374 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



More especially, it is argued that the moral casuist 

 will be disposed to rate the authority of conscience lightly 

 when he is further informed that conscience itself, this 

 inward monitor and light, together with our inherited 

 tendency to certain virtues if not too costly in their 

 practice, were the slow products of a process whose 

 essential feature was the desperate individual struggle 

 for life. And how conscience, the absolute commanding 

 voice, the warning and seemingly unearthly light, could 

 be born on such a battle-field ; how morality, that was 

 to be the mitigator and moderator of the wild and selfish 

 struggle, could at all arise in the brief pauses of the 

 strife, how it could be evoked out of the very strife 

 which itself was partly to heal, or how emerge from the 

 moral chaos, to compose which was its chief business, 

 has not been at all satisfactorily explained to us. For 

 to say that savage societies and tribes, as a first condi- 

 tion of vigorous external war, must first have secured 

 some harmony and peace within, must have secured 

 some mutual understanding amongst the internal units, 

 amounting to a low sort of morality, is not a sufficient 

 explanation of the height and disinterested sacrifice to 

 which moral conduct may reach, even amongst savage 

 tribes, notwithstanding all their immorality. Some 

 other and higher origin still seems requisite to make the 

 moral feelings do their work. Even to give the dog his 

 fidelity and affection, the ant its courage and devotion to 

 the interest of the colony, asks for a higher origin than 

 the instinct of self-preservation or the fear of punish- 

 ment, as these virtues in the lower animals require even 

 now some higher prompting to their practice. 



But if, indeed, from such an origin and by such a 

 route virtue really reached the earth, men may well 

 repeat the desperate sarcasm of Brutus 



There, vile jade Virtue, thou'rt proved but a word ! 



