134 First Assumption. 



follower of Plato or Kant, for example, could not 

 be a Darwinist in science ! Is it forgotten that, 

 even if goodness be an end in itself the sole end 

 worth living for it still remains true that hon 

 esty is the best policy, that honest acts are the 

 most advantageous acts, and that they will ac 

 cordingly be preserved through natural selection 

 in the struggle for existence ? All that natural 

 selection requires is that something shall be use 

 ful ; what else it may ~be, what other predicates it 

 may have, wherein its essence consists, natural 

 selection knows not and recks not. Be virtue a 

 proximate end or an ultimate end, natural selec 

 tion tells us it will be preserved and perpetuated 

 if it is useful ; and it tells us no more. It is, 

 accordingly, a gratuitous assumption which our 

 exponents of evolutionary ethics make, when 

 they decline to allow more than a merely relative 

 value to morality. And as their position derives 

 no support from evolutionary science, so is it 

 exposed to all the objections which moralists, 

 voicing the universal consciousness of mankind, 

 have brought against it, from the time when 

 Aristotle asserted that virtue has no extrinsic 

 end (roO KaXov eveica) to the time when Kant pro 

 claimed the absolute worth of a good-will. 



In the second place, the current expositors of 



