234 THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. [CHAP. 



This theme, however, is too foreign to the immediate 

 matter in hand to be further pursued, tempting as it is. 

 But a passing protest against a superstitious and deluding 

 dogma may stand, a dogma which, like any other dogma, 

 may be vehemently asserted and maintained, but which 

 is remarkable for being destitute, at one and the same 

 time, of both authoritative sanction ancl the support of 

 reason and observation. 



To return to the bearing of moral conceptions on 

 " Natural Selection," it seems that, from the reasons given 

 in this chapter, we may safely affirm 1. That "Natural 

 Selection " could not have produced, from the sensations of 

 pleasure and pain experienced by brutes, a higher degree 

 of morality than was useful ; therefore it could have pro- 

 duced any amount of " beneficial habits," but not abhor* 

 rence of certain acts as impure and sinful. 



symptom of resistance to the humiliations inflicted on him, whenever 

 news arrived of a victory of the Vendeans or the Austrians." . . . . " The 

 brutal monster one day beat and kicked the boy because he would not 

 repeat the words, 'My mother is a harlot.' Another time Simon was 

 awakened in the night, and heard the child praying as he knelt by his 

 bedside. Til teach you,' he cried, 'to whine your paternosters,' and, 

 pouring a pail of cold water over his body and his bed, he compelled him 

 by blows from an iron-heeled shoe to pass the rest of the winter night in 

 the wet, cold bed." After the death of Simon b.9 was imprisoned in a 

 little cell for six months, at the end of which time when his new jailer, 

 Laurent, entered, "He was astonished when they led him by the dim 

 light of a lantern to the entrance of a pestiferous den, from which a feeble 

 voice answered him after repeated calls ; but what was his horror, when, 

 on the following day, he caused the door to be broken open, and pene- 

 trated the scene of misery itself ! In this poisonous atmosphere a pale 

 and emaciated child, with matted hair, lay upon a filthy lair, clothed with 

 half-rotten rags, his head covered with an eruption, his neck with fester- 

 ing sores, and his whole bod} r with swarms of vermin." Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer may be safely challenged to explain by what crimes this child had 

 merited so frightful and long-continued a chastisement. 



