists for the different religious beliefs, unless 

 they willingly desire to blind the eyes of their coreligionists 

 to the facts of human history. Moreover, our knowledge 

 of the development and evolutionary unfolding of many moral 

 attitudes amongst diverse nations is sufficiently advanced to 

 permit of our saying that these moral attitudes all represent 

 proenvironal efforts by individuals, or by the mass of each 

 nation, which have resulted in one of the three conditions 

 already named, progress, stagnation, or regression and decay. 



The absence of moral feeling or sentiment and of conscience 

 in the child, along with its continued non-development if the 

 child of highly moral parents be kept in the midst of non- 



