104 LESSONS FEOM NATUKE. [CHAP. V. 



or race, and that the same action has destroyed a pre 

 dominating number of those individuals who possessed a 

 marked tendency to contrary practices. The descendants of 

 individuals so preserved have, they say, come to inherit such 

 a liking and such useful habits of mind, and at last (finding 

 this inherited tendency thus existing in themselves, distinct 

 from their tendency to conscious self-gratification) have 

 become apt to regard it as fundamentally distinct, innate, 

 and independent of all experience. In fact, according to 

 this school, the idea of &quot;right&quot; is only the result of the 

 gradual accretion of useful predilections which, from time to 

 time, arose in a series of ancestors naturally selected. In 

 this way &quot; morality &quot; is, as it were, the congealed past 

 experience of the race, and &quot; virtue &quot; becomes,* as it were, a 

 sort of &quot; retrieving&quot; which the thus improved human animal 

 practises by a perfected and inherited habit, regardless of 

 self-gratification, just as the brute animal has acquired the 

 habit of seeking prey and bringing it to his master, instead 

 of devouring it himself. 



Mr. John Stuart Mill has very amusingly and instructively 

 Mr. John (though, of course, quite unintentionally) shown us 



Stuart Mills N TUT 



seif-contra- how radically distinct even in his own mind are 



diction in J 



this matter, the two ideas, which he nevertheless endeavours to 

 identify. In his examination of Sir William Hamilton s 

 Philosophy, he says : &quot; If I am informed that the world is 

 ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they 

 are we cannot learn, nor what the principles of his govern 

 ment, except that the highest human morality which we 

 are capable of conceiving does not sanction them ; convince 

 me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am 

 told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this 

 being by the names which express and affirm the highest 

 human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. What 

 ever power such a being may have over me, there is one 



* This was pointed out in the Genesis of Species (Macmillan), 2nd 

 edition, p. 213. 



