Methods of Eth us. 2 7 



selection), he appeals, not to imagination, but to 

 observation ; for the successive growths are act 

 ually open to view on the surface of the earth or 

 in its fossiliferous strata. He may be wrong in 

 his explanation of the process of development 

 and it is not improbable that natural selection is 

 not the only or even the chief agency ; but about 

 the existence of a series of related forms that 

 have followed one another through the lapse of 

 vast geological epochs there cannot be a particle 

 of doubt. With our scientific moralist, however, 

 the case is absolutely different. I do not mean 

 merely that he is ignorant of the connections be 

 tween moral phenomena ; for facts may become 

 the subject of science though the laws of their 

 sequence be undiscovered or even beyond the 

 reach of discovery by our existing resources. 

 But without the facts themselves there can be no 

 science. And it is the misfortune of the scien 

 tific type of ethics we are now investigating that 

 the phases of morality it binds together in its 

 theory of development are, when not a part of 

 human history, purely imaginary. We know 

 nothing about the morals of the first species that 

 ceased to be non-moral. From structural affinities 

 and rudiments the naturalist may trace the 

 genealogy of man and reconstruct his simian or 



