THE CONSTRUCTOR 229 



" good " and " evil " have no meaning till communal 

 life begins. Where there is no society there is no 

 sin. A solitary man on an uninhabited island can do 

 no wrong, but when Robinson Crusoe meets Friday, 

 the question of behaviour of one to the other arises ; 

 and conduct is ethic. Restraint on individual action 

 begins ; and the morality of the action is determined 

 by circumstances ; hence the relativity of morals, and 

 the origin of artificial codes which, ruled solely by 

 conventions, make a breach of etiquette a less 

 pardonable offence than the seduction of a woman. 



Upon the general basis of ethics Huxley speaks 

 with no uncertain sound : — 



Moral duty consists in the observance of those 

 rules of conduct which contribute to the welfare of 

 society, and, by implication, of the individuals who 

 compose it. 



The end of society is peace and mutual protection, 

 so that the individual may reach the fullest and 

 highest life attainable by man. The rules of conduct 

 by which this end is to be attained are discoverable — 

 like the other so-called laws of Nature — by observa- 

 tion and experiment, and only in that way. 



Some thousands of years of such experience have 



evolution and modern anthropology is making us realise that the 

 beginnings of morality are lost among the self-preserving and 

 race-prolonging instincts which we share with the animal creation; 

 that religion in its higher forms is a development of infantine and 

 often brutal superstitions ; and that in the pedigree of the noblest 

 and most subtle of our emotions are to be discerned primitive 

 strains of coarsest quality." 



