288 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [XL 



Mr. Mivart's definition, the man who loves God and his 

 neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, 

 does all he can to please them, is, nevertheless, destitute 

 of a particle of real goodness. 



And it further happens that Mr. Darwin, who is 

 charged by Mr. Mivart with being ignorant of the dis- 

 tinction between material and formal goodness, discusses 

 the very question at issue, in a passage which is well 

 worth reading (vol. i. p. 87), and also comes to a con- 

 clusion opposed to Mr. Mivart's axiom. A proposition 

 which has been so much disputed and repudiated, should, 

 under no circumstances, have been thus confidently 

 assumed to be true. For myself, I utterly reject it, inas- 

 much as the logical consequence of the adoption of any 

 such principle is the denial of all moral value to sym- 

 pathy and affection. According to Mr. Mivart's axiom, 

 the man who, seeing another struggling in the water, 

 leaps in at the risk of his own life to save him, does that 

 which is " destitute of the most incipient degree of real 

 goodness/' unless, as he strips off his coat, he says to 

 himself, " Now mind, I am going to do this because it is 

 my duty and for no other reason ;" and the most beauti- 

 ful character to which humanity can attain, that of the 

 man who does good without thinking about it, because 

 he loves justice and mercy and is repelled by evil, has no 

 claim on our moral approbation. The denial that a man 

 acts morally because he does not think whether he does 

 so or not, may be put upon the same footing as the denial 

 of the title of an arithmetician to the calculating boy, 

 because he did not know how he worked his sums. If 

 mankind ever generally accept and act upon Mr. Mivart's 

 axiom, they will simply become a set of most unendurable 

 prigs ; but they never have accepted it, and I venture to 

 hope that evolution has nothing so terrible in store for 

 the human race. 



