386 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



the moral sentiments as shown in the infancy and in the 

 maturity of the race. 



Above all, it is useless to turn to the origin, if we 

 would know what course of action our present moral 

 intuitions point to. To consult the dark oracle of the 

 primitive man, even could we reach the strange interior 

 of his moral consciousness, would avail us to this end 

 just as little as the careful psychological scrutiny of the 

 moral instincts of his nearest existing representatives, 

 would now avail us. In all such investigations, however 

 carefully conducted, we are leaving the light which is in 

 ourselves and round about us in the world of man, and 

 going into dark regions in search of it. That light is 

 nowhere to be found, save in the feelings themselves as 

 manifested and interpreted by ourselves, corrected by the 

 interpretation of the highest specimens of our species 

 who have had the same feelings in highest form in the 

 feelings of pity as we now experience it, in the love of 

 justice, of truth, of charity, of our kind, or whatever 

 other social or disinterested sentiment is strong within 

 us. The meaning of these principles is given in the 

 principles, and that meaning is action, to which they 

 unmistakably point ; but action regulated by reason and 

 advised by science, which give a commanding view of 

 the possible remote as well as the immediate consequences 

 of such actions. 



If, then, the evolution moralist would really obviate 

 the objections of the spiritualist or idealist, let him thus 

 acknowledge that the true meaning of our moral ideas 

 and impulses is to be read in their present full-grown and 

 developed form, as shown in the most superior spirits, 

 and not in their germinal form, whether as shown in 

 children, savages, or the doubtful traces of the primitive 

 man. Let him acknowledge further, as Herbert Spencer 



