62 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



average virtues. Speaking generally, man is a being 

 with an inherited leaning to both good and evil, to 

 neither excessively, though, from pressure of self or 

 circumstance, somewhat more given to the latter; not 

 much, however, and the degree may be exaggerated, 

 because there is of necessity much more attention called 

 to his vices, which must be frequently punished, than 

 to his virtues, which mostly pass without notice or 

 external reward. 



However this be, there is to be set against the exist- 

 ing evil the scientific promise of its future diminution, 

 the assurance of a slow tendency to improvement. There 

 is a slow, though admittedly a very slow, change in the 

 relative proportions of the tendencies that make respec- 

 tively for virtue and vice, and this alteration of the 

 existing ratio is in favour of virtue, in the direction of 

 the good. A reduction of evil, both physical and moral, 

 is discoverable through the course of history, and a 

 similar and still great reduction (as before remarked) 

 is promised in the future, when man shall have more 

 completely harmonized his nature with his physical and 

 social environment.* 



Thus, then, our species has not fallen from a perfect 

 or paradisaical state ; on the contrary, it has raised itself 

 by its own efforts, by the favour of Nature, by the fact 

 of natural selection, from a state low and terrible and 

 precarious to its present comparatively enviable position. 

 Man commenced his career with no very exceptional 

 advantages; indeed, like our present ll self-made man" 

 his nearest type and true representative he commenced 

 upon almost nothing ; and the accumulated intellectual, 

 emotional, and moral capital now possessed by the species 

 is mainly an inherited bequest, the result of the patience, 



* Spencer's Data of Ethics ; also, Principles of Biology, ch. xiii. 



