1909-] FULLERTON— DARWIN AND MENTAL SCIENCES. xxxi 



be despised in any instance, but never to be accepted as a last 

 standard which shall remain fixed and unchangeable. 



The ethical philosopher has come to view his science from the 

 same standpoint. He is concerned with rights and duties; man as 

 he studies him is necessarily a social creature, standing in more or 

 less complex relations with his fellow man. Man as a moral being 

 is a constituent part of a greater organism, the family, the tribe, the 

 state, humanity as a whole. The greater organism has a life history, 

 somewhat analogous to his own; it is unfolding a life which, begin- 

 ning with something relatively simple, comes to reveal in its later 

 stages an indefinitely greater degree of complexity. It is to be 

 expected that the rights and duties that express the relations of man 

 to man in the social organism should take no new aspects as the 

 relations themselves become more complex or come to be better 

 understood. It is inconceivable that the same qualities of mind 

 and character should, under widely varying conditions, call forth 

 the same degree of approval, or be stamped as detrimental and to 

 be discouraged. In other words, it is inconceivable that the social 

 conscience should be an unvarying thing, unadapted to its setting, 

 taking no note of those relations which are the very ground of its 

 being. Moral codes must vary, if they are to be significant of the 

 life of a community; actual ideals must be abandoned for better 

 ideals, if men are to rise to more enlightened conceptions, and to em- 

 body them in a higher life. Ethics can reverence everyman's con- 

 science, regarding it as the expression of the stage of moral develop- 

 ment to which, for certain reasons, he has managed to climb. It 

 can regard no man's conscience as infallible, inexplicable, an arbi- 

 trary limit to further development. 



In speaking as I have of ethics, I have virtually described the 

 attitude of the modern man to the social and historical sciences 

 generally. It is impossible for me in the brief time at my command 

 to dwell at length upon these disciplines. Suffice it to say that 

 whether men are studying with the anthropologist, the differences 

 which characterize races and peoples; with the sociologist, the 

 general laws of the evolution of human societies, or the special 

 institutions which are now the subject of such detailed and laborious 

 investigation ; with the historian, the life history of a community, 



