Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/27

Rh lower nature by the power of educating or subduing them, and by all those varying relations involved in the mystery of life.

The distinctive position of man, as an animal placed at the head of the animal world, necessarily creates serious responsibility on the part of the higher towards the lower creature.

This basis of moral responsibility extends in kind, it not in degree, to all life. It necessitates a directing conscience, which shall guide all our intellectual and practical relations with every category of life.

This moral element enters unavoidably into our treatment of animal life from its lowest to its highest form. Our treatment of a monkey or a prince contains an element of moral attitude which does not exist in our relation to inorganic Nature.

It is a difference of kind as well as of degree, which it is blindness to ignore.

The divergence which now exists between some biological investigators and their critics rests upon the failure to recognise that moral error may engender intellectual error.

The special subject which has produced this