MORALITY 



purified of superstition and turns more and more to 

 morality. 



The obedience to the "divine commands" which re- 

 ligion demands of its followers is often transferred by- 

 human society to rules that have arisen from social cus- 

 toms of subordinate kinds. 'Thus we get the familiar 

 confusion of manners and morals, of conventional outer 

 deportment and real inner morality. The ideas of good 

 and bad, morality and immorality, are subjected to 

 arbitrary definitions. In this a great part is played by 

 the moral pressure which is exercised by conventional 

 ideas in the social body on the conduct and minds of its 

 members. However clearly and rationally the individ- 

 ual thinks about the important questions of practical 

 life, he has to yield to the tyranny of traditional and 

 often quite irrational customs. As a matter of fact, 

 both in life and in the nature of the case practical reason 

 does take that precedence of pure reason which Kant 

 claimed. 



The tyranny of custom in practical life does not de- 

 pend merely on the authority of social usage, but also 

 on the power of selection. Just as natural selection in- 

 sures the relative constancy of the specific form in the 

 origin of the animal and plant species, so it has a pow- 

 erful efEect on the origin of morals and customs. An im- 

 portant factor in this is mimetic adaptation, or mimicry, 

 the aping or imitating of certain forms or fashions by 

 various classes of animals. This is unconscious in the 

 case of many orders of insects, butterflies, beetles, 

 hymenoptera, etc. When insects of a certain family 

 come to resemble in their outer form and color and 

 design -those of another family, they obtain "the protec- 

 tion or other advantages which these particular char- 

 acters give in the struggle for life. Darwin, Wallace, 

 Weismann, Fritz MuUer, Bates, and others, have shown 

 in numbers of instances how the origin of these deceptive 



421 



