Present and Prospective 2 2 1 



natural as hunger, and stands in no less need of 

 scientific explanation. That moral qualities are 

 not dependent upon physical constitution, have 

 no physical connexion whatever, is an opinion 

 which, although fostered in the supposed interests 

 of morality, is really a hindrance to the growth of 

 practical morality. If one thing is certain it is 

 that all wrong-doing, whether error, vice or sin, is 

 avenged on earth ; not always, it is true, on the 

 individual wrong-doer, but somehow, somewhere, 

 on others bound together with him vitally in the 

 social system. Could men be taught to know and 

 knowingly feel this simple truth they might be 

 more heedful of their thoughts, feelings, and 

 actions than they are apt to be while they ignore 

 the stern law of vicarious punishment on earth 

 and relegate the recompense of their doings to 

 another life. Even for his own sake the evil doer | 

 might pause in his course if he bethought himself 

 that the habit of a life is the organic fashioning 

 of a character, and that a persistent system of bad 

 feeling and conduct means a steady deterioration 

 of character — means, in fact, the physiological 

 undoing in the mental organization of the fine 

 filaments of thought and moral feeling, the delicate 

 nervous tracery, which have been the gain of 

 human progress through the ages, and, being the 

 latest and finest organized, are the first lost in 

 every form of mental degeneracy. 



A sobering thought, too, it might be that the 

 mischief does not end with the individual life. 



