670 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



Striking indication of the steady though slow moral advance 

 made, during the past two millennia, is got when we compare 

 the moral atmosphere of today with that when Christ and 

 Paul appeared as great moral lawgivers, as well as religious 

 teachers. Both enjoined moral obligation and observance not 

 by the method of legal enactment or of compulsion, but by 

 that greatest law that is steadily permeating the world, love 

 for mankind. Flowing therefrom has gradually evolved legal- 

 ized monogamy, constitutional national laws, free suffrage, 

 compulsory national education, a widespread happy family 

 life, enlightened prison treatment, hospitals or asylums for 

 the sick, deaf, blind, and insane, repression or suppression of 

 drunkenness, social vice, individual civic, national, and inter- 

 national brutality, abolition of slavery, international stamping 

 out of disease, cooperative factories and trades-unions, social 

 combinations and civic improvements. All of these are, in 

 the exactest sense, moral advances that belong to a different 

 category biologically from individual mental advance or im- 

 provement on the one hand and religious evolution on the 

 other, though the former of these almost invariably leads up 

 to moral organization; while true religious advance seems only 

 possible when a progressive moral atmosphere surrounds it. 



The written period of human history then, and particularly 

 the past two thousand years, has witnessed a great evolution 

 in morals, that is itself an object-lesson in evolution of new 

 races of mankind. It largely explains also the decadence 

 and in a few accurately known cases the extinction even of 

 whole races of less morally organized humanity, when brought 

 face to face with — not isolated individuals of, but — the moral 

 resultant of a more moral race. 



In order to estimate aright the usual complexity of a moral 

 act, we shall now endeavor to analyze a few of those into their 

 component resultant responses, and these again into their 

 primary stimuli. We may best succeed however if we reverse 

 the process, and trace the evolutionary sequence, as worked 

 out in the history of each organism, or in the mental history 

 of its instructors. 



