OBJECTIONS TO THE EVOLUTION ETHICS. 375 



If virtue is but the result of a convention, as Hobbes 

 affirmed, and as evolution confirms ; if it is in its essence 

 only a set of police regulations, conceived and drawn out 

 in the interest of the social order ; then, indeed, it has 

 no substance or reality. Virtue is then only a name, 

 and not what some of her deluded followers, faithful 

 even unto death, believed her to be something deep as 

 the central foundations of the universe, beautiful beyond 

 all else, and real as life itself; that towards which, above 

 all, Nature pushes and tends as her highest aim and 

 goal; that on which she has most determinedly and 

 passionately set her heart ; and that too which, albeit 

 her efforts seem slow and vacillating, and her progress 

 fitful or interrupted, she will surely at last attain. 



If, objects the moral idealist, morality is essen- 

 tially, as by implication it is in the evolution ethics, a 

 selfish compact or transaction whereby we engage our- 

 selves to restrain certain of our selfish impulses, for the 

 sake of a larger ultimate net return to self in a different 

 shape, and not necessarily to a higher self, then virtue 

 is destroyed in idea, as it assuredly will be in practice, 

 whenever this ethics is adopted and acted upon. For 

 assuredly the selfish man will seek, and justifiably, to 

 evade or perform imperfectly his part of the moral con- 

 tract, whenever he can with safety, and especially wher- 

 ever his supposed interests come into collision with those 

 of others. In short, with such an origin, virtue is effec- 

 tually destroyed ; and, indeed, vice not less ; for there 

 remains no essential or real distinction between them. 

 The difference is for us one of name, of convenience, even 

 of provisional names and of changing convenience. The 

 human world that we imagined the only moral world 

 becomes the most completely non-moral world, since man 

 is the only animal that, having a conscience, is able to 

 analyze it away, and thus escape from its authority. 



