146 Both Indefensible. 



it could not have turned up as the crowning glory 

 of the development of life. 



The same position may be taken up in oppo 

 sition to the current evolutionary ethics. Biology 

 warrants the belief that non-moral beings existed 

 on our globe long before the appearance of the 

 only moral being we know man ; and natural 

 selection explains the process by which the latter 

 may have been descended from the former. But 

 natural selection, as we have already shown, cre 

 ates no new material ; it merely sits in judgment 

 upon what has already appeared. Given acts, or 

 habits, or moral practices, natural selection is the 

 name for the survival of the fittest of them, not 

 the talismanic cause which originates any of them. 

 However they originate, they must have a defi 

 nite relation to the constitution of the being that 

 manifests them ; and to suppose that moral sen 

 timents, moral notions, moral practices, could be 

 grafted upon a primitively non-moral being is, in 

 the first place, to take a grossly mechanical view 

 of human nature and, in the second place, to 

 transgress the limits alike of natural selection and 

 of evolutionary science. Yet this is what is done 

 by our evolutionary moralists. A moral law, they 

 tell you, is the formulation by intelligence of the 

 social practices instinctively followed by the more 



