EVOLUTION IN PROFESSOR HUXLEY. 325 



But, unhappily, men sometimes take pleasure in acts which 

 their conscience disapproves, and enjoy them the more on such 

 very account. " I'm a sad dog, I am, no mistake about that ! " has 

 "been said, now and again, with a pleasurable chuckle of immoral 

 self-consciousness, by men not by any means the worst of sinners. 



Real merit depends exclusively on motives, and thus one and 

 the same act may be moral or immoral, according to the direction 

 taken by the will in performing it as in the instances above 

 given of the sick nurse and the woman materially an adulteress. 



But this ethical distinction between acts formally and only 

 'materially good the distinction of motive and consequent merit 

 or guilt is the most important distinction which it is possible for 

 us to draw in the whole domain of human thought, from element- 

 ary arithmetic up to the highest regions of philosophy. 



The reader will readily understand then my satisfaction when, 

 on perusing the right honorable professor's recent lecture, I read 

 as follows : * 



Civilization could not advance far without the establishment of a capital dis- 

 tinction between the case of involuntary and that of willful misdeed ; between a 

 merely wrong action and a guilty one. And, with increasing refinement of moral 

 appreciation, the problem of desert, which arises out of this distinction, acquired 

 more and more theoretical and practical importance. . . . The idea of justice 

 thus underwent a gradual sublimation from punishment and reward according to 

 acts, to punishment and reward according to desert ; or, in other words, accord- 

 ing to motive. Righteousness that is, action from right motive not only be- 

 came synonymous with justice, but the positive constituent of innocence and the 

 very heart of goodness. 



The position of the absolute moralist could not be better ex- 

 pressed than in those admirable words : The " very heart of good- 

 ness " lies in action due to right motives and good will. 



I add the words " good will " because, with the attribution of 

 guilt or merit to actions according to the motives of the doer of 

 them, a certain freedom must also be attributed to the will itself. 

 Moral blame or approbation can not (as the universal custom of 

 mankind shows) be attributed to any being destitute of all power 

 of choice or of any control whatever over the actions he performs. 

 Prof. Huxley will not deny that " our volition counts for some- 

 thing as a condition of the course of events." 



An act of free will is no uncaused event. Its cause is the spon- 

 taneous self-determination of him who freely acts. 



But some noble words in the recent Oxford lecture specially 

 merit notice as containing in them an energetic repudiation of 

 the utilitary theory of morals. They are: f "We should cast 



* [November Popular Science Monthly, pp. 24, 25.] 

 f [December Monthly, p. 191.] 



