Chap. III. 
MORAL SENSE. 
103 
sessing sucli virtues, having succeeded best in the 
struggle for life. My chief source of doubt with respect 
to any such inheritance, is that senseless customs, super- 
stitions, and tastes, such as the horror of a Hindoo for 
unclean food, ought on the same principle to be trans- 
mitted. Although this in itself is perhaps not less pro- 
bable than that animals should acquire inherited tastes 
for certain kinds of food or fear of certain foes, I have 
not met w 7 ith any evidence in support of the trans- 
mission of superstitious customs or senseless habits. 
Finally, the social instincts which no doubt were 
acquired by man, as by the lower animals, for the good 
of the community, will from the first have given to him 
some wish to aid his fellows, and some feeling of sym- 
pathy. Such impulses will have served him at a very 
early period as a rude rule of right and wrong. But as 
man gradually advanced in intellectual power and was 
enabled to trace the more remote consequences of his 
actions; as he acquired sufficient knowledge to reject 
baneful customs and superstitions ; as he regarded 
more and more not only the welfare but the happi- 
ness of his fellow-men ; as from habit, following on 
beneficial experience, instruction, and example, his 
sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, 
so as to extend to the men of all races, to the im- 
becile, the maimed, and other useless members of 
society, and finally to the lower animals,— so would the 
standard of his morality rise higher and higher. And 
it is admitted by moralists of the derivative school and 
by some intuitionists, that the standard of morality has 
risen since an early period in the history of man . 37 
As a struggle may sometimes be seen going on 
37 A writer in the ‘ North British Review’ (July, 1869, p. 531), well 
capable of forming a sound judgment, expresses himself strongly to this 
