Darwinism in Ethics. 



him the entire preceptive part of morality must 

 seem a baseless imposition. And in the courage 

 ous language of M. Guyau he could recognize 

 nothing but une morale sans obligation ni sanc 

 tion. No longer avrovopos man must perforce 

 be az/o/409. Had this point been brought out as 

 clearly by the English as by the French evolu 

 tionists, they would have seen that their own prin 

 ciples required them to dismiss the incongruous 

 problem of establishing the validity of moral 

 rules, even if they still persisted in speculating on 

 the origin of them. It is worse than idle for 

 mechanical evolutionists to talk of the reason or 

 end or ground of morality. 



That morality has had a mechanical origin is, 

 I have said, the fundamental assumption of cur 

 rent evolutionary ethics. The ancestors of man 

 had no moral fibre in their constitution, but 

 through long-inherited experiences of the conse 

 quences of conduct man has been rendered &quot; or 

 ganically moral.&quot; Just as intelligence, in general, 

 according to the same theory, has been generated 

 in unintelligent beings through the accumulation 

 of modifications arising from intercourse between 

 the organism and its environment, so the moral 

 faculty, in particular, is the result of all those ex 

 periences whereby mutually repellent individual 



