258 Evolution of Morals. 



Mr. Savage, " A change of front of the Universe." It is 

 the passage of man, in his mental estate, from dependent 

 childhood to self-reliant manhood — always a critical and 

 dangerous period in the history of the individual, none the 

 less critical and dangerous in the life of a nation or a civil- 

 ization. Heretofore the ethical systems of the world have, 

 in the main, rested on the sanctions of theology — upon 

 man's thought of God — instead of upon the Divine Reality 

 as revealed in the nature of things. It has been assumed 

 that man's supreme obligations were due to God or the gods, 

 as he conceived them, and that they were enforced by a sys- 

 tem of rewards and penalties to be bestowed or inflicted in 

 a future state of existence. The new philosophy affirms 

 that man's primary obligation is to his fellow-man — that 

 duty grows out of the necessities of social communion j that 

 it is founded in the nature of things, instead of in the 

 arbitrary will of an absent deity ; that its penalties are not 

 extrinsic but intrinsic — that they are registered immedi- 

 ately on the tablets of character, and their enforcement is 

 dependent upon no speculative beliefs, whatever may be 

 the theological implications involved in such beliefs. The 

 old sanctions, resting on theology, are losing their force 

 and efficacy in all thinking minds. A few only, as yet, 

 comprehend the significance and bearing of modern scien- 

 tific thought, and especially of the doctrine of evolution, 

 upon the foundations of morality ; hence the assumed and 

 not altogether imaginary danger of a " moral interregnum " 

 — a temporary lapse into laxity of thought and depravity 

 of life. 



Intuitional metaphysics joins with theology in the at- 

 tempt to discredit the foundations of evolutionary ethics. 

 The sanctions of morality, it declares, rest not indeed upon 

 the arbitrary mandates of deity, but upon the nature of the 

 human mind. The sense of obligation is a primary intui- 

 tion of consciousness. It has had no causal genesis — no 

 historical evolution. Its "ought" is the "categorical im- 

 perative," which cannot be analyzed, scientifically investi- 

 gated, or traced to any less definite or coherent substratum 

 of primitive impulse. The intuitive system appeals for 

 rational recognition by its fundamental assumption of the 

 supremacy of reason, and affirms its competence to deal with 

 the problems of philosophy and psychology by the deductive 

 or a priori method, independent of the facts of experience. 



