30 Its Theme Limited to Man. 



psychical attributes of the dog or the elephant, and 

 this is a field much in need of cultivation ; but 

 however rich your harvest of observations, you 

 will be no whit nearer the origin of human mo 

 rality so long, at least, as conscience continues the 

 unique prerogative of man, the only moral being 

 we know. Even if you imagine a moral sense in 

 the higher brutes, your descriptive ethics, though 

 acquiring thereby a comparative character, would 

 be as far as ever from that genesis of man s mo 

 rality which evolutionary moralists profess to ex 

 plain in their theories of physical ethics. Accord 

 ingly, the scientific moralist, instead of roaming 

 comprehensively over the fields of animal life, 

 must brood intensely at the altar-fires of the hu 

 man heart. However deep the mysteries of 

 man s moral nature, no irradiating light falls 

 upon them from the non-moral world without. 

 The moral being is more than the child of nature ; 

 he is the member of a kingdom where time and 

 space are not. Yet is virtue not withholden from 

 scientific survey, since its manifestations fall in 

 time and constitute a part of the history of hu 

 manity. And if ethics, instead of groping through 

 the void, impalpable inane of fictitious pre-human 

 morality, would in good earnest describe historic 

 morality in all its fixed and changing characters, 



