284 EtuAiition of Morals. 



minds: we are bound to preserve and sustain life in all creatures 

 wliich do not interfere with or detract from fulness of life in the 

 totality of things — taking into account, of course, the quality of 

 life as jxulged by an evolutionary standard. This law makes it 

 our duty to desti'oy those creatures which impede human advance- 

 ment, as it is our duty to exercise protection and kindness toward 

 our poor relations of the animal world, who are helpers of man- 

 kind. Animals, indeed, are not moral, as I have declared. ?f either 

 was primitive man. But animals are on the road toward the 

 moral. The- moral is but man's self-conscious recognition of laws 

 that reach all the way down, through the brute to inanimate 

 nature. I fail to see that the moral sense is in any way discredited 

 by being explained, as the intuitionalists assume. The evolutionary 

 sanctions of morality seem to me quite as imperative as those of 

 the metaphysicians. 



