136 HEREDITY. 



you will let them drift into my bottle in which I am 

 required to produce, by spontaneous generation, con- 

 science, I shall have no trouble with that experiment. 

 [Applause.] 



These are phrases out of Darwin's famous chapter. 

 If, by such an amount of carelessness in his experi- 

 ment, you are not thrown into scientific unrest as to 

 Darwin's theory concerning the origin of conscience, 

 I shall say that you are accustomed to a loose appli- 

 cation of the scientific method, worse than I have 

 been taught, even under the mediaeval and mossy 

 instruction of Andover. 



4. What ancestors do not possess, offspring cannot 

 inherit. 



5. The moral sense, therefore, cannot be inherited 

 from a non-moral source. 



From my point of view these two propositions are 

 the most important in the whole range of investiga- 

 tion as to the origin of conscience. Our only safety 

 in reasoning is to begin always with absolutely unde- 

 niable propositions, and then to make only such 

 inferences from them as are axiomatically clear. I 

 think these two propositions are clear; and from 

 them may be made inferences that undermine the 

 foundations of every merely derivative theory of the 

 origin of the moral sense. Darwin's hypothesis 

 assumes that the moral sense is inherited from a non- 

 moral source. His scheme of thought, therefore, 

 makes the stream rise higher than its fountain, or 

 involves the assertion that there can be an event 

 without a sufficient cause. 



