IX.] EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 229 



have their rough conclusions interpreted and verified by 

 them." l 



Against this view of Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Hutton 

 objects " 1. That even as regards Mr. Spencer's illustra- 

 tion from geometrical intuitions, his process would be 

 totally inadequate, since you could not deduce the neces- 

 sary space intuition of which he speaks from any possible 

 accumulations of familiarity with space relations. . . . We 

 cannot inherit more than our fathers had: no amount of 



1 Mr. H. Spencer has published in the Fortnightly Review for April 1871, 

 a paper on "Morals and Moral Sentiments," in reply to Mr. Button, 

 wherein he complains that the last-named writer has misrepresented him, 

 and says : " Mr. Hutton has so used the word 'utility,' and so interpreted 

 it on my behalf, as to make me appear to mean that moral sentiment is 

 formed out of conscious generalizations respecting what is beneficial and 

 what detrimental." Mr. Spencer then goes on to say : "The experiences 

 of utility I refer to are those which become registered, not as distinctly 

 recognized connexions between certain kinds of acts and certain kinds of 

 remote results, but those which become registered in the shape of associa- 

 tions between groups of feelings that have often recurred together, though 

 the relation between them has not been consciously generalized." Mr. 

 Spencer then gives some examples of emotions unconsciously resulting 

 from previous associated sensations. The author of this book can say 

 that he did not understand Mr. Hutton to have laid the stress, which Mr. 

 Spencer imagines he has, upon the fact that the experiences in question 

 were reasoned-out, consciously accumulated, and generalized. If Mr. Spencer 

 will say his meaning is that the universe being governed by Infinite Good- 

 ness, utility and virtue ultimately coincide, and that experiences of utility 

 and sympathetic feelings are consequently the occasions of the full develop- 

 ment in us of moral perceptions then it must be owned he hasbeen strangely 

 misunderstood and misrepresented. But if the moral perceptions are, in 

 their ultimate analysis, mere inherited utilitarian experiences the con- 

 sciousness or unconsciousness of the generalizations is a matter of com- 

 paratively no importance whatever. It may be here added that Mr. 

 Spencer's illustrations seem to tell against his cause. As in the cases 

 mentioned, the intensity of emotion felt will be increased by recalling to 

 consciousness the sense associations on which it is based, while with 

 moral perceptions it is directly the reverse, if these are based, as Mr. 

 Spencer asserts them to be, on unconscious utilitarian generalizations. 



