Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/385

Rh moral nature. Moral progress consists, not in men coming nearer to their ideals, but in their ideals reaching a higher plane.

This theory shows us how dependent man is upon his race, and how erroneous it is to separate him from that connection. That the faculty of conscience is a result of the adaptation of man to the conditions of social existence appears to he doubted by no adherent of the theory of development; but the exponents of the doctrine vary greatly in their views of the manner in which the moral conceptions arise in individual life. Some regard them as to a greater or less extent instinctive, or transmitted by inheritance from the accumulated experience of ancestors; while others are inclined to accord a more prominent agency in the matter to training. We may apparently, however, presume that that which is practically the most wholesome will endure in the character, provided the teacher does not trust too much to the innate moral instincts, but recognizes that, while his child has the qualities requisite to his becoming a moral man under favorable conditions, this is not sure to be the case if those conditions are wanting, and therefore exercises extreme care in moral instruction.

We turn next to the answer to the question, What is the bearing of the development theory on the practical part of ethics? Man's place in Nature, as determined by that theory, is very different from that indicated in the older ideas of men; just as the Nature in which man finds himself set is not the Nature that existed in the conceptions of the past. The new conception of man and his morals again approaches, in many respects, that which was implied in the ethics of classical antiquity. Man no longer stands outside of Nature, but within it, as one of its integral parts. He is subject to the same laws of life as the animals. All in him, like all around him, is a product of natural, regular development. Even his moral part is not something laid upon him from outside of Nature, but something which has been shaped out of his own nature, molding itself according to the conditions of his existence. To an ethicist who accepts this view, morals will appear an affair of humanity and for humanity—for humanity on earth; and will give the most comprehensive construction of the saying of Christ, that man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man. We can not perceive that this view involves any practically destructive tendencies; and there are not a few distinguished men who avow the belief that there is no irreconcilable variance between evolution and religion.

With this view of the place of man in Nature, the ethicist can not easily oppose the doctrine that the same legality rules in the human will as in all the other processes of Nature. Even in the matter of the appearance of new individuals, the development theory admits no void in the endless chain of causation; for the dispositions which man brings into the world are, in consequence of it, nothing else than a product of the energies of his predecessors. The recognition of the