318 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



by the action of a supernatural mind planning it or of a 

 supernatural hand achieving it ; which are clearly mere 

 words that convey no meaning. It is done by regular, 

 natural steps and processes which science is learning to 

 trace and exhibit to us as invariable laws, mysterious 

 and marvellous in the last result, indeed, but only, as all 

 ultimate facts and laws are and must be, from the laws of 

 embryonic development and natural selection to the law 

 of gravitation, although they, in the long run, relate only 

 to matter and its various manifestations. 



2. Thus, the new materialism seeks to draw renewed 

 life and nutriment from Darwinism. Can it be said to 

 this materialism, which basis itself upon doctrine of 

 evolution, that, whether there be or be not marks of 

 infinite wisdom and goodness discoverable in the entire 

 cosmic process, yet a God, intelligent and moral, must be 

 postulated as the Auther of conscience and the moral law 

 in man; a God who, moreover, still exists as a moral 

 Legislator and Ruler, and who will finally make virtue 

 and happiness coincident hereafter, as we feel they 

 should be, though they never actually are, upon the 

 earth ? This is Kant's argument for the existence and 

 moral government of God, reproduced in Mr. Matthew 

 Arnold's " something not ourselves that makes for 

 righteousness." 



But in answer to this we are assured, not merely by 

 the materialists, but by scientific moralists like Darwin 

 and Spencer, that from the circumstances and necessities 

 of the case, men themselves must have invented morality, 

 slowly but surely a conclusion which is confirmed by 

 Tylor's and Lubbock's researches into the primitive 

 history of mankind. The germs of all morality, we are 

 told, are contained in two primitive instincts the in- 

 stinct of self-preservation and the reproductive instinct ; 



