354 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 
Santal insurrection, were allowed to go free on parole, 
to work at a certain spot for wages. After some 
time cholera attacked them and they were obliged to 
leave, but every man of them returned and gave up 
his earnings to the guard. Two hundred savages 
with money in their girdles, walked thirty miles back 
to prison rather than break their word! My own 
experience among savages has furnished me with 
similar, although Jess severely tested, instances; and 
we cannot avoid asking, how is it, that in these few 
cases ‘ experiences of utility’ have left such an over- 
whelming impression, while in so many others they 
have left none? The experiences of savage men as 
regards the utility of truth, must, in the long run, 
be pretty nearly equal. How is it, then, that in some 
cases the result is a sanctity which overrides all con- 
siderations of personal advantage, while in others there 
is hardly a rudiment of such a feeling ? 
The intuitional theory, which I am now advocating, 
explains this by the supposition, that there is a feeling— 
a sense of right and wrong—in our nature, antecedent 
to and independent of experiences of utility. Where 
free play is allowed to the relations between man and 
man, this feeling attaches itself to those acts of uni- 
versal utility or self-sacrifice, which are the products 
of our affections and sympathies, and which we term 
moral; while it may be, and often is, perverted, to 
give the same sanction to acts of narrow and con- 
ventional utility which are really immoral,—as when 
the Hindoo will tell a lie, but will sooner starve than 
