THE DESCENT OB ORIGIN OF MAN 167 



action familiar to the mind, renders its performance by so 

 much the easier. As Marcus Aurelius long ago said, "Such 

 as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character 

 of thy mind ; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts." " 



Our great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, has recently 

 explained his views on the moral sense. He says," "I 

 believe that the experiences of utility, organized and con- 

 solidated through all past generations of the human race, 

 have been producing corresponding modifications, which, 

 by continued transmission and accumulation, have become 

 in us certain faculties of moral intuition — certain emotions 

 responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no 

 apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility." 

 There is not the least inherent improbability, as it seems 

 to me, in virtuous tendencies being more or less strongly 

 inherited; for, not to mention the various dispositions and 

 habits transmitted by many of our domestic animals to their 

 ofEspring, I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire 

 to steal and a tendency to lie appeared to run in families 

 of the upper ranks ; and as stealing is a rare crime in the 

 wealthy classes, we can hardly account by accidental coin- 

 cidence for the tendency occurring in two or three members 

 of the same family. If bad tendencies are transmitted, it is 

 probable that good ones are likewise transmitted. That the 

 state of the body, by affecting the brain, has great i^ifluence 

 on the moral tendencies, is known to most of those who 

 have suffered from chronic derangements of the digestion 

 or liver. The same fact is likewise shown by the "perver- 

 sion or destruction of the moral sehse being often one of the 

 earliest symptoms of mental derangement;"*' and insanity 

 is notoriously often inherited. Except through the principle 

 of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot under- 



4s "rrjie Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus," Eng. translat., 

 ad edit., 1869, p. 112. Marcus Aurelius was bom a.d. 121. 



<' Letter to Mr. Mill in Bain's "Mental and Moral Science," 1868, 

 p. t22. 



« Maudsley, "Body and Mind," 18'? 0, p. 60. 



