356 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ PT . a 



areas, no longer needing the stimulus of present pains and 

 pleasures to call them, forth, they generate at last an ab 

 stract moral sense, so free from the element of personality 

 that to grosser minds it is unintelligible. The savage cannot 

 understand the justice which he sees among Europeans, and 

 the mercy of the white man is ascribed by him to imbecility 

 or fear. To him some personal end seems necessary as an 

 incentive to action. But the philanthropist finds an adequate 

 incentive in the contemplation of injustice in the abstract. 



Thus the ethical theories, as well as the psychology, of the 

 schools of Hume and Kant, appear to be reconciled in the 

 deeper synthesis rendered possible by the theory of evolu 

 tion. On the one hand, it is a corollary from the laws of 

 life that actions desired by the individual and approved by 

 the community must in the long run be those which tend 

 to heighten the life respectively of the individual and of 

 the community. And on the other hand, it is equally true 

 that there is a highly complex feeling, the product of a slow 

 emotional evolution, which prompts us to certain lines of 

 conduct irrespective of any conscious estimate of pleasures 

 or utilities. In no department of inquiry is the truth and 

 grandeur of the Doctrine of Evolution more magnificently 

 illustrated than in the province of ethics. 



Before we conclude, there are one or two further points 

 to which it seems necessary to allude. In asserting that we 

 possess an instinctive and inherited moral sense, it is not 

 meant that we possess, anterior to education and experience, 

 an organic preference for certain particular good actions, 

 and an organic repugnance to certain particular bad actions, 

 We do not inherit a horror of stealing, any more than the 

 Hindu inherits the horror of killing cattle. We simply 

 inherit a feeling which leads us, when we are told that 

 stealing is wrong, to shun it, without needing to be taught 

 that it is detrimental to society. Hence there is a chance 

 for pathological disturbances in the relations between the 



