Evolution of Morals. 261 



rapidity, the contest for existence forces them into compe- 

 tition and conflict with their kind, as well as into the 

 struggle against the inertia or opposition of natural forces. 

 Thus the problem of life steadily increases in complexity. 

 It demands greater activities of mind and body, and the 

 demand induces the supply. Out of the desire and purpose 

 to live, and the conflict consequent upon action in accordance 

 with that purpose, — the inter-action of intelligent volition 

 in the organism and the stress of environing conditions, — 

 have grown all the splendors of the intellectual activities, 

 all the diversified wonders of organic structure and function. 



As intelligence increases, it is at length naturally per- 

 ceived that the welfare of the individual organism is largely 

 dependent upon the preservation and perpetuation of the 

 race. The latter end, after a time, to some degree supplants 

 the primitive impulse for self-preservation as a conscious 

 motive for voluntary effort. In the lowest organisms the 

 race is perpetuated without conscious purpose — sometimes 

 by fission, or automatic sub-division, each section or part of 

 an original unitary organism forming, when separated, an 

 independent individual. This process is automatically ini- 

 tiated whenever increasing size in the organism, or dimin- 

 ished food-supply, renders nourishment too difficult ; or 

 when other physical conditions over which the organism 

 has no voluntary control, operate to produce a like result. 

 The action is purely instinctive and purposeless. Higher 

 in the scale of being, intelligence co-operates more and more 

 with inherited instinct in securing race-perpetuation. Off- 

 spring require and receive more care. Many of the higher 

 animals will risk their own lives, or deprive themselves of 

 food, to protect or feed their mates or their young during the 

 breeding season. 



Accepting the Darwinian account of man's origin,* we 

 must conceive of him as emerging from brutehood possessed 

 of these two inherited instincts of self-preservation and 

 race-perpetuation. The historical period evidently consti- 

 tutes but the smallest fraction of the time during which he 

 has existed on the earth. Some six or seven thousand years, 

 at most, bring us to the beginnings of human history ; but 

 the facts of man's present condition, and the evidence of 

 ancient monuments and archaeological remains, render it 

 necessary for us to assume a period of several hundred 



* Darwin's Descent of Man. 



