394 NATURAL SCIENCE. June, 1897. 



of the Idols"), which people in this country would do well to ponder. 

 He says that " morality is not yet a problem for the Englishman." 

 It is almost universally taken for granted that measures which make 

 any class of persons happy and comfortable are necessarily good ; 

 whereas the facts are almost always overlooked by English morahsts 

 that happiness and comfort may in many cases be unmerited, and 

 that measures which result in unmerited advantages to a certain class 

 bring about indirectly undeserved disadvantages elsewhere, and may 

 be prejudicial to society as a whole. Nietzsche saw clearly that the 

 popular notions of morality (which have hitherto also been supported 

 by academic influence) were quite superficial, and exercised an in- 

 jurious effect. He therefore devoted himself to the great task of 

 effecting a transvaluation, or rather a counter-valuation, of moral 

 values, which involved, in fact, as the title of his unfinished work 

 indicated, a re-appraisement of all the estimates of worth. 



It is not enough, however, for the philosopher and the scientist 

 to discover that a system is wrong ; their task is not completed until 

 they have explained how the wrong system came into existence and 

 ■maintained itself. This task Nietzsche has fully accomplished, and 

 has thereby, as it were, put the copestone on the Darwinian edifice, 

 by explaining the evolution of morality — a problem which remained 

 unsolved until Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals appeared. Though he 

 speaks somewhat slightingly of Darwin, his philosophy can, neverthe- 

 less, be best understood from the Darwinian point of view — indeed it 

 forms the last and most important chapter of the Darwinian system. 

 The most important distinction among animals is their fitness or 

 unfitness for the conditions of existence, in fact, their superiority or 

 inferiority. It is the same among human beings. As among the 

 animals, however, we see that certain inferior creatures have adopted 

 devices which enable them to maintain themselves (e.g., the serpent 

 by means of its venom, the skunk by means of its stench, the porcu- 

 pine by means of its quills, other creatures by means of mimicry and 

 suitable coloration), so among human beings the inferior slave- 

 morality has been successfully promulgated under a series of favour- 

 able conditions during the past two thousand years, in the interest of 

 the inferior class of human beings, and has partially displaced the 

 older master-morality in those nations which are "in the foremost 

 files of time," and in which, consequently, abnormal social evolution 

 has the best opportunity of developing without producing immediately 

 fatal results. It is somewhat on these lines that Nietzsche explains 

 the origin of the modern notions of morality. It seems to me, there- 

 fore, considering the importance of these ideas, that no one is properly 

 qualified to write on morals, or even on human evolution who is 

 unacquainted with Nietzsche's writings. 



Thomas Common. 



9 Caird Drive, Partick Hill, Glasgow. 



