1 92 Fallacious Assumption. 



lust, etc., are not. &quot;What Darwin maintains about 

 these last impulses is psychologically true : they 

 may be readily and completely gratified, and nei 

 ther the attendant pains nor pleasures are sus 

 ceptible of vivid representation in consciousness. 

 And, on the other hand, the influence upon the 

 individual of the social organism or social factor 

 seems scarcely capable of exaggeration to those 

 who have taken to heart the teachings of Herder 

 and the great German thinkers of the eighteenth 

 century, or of Comte, Mill, and Lewes in the 

 nineteenth. Nevertheless, when the social prin 

 ciples of conduct are enumerated one by one, no 

 one would venture to assert that compassion, be 

 nevolence, gratitude, justice, veracity, or humanity, 

 is an &quot; ever present and persistent instinct. &quot; Man 

 is moved both by egoistic and altruistic springs of 

 action, and no psychology would imitate the Dar 

 winian irony of making the latter the more en 

 during. On the contrary, as in the Darwinian 

 theory, the instinct of self-preservation comes 

 earliest ; and as the filial, parental, and social in 

 stincts are derived from it by means of natural 

 selection ; there would be grounds for maintain 

 ing that the one omnipresent and persistent im 

 pulse is the egoistic one of self-preservation. At 

 any rate, it is only through the illicit comparison 



