126 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



thing which ought to be, whatever the individual 

 likes or dislikes, no so-called histories of the origin 

 of justice can help us : 



" Though our information about primitive man were very 

 different from what it is, it could never be other than a 

 contradiction to found upon it a theory of a state of mind 

 underlying the earliest forms of social union, which should 

 represent this state of mind as different in kind from that 

 which, upon fair analysis of the spiritual life, now shared 

 by us, we find to be the condition of such social union as 

 actually exists '' (p. 216). 



Sight cannot be generated when there is no 

 optic nerve, nor can the idea of an absolute and 

 common good, which is alike the foundation of 

 morality and of the institutions of daily life, be the 

 product of that which is irrational and non-moral. 



So much, then, is necessarily implied in morality, 

 that there should be the idea of an absolute good, 

 which is a good for others as well as for one's self. 

 But the earliest moral ideals and that which the 

 modern age has caught from Christianity seem 

 wide as the poles asunder. In what, then, does 

 the process or evolution of morality consist ? To 

 this the answer is that there has been a gradual 

 widening of the area of common good and a 

 gradual determination of the idea. We have been 

 slowly learning that a common good is a good 

 for all: 



" The change is not necessarily in the strength, in the 

 constraining power, of the feeling of duty perhaps it is 



