Evolution of Morals. 275 



and more helpful state of mind than remorseful self-depre- 

 ciation. "Do not waste time in compunctions/"' said the 

 Concord seer, in the spirit of the New Ethics. Longfellow's 

 "Let the dead past bury its dead," phrases the same high 

 thought : this is the nobler inspiration of evolutionary 

 morals. 



Praise and blame are indeed justly apportioned to incli- 

 viduals according to the degree of difficulty under which 

 they pursue right courses of action ; but the moral law is 

 ultimately concerned with something infinitely higher than 

 the task of justly awarding praise and blame for individual 

 actions. Its purpose is the development of the highest 

 life, both in the individual and in the social organism. 

 When it has achieved this result in the individual as far as 

 it is possible, by his conversion to pleasurable and voluntary 

 right action, shall it be said that it is no longer operative 

 in his life ? Let it rather be recognized that therein it is 

 completely operative. 



Another objection often raised against the evolutionary 

 ethics, is that it fails to recognize the freedom of the will. 

 In this freedom, it is said, resides the sole opportunity for 

 moral action. In the light of the facts of moral develop- 

 ment, the conception of uncaused volition in man is evidently 

 untenable. This conception, indeed, has no logical founda- 

 tion in theory, save as it is connected with some hypothesis 

 of a pre-existent will or ego — and of this we have no evi- 

 dence in nature, nor in the observed facts of a rational 

 psychology. The names of eminent thinkers of the meta- 

 physical school may indeed be marshalled in the support of 

 this dogma — Bruno, Leibniz, Kosmini-Serbati, Kant, Lotze 

 and others, as well as the Oriental sages of this and by-gone 

 generations ; but it is a doctrine evidently manufactured to 

 sustain certain metaphysical assumptions concerning the 

 nature of the soul and conscience, rather than a conclusion 

 deduced from the scientific examination of man's mental 

 constitution, unbiased by metaphysical pre-judgments. It 

 is contradicted by the unquestioned facts of heredity, and 

 by all the accessible data of a rational psychology. Kant 

 rests his doctrine of moral responsibility upon the assump- 

 tion of a pre-existent will — thus making the individual 

 man rather than his parents, ancestors or the circumstances 

 of his environment responsible for his nature. He admits, 

 however, that man is free to act only in accordance with 



