THE THEORY OF USE-INHERITANCE. 777 
powers; and we have to some extent succeeded. In so far ~ 
as our science is true, we have found a reality behind the 
veil of appearance. The world which we have thus dis- 
covered is very different from the weltering chaos which it 
presents to’mere sense. On these grounds, we must reject 
the theory that our belief in the universality of causation, 
or in the orderly sequences of Nature, is due to the heredi- 
tary transmission of a nervous record of sense-experiences in 
the lives of innumerable generations. 
Our moral intuitions, it has been said, are due to ancestral 
experiences of utility, similarly recorded in the cerebral 
hemispheres, and transmitted. An intuition, thus under- 
stood, is not an immutable belief; it is a belief inherited in 
the way supposed, and subject to criticism in the light of 
further experience. Whatever may have been the origin of 
the moral ideal, it is undoubtedly true that there is such an 
ideal, and that. it has undergone changes in the develop- 
ment of the individual and of the race. The question to be 
decided is whether these changes require for their explana- 
tion the theory of the transmission of acquired characters. 
May they not be explained by conditions which are suffi- 
ciently obvious, without bringing in this hypothetical in- 
fluence? Moral precepts are handed down orally and in 
writing from generation to generation; they are impressed 
by example, and enforced by penalties. Codes of life are 
embodied in laws and institutions. Everyone breathes the 
moral as well as the intellectual atmosphere of his time. 
Opportunity for progress is given in the conflict of ideals, 
the law of the survival of the fittest holding good here as 
in organic evolution. There is, also, a natural selection of 
individuals, tending to the elimination of those who fall 
below the level of their time, and conserving those who live 
more nearly up to its ideal. Sexual selection is shown in 
the choice of those who are unselfish, and who try to do 
their duty. The kindly and the moral are more likely to 
survive, and leave descendants, than those who defy 
morality. | Whatever tendencies towards moral progress 
exist In a community may be transmitted in the known and 
obvious ways of social intercourse. What residue is left 
to be explained? With these influences at work, there is 
neither need nor room for the supposed transmission of the 
results of moral action through the nervous organism. 
Darwin parts company with Spencer here, remarking that, 
on his principle, senseless customs, superstitions, and tastes, 
such as the horror of a Hindoo for unclean food, ought to be 
transmitted, and that there is no evidence of this. Wundt, 
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