Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/698

 away to-morrow, men would breed it afresh before to-morrow's tomorrow by their errors, their excesses, their wrong-doings of all sorts. Rightly, then, may the scientific inquirer echo the words of the preacher, that however prosperous a man may have seemed in his life, judge him not blessed before his death; for he shall be known in his children: they shall not have the confidence of their good descent. In sober truth, the lessons of morality which were proclaimed by the prophets of old, as indispensable to the stability and well-being of families and nations, were not mere visions of vague fancy; founded upon actual observation and intuition of the laws of nature working in human events, they were insights into the eternal truths of human evolution.

Whether, then, man goes upward or downward, undergoes development or degeneration, we have equally to do with matters of stern law. Provision has been made for both ways; it has been left to him to find out and determine which way he shall take. And it is plain that he must find the right path of evolution, and avoid the wrong path of degeneracy, by observation and experience, pursuing the same method of positive inquiry which has served him so well in the different sciences. Being preëminently and essentially a social being, each one the member of one body—the unit, that is, in the social organism—the laws which he has to observe and obey are not the physical laws of nature only, but also those higher laws which govern the relations of individuals in the social state. If he make his observations sincerely and adequately in this way, he can not fail to perceive that the laws of morality were not really miraculous revelations from heaven any more than was the discovery of the law of gravitation, but that they were essential conditions of social evolution, and were learned practically by the stern lessons of experience. He has learned his duty to his neighbor as he has learned his duty to nature; it is implicit in the constitution of a complex society of men dwelling together in peace and unity, and has been revealed explicitly by the intuition of a few extraordinary men of sublime moral genius.

As it is not a true, it can not be a useful, notion to foster that morality was the special gift to man, and is the special property of any theological system, and that its vitality is bound up essentially with the life of any such creed. The golden rule of morals itself—"Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you"—was perceived and proclaimed long before it received its highest Christian expression. It is not, indeed, religious creed which has invented and been the basis of morality, but morality which has been the bulwark