Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/386

370 fact of the transmissibility of mental as well as of physical characteristics, if not to the children to the children's children—a transmissibility whose sphere of influence in individual cases is not susceptible of definition—can not but heighten the feeling of responsibility, because we are thereby made aware that the consequences of good as well as of bad conduct extend further than we had supposed.

A few adherents of the development theory, including Darwin himself, have held that not the good of mankind, but the maintenance of his existence, is the moral principle resulting from it; and that feelings of pleasure and of pain are only the means which Nature uses to promote the exercise of life-favoring and restraint from life-injuring conduct; that the real end of all action is not pleasure and the avoidance of pain, not the greatest possible excess of pleasure over pain for as many as possible, not the greatest good of the greatest number, but only the most prolonged existence of the greatest number. The greatest possible endurance of species, or the mere maintenance of species, not their welfare, would be according to this view the chief moral principle. This position appears to us to be a difficult one.

The chief moral principle expresses that from which all of the rules of right may be derived, and accordingly means the highest rule of conduct, the highest moral aim of life, or the ethical highest good, and serves as the highest standard of estimation and judgment. Those evolutionists of whom we have just spoken start from a teleological view of the world—from the view that the course of Nature is governed by some purpose. But the majority of the Darwinians are opponents of teleology, or try to be. Rolph has shown that, in following the history of organic development on the earth, we can really perceive no tendency to an adaptation showing design, to the production of forms that may be represented to human conception as higher. Its result has been only to produce forms better adapted to what is around them; and the change just as often consists in a deterioration, even though some advantage is always gained for the creature. As not final causes, but efficient causes, working causes, have worn out the river-bed and determined the course of the stream, as it has formed its channel not with reference to its final outlet, but to the local conditions, so, as Darwin and his followers have shown, it is with all organic phenomena. The investigator has to break with teleology in all its forms; and, even in ethics, the question of the object, of the destiny of man, will have to be given up. This idea of a purpose or design in Nature, when we come to analyze it, of a preconceived and voluntary operation working to produce determined effects, presumes by necessary implication the agency of a will behind the causes which are leading up to those effects. It follows, hence, that there is purpose in Nature in the domain of man and the higher animals, because men, and in a certain but very much less degree the animals, form conceptions of processes which they strive to carry through; but that