118 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



will cancel one another, there is no reason to suppose that 

 his life as a whole will be preferable, on this account, to 

 a life in which the superior quality is absent on both sides 

 of the equation. For the same reason, the superior quality 

 will be common to the pleasures derived from all his impulses, 

 the higher and the lower alike, and it is therefore impossible 

 that it should give one an advantage over another. Finally, 

 though the superior quality of the higher pleasures is cer 

 tainly unknown to, and unsuspected by, the multitude, it is 

 equally certain that the superior value of the higher lines 

 of conduct has their warmest appreciation, and that appre 

 ciation must be due to some other cause than a distinction 

 of quality of which they are, and always must remain, 

 in total ignorance. 



If, then, the hypothesis of qualities, even if it is true, 

 fails to reconcile the seemingly contradictory propositions 

 that the prospect of pleasure is the sole determinant of 

 conduct, and that in large classes of conduct the determinant 

 is not the greater amount of pleasure ; and if there is no 

 other imaginable reconciliation (as indeed there is not), 

 it follows that the propositions are, in fact, contradictory, 

 and that one or the other must be given up. Before making 

 our choice for rejection, it will be as well to consider what 

 those classes of conduct are in which the determination 

 is not by the greater amount of pleasure, and in respect 

 to which the difficulty arises. On this point there is no real 

 difference of opinion. Pride, love of liberty, love of power, 

 love of excitement, and, more generally, a sense of dignity, 

 are the motives enumerated by Mr. Mill, and to these may 

 be added emulation, or the desire to excel our fellows 

 and to break the record , and, still more distinctly, 

 obedience to the commands of the conscience or of religion. 

 Now all these (for I think love of excitement may be 

 included) are the distinctive properties of a progressive 

 evolution, and at once the causes and the symptoms of that 

 advance of power which has been noticed in a previous part 

 of this essay as what is meant by improvement when a higher 

 organism is compared with a lower. A complete statement, 



