GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY 



respectively awakened by pleasure-giving and 

 pain-giving actions. And just as men's intellec- 

 tual conceptions of the causes of phenomena 

 become more and more impersonal as they are 

 extended over wider and wider groups of phe- 

 nomena, generating at last an abstract concep- 

 tion of Universal Cause, so free from the ele- 

 ment of personality that to less cultivated minds 

 it seems atheistic ; so in like manner, as the 

 sympathetic feelings are extended over wider 

 and wider areas, no longer needing the stimulus 

 of present pains and pleasures to call them forth, 

 they generate at last an abstract moral sense, 

 so free from the element of personality that to 

 grosser minds it is unintelligible. The savage 

 cannot understand the justice which he sees 

 among Europeans, and the mercy of the white 

 man is ascribed by him to imbecility or fear. 

 To him some personal end seems necessary as 

 an incentive to action. But the philanthropist 

 finds an adequate incentive in the contemplation 

 of injustice in the abstract. 



Thus the ethical theories, as well as the psy- 

 chology, of the schools of Hume and Kant, 

 appear to be reconciled in the deeper synthesis 

 rendered possible by the theory of evolution. 

 On the one hand, it is a corollary from the laws 

 of life that actions desired by the individual and 

 approved by the community must in the long 

 run be those which tend to heighten the life 



