Darwinism in Ethics. 145 



gradual development of organisms on our globe, 

 I accept implicitly. But because minerals and 

 plants and the lower animals appeared before 

 man, I will not, therefore, hold that they were 

 adequate conditions to his production, or that 

 there is nothing in him that was not generated 

 through actions and reactions between an animal 

 system and its physical or social environment. 

 Such a doctrine used to be called material- X. 

 ism, but in deference to the feelings of specu 

 lative evolutionists the word has nowadays been 

 dropped. All the objections, however, which 

 were formerly urged against the derivation of 

 mental and moral functions from material com 

 binations, however finely organized, are still valid 

 against the evolutionary identification of intel 

 ligence with the modifications produced in the 

 nervous and muscular systems from action and re 

 action between the organism and its environment. 

 Man is later on the scene than the unintelligent 

 organisms ; but whence his intelligence we know 

 not, unless it be the emergence of something 

 new from the fountain of being, from the under 

 lying ground and sustaining cause of the whole 

 evolutionary movement. Certainly it was not 

 evolved by mere repetition of mechanical actions. 

 Were intelligence not at the heart of the cosmos, 

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