36 Evolution and Religion 



and this will still further complicate man's moral codes. 

 Thus a man may hesitate to offer his life a sacrifice to 

 his clan or country, not because of self-love, but on 

 account of his more unselfish love of family. Or a man 

 may refuse to go forth to battle for his country because 

 of his larger love for the race. 



The General Good 



But man's ideas of morality have also varied widely 

 as regards what constitutes the general good of the 

 community. Here is where man's imperfect, self- 

 deceiving intellect would appear to have often played 

 him false. His social, moral instincts impel him to 

 place the general welfare in advance of everything else; 

 but his selfish, tricky, self-sufficient intellect will 

 mislead him, if it possibly can, as to what that general 

 welfare really is. Those rude early tribes who prac- 

 tised infanticide would seem to have done so from 

 equally honest but mistakenly selfish motives with 

 those who practise race-suicide to-day. Those primi- 

 tive peoples who regarded suicide as anything but dis- 

 honorable would appear to differ only slightly from 

 many of our modern clubmen who engage, with a 

 spirit of senseless bravado, in the same foolish prac- 

 tise only in a more leisurely way, in a sort of slow 

 suicide. Intemperance and licentiousness both seem 

 to be self-destroying errors into which our race has 

 fallen largely through this same overweening conceit of 

 intellect. Certainly the brutes with their less developed 

 intellects, but almost equally developed social instincts 



