152 Their Fundamental Fallacy. 



a utility. That is the explanation of the plausi 

 bility of their ethical theory as expounded in the 

 earlier part of the present chapter. And no other 

 refutation, after all that has been said, need now 

 be added except the reminder that natural selec 

 tion, though wide-awake to the uses of things, is 

 blind to their nature and essence. It takes ad 

 vantage of the utility of morality, but no more 

 determines its content and meaning than a posi- 

 tivist who passes over the question of the essence 

 of things. It acts upon germs of all kinds, once 

 they have been produced and are moving through 

 phases of development ; but it knows not what the 

 germs are, whence they come, or what develops 

 them. The whole question, so far as ethics is 

 concerned, turns on the nature of those primitive 

 modifications out of which morality has been 

 evolved. But on that point evolutionary science 

 has no answer of its own to give, and the blank 

 has been filled by the preconceptions of evolu 

 tionary speculators. Subordinating, as the school 

 lias hitherto done, intelligence to mechanism, it 

 has invariably sought the first germ of con 

 science in a random action that proved useful to 

 the species in which it was struck out. We 

 have, on the contrary, maintained that this hypo 

 thetical derivation passes over the very essence 



