1 82 Conscience Indefinable. 



while moralists, repudiating the latter, thought 

 they were called upon to demolish Darwinian 

 science. What a chaos of absurd disputation has 

 been thus engendered, the Darwinian literature 

 of the last generation too abundantly evinces. 

 These fruitless contentions arise from a miscon 

 ception which is clearly evident in the light of 

 the preceding chapters. That mass of fact and 

 theory which naturalists and moralists have im 

 agined unitary is really twofold, with two distinct 

 centres of gravity. Without maintaining, in gen 

 eral, in opposition to Mr. Herbert Spencer, that 

 biology has nothing to do with ethics or ethics 

 with biology (though this is not incapable of de 

 monstration), we do assert with the greatest con 

 fidence that, even if Darwin s theory of the origin 

 of species and descent of man is sound, his specu 

 lations on morals will not, therefore, be sustained 

 or confirmed, since the two rest on wholly dif 

 ferent bases, which are at no point coincident, and 

 which no reasoning can bring together. 



The absolutely unique treatment which ethical 

 phenomena received at the hands of Darwin may 

 be still further illustrated in yet another way. It 

 has been shown already that, in his own province 

 of natural history, Darwin makes no attempt to 

 derive that life whose mysteriously expanding 



