IX.] EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 213 



predominating number of those individuals who have had 

 a natural and spontaneous liking for practices and habits 

 of mind useful to the race, and that the same power has 

 destroyed a predominating number of those individuals 

 who possessed a marked tendency to contrary practices. 

 The descendants of individuals so preserved have, they 

 say, come to inherit such a liking and such useful habits 

 of mind, and at last (finding this inherited tendency thus 

 existing in themselves, distinct from their tendency to 

 conscious self-gratification) have become apt to regard it 

 as fundamentally distinct, innate, and independent of all 

 experience. In fact, according to this school, the idea of 

 " right " is only the result of the gradual accretion of useful 

 predilections which, from time to time, arose in a series of 

 ancestors naturally selected. In this way, " morality " is, 

 as it were, the congealed past experience of the race, and 

 " virtue " becomes no more than a sort of " retrieving," 

 which the thus improved human animal practises by a 

 perfected and inherited habit, regardless of self-gratifica- 

 tion, just as the brute animal has acquired the habit of 

 seeking prey and bringing it to his master, instead of 

 devouring it himself. 



Though Mr. Darwin has not as yet expressly advocated 

 this view, yet some remarks made by him appear to show 

 his disposition to sympathise with it. Thus, in his work 

 on " Animals and Plants under Domestication," 1 he asserts 

 that " the savages of Australia and South America hold 

 the crime of incest in abhorrence ; " but he considers that 

 this abhorrence has probably arisen through " Natural 

 Selection," the ill effects of close interbreeding having 

 caused the less numerous and less healthy offspring of 



1 Vol. ii. . 122. 



