en. xxii.] GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY. 339 



beneficial to Humanity, while actions morally wrong are those 

 which are detrimental to Humanity. 



Are we to maintain, then, that when we approve of certain 

 actions, we do so because we consciously and deliberately 

 reason out, in each particular case, the conclusion that these 

 actions are beneficial to mankind ? By no means. Not only 

 is it that the highest science cannot always enable us to say 

 surely of a given action that it is useful to mankind, but it is 

 also that we do not stop to apply science to the matter at 

 all. We approve of certain actions and disapprove of certain 

 actions quite instinctively. We shrink from stealing or 

 lying as we shrink from burning our lingers ; and we no 

 more stop to frame the theorem that stealing and lying, 

 if universally practised, must entail social dissolution and 

 a reversion to primeval barbarism, than we stop to frame the 

 theorem that frequent burning of the fingers must entail 

 an incapacity for efficient manual operations. In short, 

 there is in our psychical structure a moral sense which 

 is as quickly and directly hurt by wrong-doing or the idea 

 of wrong-doing as our tactile sense is hurt by stinging. 



Shall we, then, maintain, as a corollary from the Doctrine 

 of Evolution, that our moral sense is due to the organic 

 registration, through countless ages, of deliberate inferences 

 that some actions benefit Humanity, while others injure 

 it ? Shall we say that the primeval savage began by reason 

 ing his way to the conclusion that if treachery were to 

 be generally allowed, within the limits of the tribe, then 

 the tribe must succumb in the struggle for existence to other 

 tribes in which treachery was forbidden; and that, by a 

 gradual organization of such inductions from experience, our 

 moral sense has slowly arisen? This position is no more 

 tenable than the other. Mr. Eichard Hutton and Mr. St. 

 George Mivart would seem to have attributed to Mr. Spencer 

 some such doctrine. But Mr. Spencer is too profound & 

 thinker to ignore so completely the conditions under which 



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