216 THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. [CHAP. 



health, our moral views may also be expected to be so 

 influenced, and this in a higher degree because they so 

 often run counter to our desires. A bottle or two of wine 

 may make a sensible object appear double ; what wonder, 

 then, if our moral perceptions are sometimes warped and 

 distorted by such powerful agencies as an evil education or 

 an habitual absence of self-restraint. In neither case does 

 occasional distortion invalidate the accuracy of normal and 

 habitual perception. 



The distinctness here and now of the ideas of " right " 

 and " useful " is, however, as before said, fully conceded by 

 Mr. Herbert Spencer, although he contends that these con- 

 ceptions are one in root and origin. 



His utilitarian Genesis of Morals, however, has been 

 recently combated by Mr. Richard Holt Hutton, in a paper 

 which appeared in Macmillan? s Magazine. 



This writer aptly objects an argumentum ad hominem, 

 applying to morals the same argument that has been ap- 

 plied in this work to our sense of musical harmony, and 

 by Mr. Wallace to the vocal organs of man. 



Mr. Herbert Spencer's notions on the subject are thus 

 expressed by himself: " To make my position fully under- 

 stood, it seems needful to add that, corresponding to the 

 fundamental propositions of a developed moral science, 

 there have been, and still are, developing in the race certain 

 fundamental intuitions ; and that, though these moral intui- 

 tions are the result of accumulated experiences of utility 

 gradually organized and inherited, they have come to be 

 quite independent of conscious experience. Just in the 

 same way that I believe the intuition of space possessed by 

 any living individual to have arisen from organized and 

 consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals, who 

 bequeathed to him their slowly-developed nervous organi- 

 zations ; just as I believe that this intuition, requiring only 

 15 See No. 117, July, 1869, p. 272. 



