142 Mechanical Origin of Morals. 



animals were fused together into society and en 

 abled to perpetuate a victorious existence. The 

 evolutionist conceives life as the continuous ad 

 justment of inner relations to outer relations ; so 

 that, even before the rise of sentiencj, the acts of 

 living beings must have been adapted to their en 

 vironment, and intelligence, when it did emerge, 

 could be nothing but the consciousness of rela 

 tions already blindly established, and the function 

 of conscience could only be to recognize the utility 

 of what promoted life. The evolution of man 

 the self-conscious and moral person from lower 

 forms of life is referred to physical causation 

 alone. As the human pedigree has been traced 

 up to the simian branch of the animal tree, and 

 no ground discovered for absolutely separating 

 the latest from the earliest offshoots, our most 

 eminent living biologist maintains that when 

 Descartes declared all animals to be automata, his 

 only error lay in excluding man from the same 

 class. This conscious automaton is but the high 

 est term of an animal series whose law of devel 

 opment is already known, and everything in his 

 constitution is explicable by that law. But the 

 evolution of life has realized itself through a 

 mechanical process; consequently those distinc 

 tive characteristics which mark off the human 



