CHAP, xvi REITERATION OF DARWINISM 179 



are utterly incapable of modifying that direction or 

 of altering the pace. 



Along with Mr. Sutherland's doctrine of history 

 we may take his doctrine of reason, which resembles 

 the other doctrine closely. There is no such thing 

 as reason. Applying natural selection to every pro- 

 cess, from the life of the amoeba to that of the saint, 

 Mr. Sutherland scarcely has room for reason in his 

 system. And therefore he shows us nature selecting 

 the fittest emotions in the form of so many physio- 

 logical processes consciousness being a mere blind 

 alley ; it came no one can say how or why ; it leads 

 nowhere. The appropriate emotions are organic to 

 our race, in total independence of the accident of rea- 

 son or consciousness. They might last if it lapsed ; 

 they are untouched and unaffected by it. It is a 

 practical nullity, and ought not to have troubled our 

 theories by existing at all. 1 



Passing on to morals, we meet with the great sur- 

 prise of the book. By " moral instinct " Mr. Suther- 

 land means sympathy. There is, he says, no instinct 

 which tells us what is right and what is wrong ; moral 

 opinion could not vary as it does if instinct were con- 



1 Mr. Sutherland ascribes emotions to a bodily source, and remarks 

 that Professor William James has reached similar views. One observes, 

 however, that Professor Lloyd Morgan speaks of the " almost paradoxi- 

 cal emphasis of Mr. James's views," and of " making them somewhat 

 less repugnant to common sense " by confining them to the first rise of 

 emotion, in contrast to subsequent emotions qualified by " association." 

 Habit and Instinct, p. 190. Dr. S. H. Mellone {Studies in Philo- 

 sophical Criticism and Construction, p. 249) states that Professor 

 Dewey has maintained the paradox with more determination than 

 Professor James, 



