144 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



bad music which is preferred. This is not the case with 

 the ethical judgements. The higher types of conduct have 

 only to be presented in order to win approbation from any 

 audience, however little elevated its ordinary moral tone 

 may be. Minds to which their idea had before been wholly 

 foreign will yield respect to the higher virtues of all ages. 

 A man engrossed in the pursuit of money may entirely 

 overlook the higher duties of self-sacrifice ; it will never 

 occur to him that they exist, but, when they are suggested to 

 him from without, he will not be able to refuse his approval, 

 however little he may allow them to influence his conduct. 

 Contrast before any assembly of average men in any country 

 the pictures of a life guided by their own utilitarian ideas 

 with the life and death of a hero, and the vote in favour 

 of the hero will be unanimous, though it is not likely that 

 many would select for their portion the crown of thorns. 



Improbable though it may at first sight seem, the 

 exhibition of virtue has more power over the human mind, 

 and supplies a far stronger spring for effecting the legality 

 of actions, and produces more powerful resolutions to prefer 

 the law, from pure respect for it, to every other consideration, 

 than all the deceptive allurements of pleasure, or of all 

 that may be reckoned as happiness, or even than all threa ten- 

 ings of pain and misfortune. l 



Before proceeding to consider the transition from the 

 workings of the subjective conscience to the establishment 

 of those general rules of conduct which furnish the proper 

 material for ethical speculation, we may devote a few pages 

 to the examination of the principal distinctive terms of 

 ethics, that is to say, moral good and evil, moral obligation 

 and duty. Moral good, it is clear, is a kind of value, and 

 the subject of values generally has already been dealt with 

 at some length. But we may now return to it with special 

 reference to the values of morality. 



Mr. Spencer, in the second chapter of his Data of Ethics, 

 asserts that things are called good or bad according as they 

 are well or ill adapted to secure prescribed ends, and for no 



1 Kant, Methodology of the Practical Reason, 85, trans. Abbott, 299. 



