Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/343

Rh that wrong action tends to lower life and ultimately to extinction of life, should scarcely, one would think, be a sterile or inoperative one. Much would depend, no doubt, upon the mode in which the thought was presented by those who have it in their power to influence public opinion. That the minds of a large portion of the community have been so poisoned by the drugs of a false theology as to be incapable of responding to any teaching based on the pure laws of nature there is only too much reason to believe; but I should refuse to admit as valid against the evolutionist system of morals any argument drawn from their present condition or requirements.

The objections made to Mr. Spencer's explanation of the difference between right and wrong are very similar to those made to the Darwinian theory of the descent of man. In the dispute which raged more violently some years ago than it does now in reference to this question, an angelic character pronounced himself "on the side of the angels," as was but natural. It was thought utterly derogatory to man's dignity to suppose that his ancestry could run back into the brute creation; and so to-day it seems to threaten the stability of all moral distinctions to connect moral actions, by any process of filiation, with actions which, as we understand morality, present no moral character whatever. But just as no theory of man's origin can make him other than he actually is to-day, so no theory of the origin of morality can affect the fact that in the conscience of the modern civilized man there is a great gulf fixed between right and wrong. But, some will say, upon the evolution theory the highest morality is but self-seeking. Be it so, but if myself embraces other selves, if my personality has globed itself out till it includes a large portion of humanity, I can afford to be self-seeking without any falling away from nobility or disinterestedness. When Jesus said, "He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall save it," he meant, as we have always understood, that a careful study and pursuit of narrow personal interests would involve the sacrifice of wider and nobler interests; and that, on the other hand, by a surrender of our lower selves, we could rise to higher life. From whichever point we view it, he bids us aim at life, and so far he might be accused of prompting to self-seeking; but when we once see how life may be understood, and what it may be made to include, we perceive how pointless is the objection. It is indeed difficult to imagine how any person, except one who had been restrained from evil simply by superstitious fears, could feel himself less bound to do right and avoid wrong because he had been shown that right actions to-day are the lineal descendants of all those actions, conscious and unconscious, by which life has been preserved, and improved in the past, and that wrong actions claim their paternity in whatever in the past has tended to disintegration, degradation, and death. Who would not rather be on the side of the forces of life, in harmony with and aiding the upward movement of nature,