ON THE EVOLUTION MATERIALISM AND THEOLOGY. 325 



who, besides being braver, were more firmly knit together 

 by the common social bonds of mutual trust, a sense of 

 justice, and regard for the general good. The societies, 

 in fact, which, besides being braver, were more moral, 

 and had a more generally diffused conscience, were those 

 that were favoured by natural selection and survived. 

 And the scientifically established fact of the transmission 

 by heredity of acquired moral and mental qualities, 

 explains why modern societies have a greatly increased 

 moral, no less than industrial and intellectual capital, 

 since each generation starts with the accumulated inherit- 

 ance of the preceding, which, in its turn, it should hand 

 on to the next in at least undiminished amount. We to- 

 day are " the heirs of all the ages," morally no less than 

 intellectually. It is true, some societies may be in a 

 state of moral retrogression; there may be a period of 

 almost general moral degeneracy, as in the decline of the 

 Roman Empire before Christianity arose; but there 

 comes, as then, an epoch of reformation, a new moral illu- 

 mination, often brought about by one superior spirit, who, 

 mistaking his own enthusiasm and the higher intensity 

 of his own moral feelings for a divine voice, announces 

 himself as specially commissioned from heaven to pro- 

 claim anew the moral law and the will of God. And by 

 the powerful contagion of a great example and a great 

 personality, through the fact of sympathy existing in the 

 mass of men, the great prophet or moral reformer has 

 been able to communicate in a measure his state of soul 

 to others, and so at length to raise society to the height 

 it had lost, or even to a still higher moral level. 



Thus is to be explained the existence of conscience, 

 and even, having regard to long periods, a continual 

 increase in the clearness and range of its moral light. 

 Our moral dispositions are thus strictly an inherited 



