144 Connection with Metaphysics. 



relations, then approval of their life-conserving 

 tendencies, or conscience. The moral faculty is 

 the recognition of social relations ; it is the social 

 instinct of the animals come to a consciousness of 

 itself in man ; and this social instinct is but the 

 consolidation of habit, and habit is the pro 

 duct, through natural selection, of random actions 

 struck out in the struggle for life. Thus the 

 moral nature of man is merged in the mechanism 

 of nature. The logical, as the chronological, 

 prius is, therefore, not intelligence, but mechan 

 ical action. The exegesis of Faust receives a 

 startling illustration: Im Anfang war die 

 That. 



This moral theory, therefore, implies and rests 

 upon a system of metaphysics. I do not think we 

 can too often reiterate that current evolutionary 

 ethics is the outcome of a very dubious physico- 

 psychical speculation. From overlooking this 

 connection the issue between moralists of this 

 school and of other schools has not been clearly 

 discerned, and the very heart of the question 

 has been generally left untouched. I do not, of 

 course, mean to call in question the results of the 

 astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological 

 sciences. What one teaches about the gradual 

 formation of the universe, and another about the 



