1 5 Spencer and Guyau on Duty. 



that they rest upon a misreading of the actual 

 record. If moral obligation be the effect of cer 

 tain historical causes, it may decline with the de 

 cadence of those causes, and if conscience be a 

 blind instinct, it may follow the supposed law of 

 dissolution of instincts ; but the conditional ground 

 of the consequence is in neither case established, 

 in neither case does it rest upon evolutionary 

 science, in neither case has it any antecedent 

 probability apart from the a priori prejudice of 

 the utilitarian in favor of the derivative charac 

 ter of morality and the moral faculties. Instead 

 of so accounting for the rise of a moral sense and 

 moral obligation, as a kind of accident in our con 

 stitution, mankind (a few metaphysicians apart) 

 persists in regarding them as of the very essence 

 of human nature. The absolute &quot; ought &quot; cannot 

 be the product of any experience with the primi 

 tive policeman or priest, since (apart from the fact 

 that there would be neither without it) experience 

 only records what is advantageous for certain ends 

 and cannot, therefore, enjoin anything categori 

 cally. Hence the pretence of the evolutionists 

 to have reconciled the experiential and intuitive 

 schools of ethics cannot be sustained. Those pre 

 dicates of the moral law which, in the earlier part 

 of this chapter, we found the evolutionary theory 



