322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



acquaintance of a dear and valued friend, whose acute intellect 

 first taught me to fully understand in what the essence of " good- 

 ness " consists, as his virtue led me to appreciate its active exercise. 

 But my enlightenment ultimately resulted in controversy ; and, 

 in order that my readers may be able to judge what signs of 

 ascensive evolution Prof. Huxley has lately shown, I must briefly 

 refer to a passage of arms which took place between us one-and- 

 twenty years ago. 



I had, in a little book, then recently published,* contended that 

 the process of " natural selection " could never have evolved our 

 ethical perceptions and our clear intellectual idea of "duty" as 

 distinct from mere feelings of " sympathy," " fear," etc. I said : 



These two ideas, the " right " and the " useful," being so distinct here and now, 

 a great difficulty meets us with regard to their origin from some common source. 

 For the distinction between the " right " and the " useful" is so fundamental and 

 essential that not only does the idea of benefit not enter into the idea of duty, but 

 we see that the very fact of an act not being beneficial to us makes it the more 

 praiseworthy, while gain tends to diminish the merit of an action. Yet this idea, 

 " right," thus excluding, as it does, all reference to utility or pleasure, has never- 

 theless to be constructed and evolved from utility and pleasure, and ultimately 

 from pleasurable sensations, if we are to accept pure Darwinism : if we are to 

 accept, that is, the evolution of man's psychical nature and highest powers by the 

 exclusive action of "natural selection " from such faculties as are possessed by 

 brutes; in other words, if we are to believe that the conceptions of the highest 

 human morality arose through minute and fortuitous variations of brutal desires 

 and appetites in all conceivable directions. 



It is here contended, on the other hand, that no conservation of any such 

 variations could ever have given rise to the faintest beginning of any such moral 

 perceptions; that by ''natural selection" alone the maxim fiat justitia, mat 

 ccelum, could not have been excogitated, still less have found a widespread accept- 

 ance; that it is impotent to suggest even an approach toward an explanation ot 

 the first beginning of the idea of " right." It need hardly be remarked that acts 

 may be distinguished, not only as pleasurable, useful, or beautiful, but also as good 

 in two different senses : (1) Materially moral acts ; and (2) acts which are formally 

 moral. The first are acts good in themselves, as acts, apart from any intention 

 of the agent, which may or may not have been directed toward "right." The 

 second are acts which are good, not only in themselves, as acts, but also in the 

 deliberate intention of the agent who recognizes his actions as being " right." 

 Thus acts may be materially moral or immoral in a very high degree without 

 being in the least formally so. For example, a person may tend and minister to 

 a sick man with scrupulous care and exactness, having in view all the time noth- 

 ing but the future reception of a good legacy. Another may, in the dark, shoot 

 his father, taking him to be an assassin, and so commit what is materially an act 

 of parricide, though formally it is only an act of self-defense or more or less 

 culpable rashness. A woman may innocently, because ignorantly, marry a mar- 

 ried man, and so commit a material act of adultery. She may discover the facts 

 and persist, and so make her act formal also. 



* The Genesis of Species (Macmillan & Co.), 1871, second edition, p. 219. 



