lOO Evohttion and its Consequences 



nickname/ and making a 'joke.' Nothing could have been 

 further from my intention than either one or the other. As 

 it happens the expression was not "my own, but was picked 

 up in conversation with as thorough a Darwinian even as 

 Professor Huxley himself, who used it, as I understood, not 

 as a nickname, but as a handy mode of bringing home his 

 conceptions to my mind. I made use of it in all innocence, 

 and I still think it singularly apt and appropriate, not 

 certainly to express the conception of virtue, but to bring 

 home the utihtarian notion of it. Professor Huxley says, 

 ' What if it is ? Does that make it less virtue ? ' I answer, 

 unhesitatingly, that it not only makes it 'less virtue,' but 

 prevents it being virtue at all, unless it springs as a habit 

 acquired from self-conscious acts directed towards an end 

 recognised as good. 



Professor Huxley regrets that I should 'eke out' my 

 arguments against the views he patronises, by ascribing to 

 them ' logical consequences which have been over and over 

 again proved not to flow from them.' But it was to be 

 expected that a disciple of Mill,^ such as Professor Huxley, 

 would know that in matters of this kind it is impossible to 

 reason d posteriori, on account of the complexity of the 

 conditions ; and that the a priori argument, by deductions 



^ In speaking of the application of the experimental method to social 

 science, Mr. Mill remarks : — ' This mode of thinking is not only general with 

 practitioners in politics, and with tliat very numerous class who (on a subject 

 which no one, however ignorant, thinks himself incompetent to discuss) pro- 

 fess to guide themselves by common sense rather than by science ; but is 



often countenanced by persons with greater pretensions to instruction 



As, however, the notion of applicability of experimental methods to political 

 philosophy cannot co-exist with any just conception of these methods them- 

 selves, the kind of arguments from experience which the chemical theory 

 brings forth as its fruits (and which form the staple, in this country especially, 

 of parliamentary and hustings oratory) are such as, at no time since Bacon, 

 would have been admitted to be valid in chemistry itself, or in any other 

 branch of experimental science.' (Mill's Logic, vol. ii. p. 454.) *Itis evi- 

 dent that Sociology, considered as a system of deductions d priori, cannot be 

 a science of positive predictions, but only of tendencies.' {Op. cit. p. 477.) 



