Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/595

579 less often in the exigencies of controversy than in an unaffected sympathy for the dumb creatures,—an influence to which these writers would have been equally exposed had they never dreamed of the evolution of species. And, after all, the question has no absolute importance for ethics. Suppose it were once for all established that man and brute are essentially akin; the foundations of moral science would be in no wise disturbed. The truth must not be forgotten that whatever the brute may be, we know first and foremost what man is; and our estimate of our own moral experience could not logically suffer, should we discover that all animate nature shared it with us.

So much for ethics versus evolution. The second stage of the discussion is devoted to consideration of the merits of a certain conception of imitative ethics. The question to be decided is: Do the facts and conditions of organic evolution afford a standard for moral conduct? This is the question that doubtless fills the largest part of the popular literature on the subject. The ethical doctrine of Nietzsche, in so far as influenced by theories of evolution, implies an affirmative answer to this question. The best known negative answer is contained in Huxley's famous Romanes lecture. The underlying conception is simply the ancient 'imitation of nature,' where nature is understood in a sense opposed to human society. Human ways are complex, variable, artificial, sordid, capricious, corrupt, uncertain of their ends. The ways of nature are simple, direct, unchanging, noble, efficient. When human reason is distracted, where else should it seek counsel but in the serene simplicity of natural instinct? Serious difficulty arises, however, in the interpretation of the standard. For though nature appears to be temporally uniform, she exhibits striking differences in the habits of her many species. What, for example, is the natural marriage relation? And what is the natural state or government? Does the animal, as soon as it is born, seek pleasure, as Epicurus tells us; or does it simply aim at the preservation of its primary natural endowments, as the Stoic holds? Such are the uncertainties that in former times attended upon the imitation of nature.