Evolution of Morals. 265 



us that the great nations of antiquity, and the civilizations 

 of our own time were developed from the primitive family 

 as the social unit. The family altar has ever been the 

 school for the moral culture of the race. The full signifi- 

 cance of these facts of social evolution, in their relation to 

 our to])ic, is only made manifest when we perceive that 

 throughout the entire process, from its beginning in the 

 rude cave-dwellings of primitive man, the obligation to serve 

 others has been substituted ever more and more widely for 

 the obligation to serve one's self, as the conscious motive 

 in the government of conduct. Man has progressively iden- 

 tified his individual welfare with that of ever-increasing 

 numbers of his fellow-men. The instinct of obligation is, 

 indeed, intuitive from the beginning; an inheritance not 

 only from man's brute-progenitors, but from far away origins 

 in the operations of inorganic forces. It is akin to those 

 instinctive gropings of vegetable forms, deep-buried in the 

 earth, for light and nourishment. It impelled volition in 

 the lowest conscious adaptations of acts to ends. In its 

 primitive form, however, it was an egoistic, not a moral im- 

 pulse. The " ought " of primitive man was not a moral obli- 

 gation ; it was a recognition of something oired to himself. 

 The sense of duty, as we understand it, was not born until 

 the secondary and indirect motive of race-maintenance and 

 altruistic service was consciously and voluntarily substi- 

 tuted for the primary, egoistic motive of self-preservation 

 and self-gratification. By this substitution, — the gradual 

 and entirely natural result of growing intelligence and 

 pleasurable experience in altruistic service, — conscious al- 

 truistic feeling and desire have grown out of egoism. Duty 

 has supplanted an animal instinct. Yet here has been no 

 creation, but merely a process of transformation, of evolu- 

 tion. The "raw-material" of morality is found in the 

 simplest orderly manifestations of volitional activities in 

 organic nature ; — yes, back even in those steadfast laws 

 and tendencies which are manifest in the action of the inor- 

 ganic universe. Stability, order, law, evolutionary tendency 

 — these are the essential elements in morality, as in the 

 difi'erentiation and integration of nebulous matter, and the 

 movements of the planets around their central suns. In the 

 last analysis it is not two things that fill the mind with awe, 

 as in the familiar ])hrase of Kant, but one thiny, whether it 



