384 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



sequel, that much of the apparent contradiction (though 

 not all) rests on a confusion between real and ideal 

 morality ; between the scientific generalizations of con- 

 duct founded on man's actual behaviour, and the higher 

 morality founded on the hypothetically perfect man ; 

 between the morality which aims to lay down more or 

 less definite rules for man as scientifically known and 

 placed in certain general relations to his fellows and 

 social environment, and the morality of the Kantian, the 

 idealist, or the intuitionalist, which severally require the 

 moral subject to follow the unconditional imperative of 

 duty, the dictates of conscience, or the lead of the great 

 ideals to which he is impelled by moral forces within. 

 There is confusion in idea, as well as incompatibility to 

 a certain extent in fact, between what science teaches us 

 from our nature and the exigencies of our social environ- 

 ment we must do, and that which the moral law, the 

 authority of conscience, and the force of ideas tell us we 

 ought to do ; though, until men's moral nature is both 

 more perfect and more in harmony with its surroundings, 

 they never can accomplish other than approximately that 

 to which their highest moral conceptions point. 



To the end of conciliation between the evolution and 

 ideal morality, there is only one safe position to be taken 

 up and held by the evolutionist, no less than by the 

 idealist or intuitionalist. Let the scientific moralist 

 maintain that whatever may have been the primitive 

 origin of our present moral sentiments, whatever the 

 history of the magic transformation of the self-regarding 

 into social and even self-sacrificing impulses admitted as 

 existing facts, that the true meaning and reality of these 

 last is to be sought for in the conscious feelings and 

 impulses themselves as now felt and manifested in us ; 

 and this wholly irrespective of their scientific origin and 



