Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/104

Rh he will, if enlightened, do so, and deliberately too. And he will show in the act just as much and just as little charity as he would have shown had he lived where selfishness was best served by killing his enemy, and had he killed him. The intent, apart from the motive of the man, can have reference only to the means by which he seeks to get his ultimate aim. And such intent relates to accidental matters. If by a physical accident the selfish man grows up where you must speak politely to your antagonist, and treat him with great show of respect, then the selfish man will deliberately, and with conscious intent, do so; and if he grows up where you challenge your antagonist to a duel, he will possibly try that way of getting rid of an enemy; and if he lives among the cannibals, the selfish man, no more or less selfish than in the other cases, only by training more brutal in tastes, will torture and eat his antagonist. And if the doctrine of evolution shows that one of these forms of “adaptation” is more complete than another, or proves to us that we personally shall be most prudent in adopting one only of the possible courses, all this can in no wise tell us what aim in conduct is morally best, but only what means most exhaustively accomplish the selfish purposes of a civilized man. So intent is morally valuable only in connection with motive.

It is hardly worth while to dwell longer on the curious devices by which certain defenders of the application of the hypothesis of evolution to questions of fundamental ethics have tried to establish that the truths of evolution teach us that we ought