154 Further Objections. 



should ever have been mistaken for the powers 

 themselves ! 



The ethical conclusions here reached and co 

 ordinated with the doctrine of evolution and Dar 

 winism (which I everywhere take for granted) 

 are so opposed to those of most evolutionists 

 that some fallacy may be supposed to infect all 

 our reasonings. After the evolutionary teachings 

 of the last twenty years, it seems either blindness 

 or disingenuousness to maintain that evolution 

 leaves our ethical problems precisely where it 

 found them. And so, in spite of all the preced 

 ing analyses and criticisms, the old objections 

 are sure to recur. Does not the evolutionary 

 doctrine of heredity imply that man is what his 

 ancestry has made him, and so abrogate our be 

 lief in the freedom of the human will? And 

 does not goodness cease to be divine when you 

 Lave explained moral laws as a statement of the 

 habits blindly struck out and blindly followed by 

 simian or semi-human groups in the struggle for 

 existence ? If morality is merely a formulation 

 of the practices which, accidentally hit upon by 

 some group of animals, made the group coherent, 

 and thus enabled it to vanquish rival groups with 

 different practices, would it not seem merely ac 

 cidental that justice and truthfulness are vir- 



