UH. XXII.] GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY, 333 



danger. Hence it is not necessary to the maintenance of a 

 race like mankind that all poisons should be bitter, or that 

 injurious actions, newly tried, should painfully affect any of 

 the senses. The work of making the needful adjustments is 

 thrown largely upon the cerebrum, with its power of forming 

 ideal sequences like those formerly experienced, and of direct- 

 ing action so as to anticipate them. Here, indeed, we come 

 suddenly upon one of the conditions of human progressive- 

 ness, as above illustrated. 



We can now begin to see why man finds pleasure in so 

 many kinds of activity which are noxious to himself. In no 

 other animal are the failures of adjustment between pleasur- 

 able and painful states, and beneficial and hurtful actions, so 

 numerous or so conspicuous as in man. Though in the 

 adjustments upon which the maintenance of life immediately 

 depends, the correspondence is of necessity unimpaired, yet 

 in those less essential adjustments concerned in keeping up 

 the greatest 'possible fulness of life, there is frequent and 

 lamentable imperfection. Thus, — to take one instance out 

 of a hundred, — we continually see pleasurable states of con- 

 sciousness associated with hurtful actions in the cases of 

 men who ruin themselves by the use of narcotics. The fact 

 that men, who are so much wiser than brutes, should often 

 persist in conduct unworthy of brute intelligence, has long 

 formed the theme of much sage but fruitless moralizing. By 

 Jalvinistic theologians such phenomena were formerly cited 

 in proof of the theory that man is morally the lowest of 

 creatures, having been rendered thoroughly unsound by the 

 eating of the apple in Eden. It is needless to say that 

 science offers a very different explanation. It follows from 

 our inquiry into the causes of organic evolution,^ that the 

 adjustments which tend to maintain the highest fulness of life 

 can be kept up only by natural selection or by direct equili- 

 bration. Now we have already had occasion to notice that in 

 ^ See above, part iL chap. xli. 



