UQ 



Proceedings. 



been shown by many writers, and especially by Professor Huxley, in one of 

 his best known papers. 



Again, engrafting upon Darwinism the views propounded by some of the 

 moral philosophers of the utilitarian school, especially Mr. Mill and Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer, he argues against the views which he attributes to them, 

 and apparently to the supporters of Darwinism generally, " that natural 

 selection has evolved moral conceptions from perceptions of what was useful, 

 that is pleasurable, by having through long ages preserved a predominating 

 number of those individuals who have had a natural and spontaneous liking 

 for practices and habits of mind useful to the race, and that the same power 

 has destroyed a predominating number of those individuals who possessed a 

 marked tendency to contrary practices," etc.* 



It is clear that these views are by no means a necessary part of the 

 doctrine of development of animals by natural selection and the survival of 

 the fittest ; but that they may be abandoned or disproved without any detri- 

 ment to it. 



The origin of purely intellectual conceptions as distinguished from mere 

 animal instincts is no doubt one of the great difficulties, indeed the greatest 

 which meets the evolutionist in taking account of the development of man. 



Of however low a type we may conceive man to have been at the com- 

 mencement, or even in the stone period (neolithic) for instance — however 

 much below the Hottentot or Bosjesman — still, in the mere possession of a 

 capacity for abstract ideas, a capacity which indeed was latent, but the 

 existence of which is proved by the large brain, the step was immense, indeed 

 infinite, and this has been recognized by Mr. Darwin and all the leading 

 supporters of the doctrine of development ; but to seek from natural selection 

 the origin of a particular class of mental conceptions, a class too which the 

 majority of moral philosophers deny altogether to be intuitive, and which 

 ^many believe to be a comparatively modern outcome of culture and civilization, 

 is surely a very unfair and inadmissible line of argument. 



The origin and maintenance of a race possessing a capacity for the higher 

 mental emotions and powers, which would appear to have been at its origin of 

 no advantage whatever to the individual in the struggle for life, is indeed a 

 great difficulty, the greatest the Darwinists have yet met. 



This difficulty has been propounded, in a manner which I think will be 

 considered by most minds to be incomparably more conclusive than as stated 

 by Mr. Mivart, by one who is entitled to be considered the leading apostle of 

 the Darwinian theory up to a certain point, the eminent naturalist in fact 

 who first publicly propounded it, and so led Mr. Darwin to publish the 



* "Genesis of Species," pp. 212-213. 



