94 Heredity, Variation and Genius 



Whether or not the moral law is so ineffably 

 sublime as, like the aspect of the starry heavens, 

 rightly to throw the philosopher into an ecstasy 

 of admiration— albeit such selfish love of the 

 human kind might not look so admirable from 

 the standpoint of a lower animal world ruthlessly 

 sacrificed to its uses — it is a law ruling inevitably 

 in a social evolution which could no more have 

 been and continue to be without it than the 

 universe could hold together without the law of 

 gravitation. Its imperative code commanding the 

 acts which " thou shall " do as lawful and right 

 and forbidding the acts which "thou shalt not" 

 do as unlawful and wrong, emerged naturally and 

 necessarily into conscious cognition as the for- 

 mulated induction of experience in the social 

 progress of the race. Men did not begin to live 

 together in society because they were social 

 beings and foresaw the advantages, still less be- 

 cause of a transcendental spark of moral intuition 

 anticipating experience ; they became social 

 beings by living together and finding their profit 

 therein. The unconscious conatus progrediendi 

 in the organic world became in due course the 

 conscious conatus progrediendi in them ; wherefore 

 in the make of man now is a conscious working 

 for righteousness which was not in him when he 

 was first made. 



As it is the unquestionable law of social life, 

 dimly felt or clearly discerned by seers in 

 divers times and places, that good actions bring 



