THE PARALLEL GROWTH OF OPPOSITES 41 



processes of adaptation and misadaptation, we may, in the 

 absence of any kind of opposing evidence, feel justified in 

 extending the presumption to such strongly marked special 

 factors in the sum total as pleasure and pain. 



Our conclusion is confirmed by the observation of other 

 factors. Good and evil, in the ethical sense, differ, among 

 other things, from pain and pleasure, in having a much more 

 recent origin. They may perhaps be predicated with some 

 show of propriety of such of the higher animals as live in 

 societies. When rooks mete out a collective vengeance on 

 malefactors, we witness the operation of an instinct, which 

 at least resembles in many respects the ethical impulses of 

 humanity. Our ignorance of the processes of the rooks 

 consciousness debars us from bringing it under any dis 

 tinctively human classification, and it is perhaps impossible 

 to draw the line which divides the rudimentary principle 

 from the organic product. In any exact sense, the moral 

 qualities, as we know them, begin with man, and the earliest 

 stage we can make use of for comparison is that of savages. 

 Even within that narrow period we find the same concurrent 

 progression of both sides of the antithesis. As in the case 

 of pains and pleasures, so, here too, we find a growth in 

 intensity, accompanied by an increase in number and variety, 

 not in one direction only, but in both. If the virtues of 

 the savage are fewer and simpler than those of the member 

 of a civilized community, so also are his vices. The supreme 

 heights of moral grandeur and the lowest abysses of 

 depravity are alike closed to him. It is a matter of observa 

 tion that the extreme manifestations of both are syn 

 chronous the corruptions of the Roman Empire with the 

 birth of the Christian virtues ; the sublime heroism of the 

 Middle Ages with their atrocious crimes. A commonplace 

 age is undistinguished in either way. The numerical 

 multiplication of duties ensues, in the first place, on an 

 extension of the range of the ethical interests, and in the 

 second, on the growth of new interests within the old ; and 

 every new duty is the occasion of a new virtue, or a new 

 vice, according as it is observed or neglected. The family 



