xxviii THE DARWIN CENTENARY. [Februarys, 



on morals after the pattern of a treatise on geometry. A few- 

 fundamental principles were taken up as having ultimate and un- 

 questioned authority, an authority analogous to the definitions and 

 axioms of a mathematical treatise; then the attempt was made to 

 deduce from them a complete system of ethical maxims. As we 

 peruse the volume now, we see in it, as in a mirror, the moral 

 features of the character of the author. It is clear that he had 

 arrived at a high stage in his ethical development, that benevolence, 

 justice, veracity, obedience to law, and all the rest, were principles 

 sacred to him — as they should be. And we can also see that he 

 was a prudent man, with a wholesome tendency to check even good 

 principles which seem in danger of running out into riotous excess. 

 Does he not tell us unequivocally that the command " Thou shalt 

 not lie," is absolute and unequivocal; and does he not, when in a 

 later chapter he considers certain cases in which a strict adherence to 

 truth would appear to precipitate grave disaster, prudently refuse to 

 give us counsel, and leave us to the uncertain dictates of our be- 

 wildered conscience? How can we expect of him that he bring 

 to an end a strife between two ethical principles, that of veracity and 

 that of benevolence, equally independent, underived, ultimate, 

 neither of which can abate one jot of its authority? In the nature 

 of the case, our only refuge seems to be in an illogical compromise. 

 Ethics, so conceived, can scarcely be called science. 



Of the earlier condition of that science which studies man as 

 organized into societies, a science which comprises a whole group of 

 subsidiary sciences, there are others here better qualified to speak 

 than atn I. But it appears self-evident that, in so far as the nature 

 of man is regarded as a thing to be accepted rather than to be 

 accounted for, a limit is set to the province of explanation in all 

 those sciences which concern themselves with the study of the social 

 organism in its various phases and in the course of its development. 

 That province is immeasurably widened when description is re- 

 garded as only a first step, the preliminary to a study of origins. 

 It wall be admitted by all that description once played a more 

 exclusive role in the study of social phenomena than it does in our 

 day. 



That a revolution has taken place in the sciences upon which I 



