262 The Evolution Hypothesis. 



gentleness, courage, purity, charity. Soldiers unsur- 

 passed in valour, scholars pre-eminent in learning, 

 statesmen illustrious for wisdom, have reverenced a 

 divine ideal and submitted themselves to the revealed 

 law of God. Out of a supra-natural source the water 

 of life has flowed, refreshing and reinvigorating the 

 moral strength of the greatest and best of men. We 

 have to inquire what the new philosophy has to offer 

 in the stead of this venerated authority. 



1. Moral law is obeyed, and can be obeyed, only in 

 conscious freedom. Moral obedience is willing obedi- 

 ence. The evolution hypothesis cannot account for 

 the consciousness of liberty; and if accepted as the 

 true philosophy would inevitably destroy it. Evolu- 

 tion cannot create the conditions requisite to conduct 

 that lies under a sense of responsibility; it cannot 

 furnish the requirements indispensable to the coming 

 to be of moral life. For evolution proceeds on the as- 

 sumption that inflexible physical law dominates every- 

 where, directing all the activities of the organism, 

 " Mental acts are nervous functions." It is dynamic 

 law that moulds the innate truths of reason, and 

 shapes the fundamental principles of morals : the law 

 of the organism is the law of mind. Nerve-action is 

 correlated in the bonds of physical necessity with the 

 forces of the environment ; so that the physical law of 

 the universe governs absolutely the conscious life. 

 These are not conditions in which action that deserves 

 the name of moral is possible ; let them be realized in 



