174 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



contemporaries the Athenians either in intellect or in alge- 

 donic sensibility. It is true that the races instanced are 

 credited with a high degree of prudence, but here again 

 we encounter the confusion, under the single term of pru 

 dence, of qualities which are really distinct. What was 

 admired as prudence was not so much intellectual foresight 

 as temperance and self-restraint, and the qualities, though 

 conducing to the same result, are in fact widely different 

 (eyKpareta is not the same thing as croj^potrwTj, though 

 they are often identified). Similarly with individuals : it 

 is not the man with the richest intellectual endowments 

 who is likely to be the most obedient ; indeed, that kind of 

 eminence, though not incompatible with obedience, or with 

 any other ethical virtue, is more frequently found in oppo 

 sition than in alliance with it. It is clearly not the same 

 thing. Prudence is the last quality to be looked for in the 

 hero who leads a forlorn hope. The crew that submitted 

 its captain s orders to an intelligent scrutiny before acting 

 on them would not furnish a model of discipline. 



It is, of course, conceivable that the practice of obedience 

 might have been deliberately selected by any community, 

 such, for instance, as a state, or the crew of a vessel, as better 

 designed to secure its ends than the choice of action by each 

 individual on each emergency as it presents itself ; and that 

 the habit, though hardened, in the case of long-established 

 communities, into an instinctive principle of action, by the 

 practice of centuries, had its origin in prudence. But no 

 instance of the kind is known to history, the hypothesis 

 is unlikely to the verge of impossibility, and, as will be seen, 

 a simpler explanation, and one which is not open to serious 

 objections, is attainable. However this may be, having 

 once given the preference to obedience, prudential motives 

 will have decreed their own abdication. When, and so far 

 as, a man follows a line of conduct because he believes it 

 to be advantageous, he no longer follows it because it is 

 commanded. We may still require prudence in the man 

 who commands, but it can be nothing but a disqualifica 

 tion in the man who obeys. When we speak of intelligent 





