MORAL EVOLUTION 291 



appeared in the world only in evolution's latest stage, we may 

 nevertheless infer its existence before life began upon the earth. 

 This inference is as sound and reasonable as it would be if man 

 had been created with all his moral qualities at their highest. 

 The Darwinian believes that no new power or faculty has been 

 introduced from without, since the simplest forms of life began 

 the course of evolution that was to end in the most complex and 

 highest. It is evident, then, that on this hypothesis goodness 

 existed potentially from the beginning, only waiting for the 

 required circumstances to develop it. 



But if from the existence of goodness we derive our faith in a Evil 

 good that was before evolution began its course, may we not 

 equally from the existence of evil infer a pre-existent evil 

 activity ? Let us look at the facts. First, we must not forget 

 that rudimentary, unconscious goodness (the affection of parents 

 for their offspring as we find it in birds and mammals, their 

 associations, too, for mutual defence) made possible the evolution 

 of all the higher forms of life from the lower cold-blooded forms. 

 Lower in the scale than man we see nothing that we can call 

 wickedness, and for the obvious reason that all aberrations are 

 stamped out with a speed that steals them from our sight. 

 Deviation from the right course is not tolerated by Natural 

 Selection. We have, however, some instances in which the 

 members of a community help on the working of Natural 

 Selection in a way that has always appeared to civilised man as 

 utterly cruel. Cattle push and illtreat a sickly member of the 

 herd, as if to hasten it out of existence. The worker bees, if 

 their hive has a fertile queen, set upon the unfortunate drones in 

 July or August and massacre the whole number. But neither of 

 the cattle nor of the bees can we say that they are, in any possible 

 sense of the word, wicked. They are cruel, but they are not 

 cruel for their own personal ends. They are driven on by a 

 blind instinct to do what is in the long run good for the herd or 

 the hive. A community in which all are vigorous and do some- 

 thing for the common good is better off than one with weak or 

 idle members. If we see no great nobility of virtue in the 

 devotion of a bird to her young since she is driven by an 



