From The Contemporary Review. ETHICS AND SCIENCE. Those who can look back, through the mists and storms of nearly half a century, to the comparative lull between the political agitation of the Crimean war and the intellectual agitation stirred by "The Origin of Species," will recall the publication of a book the immediate effect of which was much stronger than its permanent position in literature would appear to justify. Buckle's "Introduction to the History of Civilization" remains, indeed, a volume of much interest, and has its warm partisans, whose claim for it would chime in with all that was felt by its earliest readers; but a remark made on it by one who was among its most enthusiastic admirers on its first appearance Charles Darwin-recurs now almost as a verdict. "How curiously the fortune of books changes!" he said, on re-perusing that one shortly before his death; "what a stir that book made among us when it first came out, and now it is dead!" Its significance for the student of to-day is that of some ancient mark of high tide where the land has gained upon the sea-it records a limit that has long vanished. Its argument may be summed up in a few sentences. There is in the world such a thing as progress; civilization is a growing thing. Morality, on. the other hand (he assumed), is evidently a stationary thing. A good man at one age is much the same as a good man at another. Therefore civilization (he inferred) must depend on something which is capable of increase, and this is evidently knowledge. The momentum and the direction of progress are given exclusively by science. As one gives this bald summary of a book which took the world by storm, one wonders that its wealth of illustration and vigor of expression could blind its readers to assumptions so baseless. But Buckle, daring heretic as he thought himself and was thought by others, when he assumed that moral development was only individual, merely echoed a view then common to the thoughtless and the thoughtful. John Mill, in his essay on "Utilitarianism," urges that on the issue whether morality is intuitive or what he

called utilitarian-decided, that is, by considerations referring to general enjoyment-depends the further issue, whether it is an advancing or a stationary thing. "How so?” asked a reviewer (in words here necessarily remembered and not copied). "Why must we take this for granted? Why should not the general conscience be a growing thing, as well as the general knowledge?" The review, which is traceable to the pen of Dr. Martineau, was the earliest protest I can recall from contemporary literature against a view which ignores or defies the lessons of all history.

surely, than that the character and actions which men admired and approved, for instance, in the thirteenth century are different from those which we admire and approve now. Many people think that the good man of the nineteenth century is better than the good man of the thirteenth; a few think that he is not so good; the wise and thoughtful, who are also few, consider that he is both better and worse; but all would agree that he is different. The best of men were ready then for actions from which the worst would shrink in our day. Who, in our time, would burn a fellow-creature alive? Six hundred years ago it would have been the most ardent philanthropists who were ready for that action. We cannot say that philanthropy was unreal then and is real now. We may be very thankful that it is purged of noxious and hateful superstition; but if we suppose that it was in no spirit of love for mankind that a St. Dominic desired to burn a heretic, then we are equally blinded by superstition of our own. We cannot measure our approximation to the moral feeling of the past by our actual nearness to it. If we look back a little way we shall find ourselves among men who felt very differently from the way their representatives feel to-day; if we go back much farther we may find ourselves among people much more sympathetic with our own standard. Cicero and Horace would be more likely to agree with nineteenth-century men of the world than Dominic and Francis of Assisi would. Mr. Huxley or Mr. John

Morley would be more out of sympathy with Luther than either of them would be with Pericles. But, just as there is an increase of temperature from January to July, and a decrease from July to December, though a warm day in January or December may sometimes be as warm as a cold day in July, so there is a change in the progress of the ages-a change which some may assimilate to the first of these and some to the second, but which, one way or another, none can ignore. The change would generally be summed up in the word "progress"-we can, indeed, hardly find another word to describe it-although the implied decision that the progress is in the right direction is not accepted by every one. I remember it being abjured, to my great surprise, by Mr. Froude. I know not whether he has ever maintained in print a view which seems so much out of keeping with the general tenor of his work, but it was certainly serious at the time, now far remote, at which he expressed it to me, and it is one in which he was not absolutely singular. But belief in the change, with or without satisfaction in it, is now universal.

We do not need to open those records of the past which we label as history for proofs of a change in men's impulses and feelings quite as great as any in their beliefs, habits or knowledge. Men now living may remember, might possibly have fought, a duel. Certainly there is nothing in which people less differ than in their objection to a violent death. Yet a number of people who in our own time would be quite in capable of an act requiring so much nerve, were ready, less than a hundred years ago, to stand to be shot at. It was at least as dangerous to fight a duel, in the days when duels were a reality, as it is to jump into the water to save a drowning person. We do not explain the change in ascribing it to the influénce of public opinion. What makes public opinion? It is not as if one set of persons somehow made another set of persons go and fight; it was a practice which society imposed upon itself. Nor can we say that the progress of knowledge had much to do with the abandonment of a practice which lin

gered only among the classes attending the universities. We may say that the decay of duelling is a result of the spread of humane feeling, or of the shrinking of military feeling; both statements are true, and each is incomplete. In either case, it is an illustration of that principle of evolution, so strangely ignored till it was universally accepted, by which men's desires and emotions change from generation to generation, whether the change be regarded as loss or gain.

It is difficult to realize that the recognition of anything so obvious is recent. But much publication of new truth is, in fact, an illumination of the obvious; certainly this is true of the doctrine of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. That more animals are brought into the world every year than can survive to leave offspring, that those who do survive to leave offspring must be the fittest to survive, that their offspring inherit more or less of those characteristics which fit them to survive-these are not opinions. They may be described as a string of truisms. Some of them are also important truths. Long before the publication of "The Origin of Species" the moral bearing of heredity weighed with any wise master who engaged a servant, with any wise father who sanctioned a marriage; other things might outweigh it, but there it was. The resemblance of child to parent is, indeed, even more moral than it is intellectual. A father cannot bequeath his knowledge otherwise than by giving his son the opportunity of learning, as he might give it to any one else. He may not, it is true, bequeath his ideal of conduct-a Marcus Aurelius may leave a Commodus as his heir, but the very conspicuousness of that contrast marks it as exceptional. To ponder over the fact that every generation transmits to its successor some feelings and impulses derived from its predecessor is to discern the bearing of moral evolution. No one ever denied the facts, though, as translated into theory, they revolutionized the world of thought.

The influence of a new philosophy is a complex thing, and may be stated, from different points of view, with what

looks like inconsistency. If Buckle were living now, he might point out the moral vicissitude of the closing century as a striking illustration of what he had meant to say, though he would have to modify his dialect in expressing it. "Was there ever a greater change produced in the moral world," he might ask, "than that which resulted from the Darwinian theory of creation?" or, as he would doubtless have expressed it, from a knowledge of a true method of creation. And in whatever else we might disagree with him, we could not deny that the change, which may be briefly described as the substitution of a world making for a world made, was the greatest in our intellectual history. It was an alteration similar to that by which the law regulating the movement of an apple or a falling leaf was recognized as regulating also the movements of worlds vastly greater than our own. And in that case also a moral accompanied an intellectual revolution. The astronomers who, in the picturesque and homely words of Mr. Huxley, swept away much beside. The old mediæval conceptions of the earth, with the heavens above and a dark world below, though it had undergone much modification before the time of Newton, embodied and typified a whole system of ethics, which was destroyed only with the "cycle and epicycle, orb on orb," to which Milton alludes in the very crisis of their disappearance. The ideas of the moral world have been almost as different, since the time of Newton, as the ideas of the physical world. Everybody knows, more or less, what is meant by the spirit of the eighteenth century; it has come to be a synonym for criticism, scepticism, disbelief. How much of this is a result of the vast change which revolutionized men's conceptions of the physical universe is not equally a matter of general agreement; but there was surely some connection between the two things. The revolution which discarded what ordinary common sense had assumed, which taught men to invert the conceptions of tradition, and believe that the seeming stationary body was whirling rapidlythe seeming motion was imaginary; this taught men also to call in question all

their inherited views, it stimulated the mental act of rejection, it gave new theory the prestige of a recent and glorious victory. With that victory, the antithesis of heaven and earth disappeared alike from the physical and moral world. From one point of view heaven itself disappeared. The high "above" changed to the wide "around;" the words "above" and "below" lost their meaning. How wonderfully linked are the sensible and the spiritual worlds! We may repeat what has just been said of the former with almost equal applicability to the latter. The high and the low, to a great extent, lost their meaning here also. Earth, in its new brilliancy, attracted men's whole attention.

The change which took place then is strikingly analogous to that of our own age. What the discovery of gravitation did for space, that the discovery of evolution did for time. As under the influence of the first a law supposed only terrestrial expanded to fill the universe; so under the influence of the second, a process supposed complete in the six days of Creation, expanded to fill the ages of our planet's existence. The first change cancelled the antithesis of heaven and earth, the second change cancelled the antithesis between Creation and that unmiraculous condition which we supposed to have followed it. The stationary world vanished as the dark world had vanished, and we found ourselves the spectators of creation as we had found ourselves the inhabitants of a star. Of conceptions so vast as these it is difficult to say that they are merely anything, but, so far as we can concentrate our attention on their limits, we may say that the views of the universe introduced both by the Newtonian and the Darwinian science are purely intellectual. Yet there is no reasonable doubt that both register a moral change. All who ponder over the history of thought will allow that at the time when this earth was seen itself to be one of "those wandering fires which move in mystic dance," the secular interests of men took a new importance. If we turn from the great men of the seventeenth century-Cromwell, Milton, Jeremy

Taylor, Bossuet, and Fénelon-to the great men of the eighteenth-Walpole, Locke, Pope, Voltaire, and Rousseauor even to such survivals of the elder spirit as Berkeley and Butler, we feel that life has taken a new coloring, untinged by the hopes and fears that are associated with eternity. The moral transformation is not an unquestionable gain, the intellectual acquisition is a triumph of truth, and yet surely these two changes are not unrelated. The new world was a suitable environment for the new race.

But far more is this true of the moral change produced by the idea of evolution. An alteration regarding time is a more spiritual thing than an alteration regarding space. The principle of evolution concerns the whole future as well as the whole past. We cannot say it was active up to a particular date and then ceased working, nor can we say it is true of man's bodily organs and not of his soul. It is simply the name for creative activity everywhere and always. Such a conception cannot suddenly conquer the world without producing a moral result. The stir created by "The Origin of Species" was caused not merely, I think not chiefly, by the enforced surrender of the first two chapters of Genesis. It was the halfconscious recoil of a traditional morality from a new influence pregnant with revolution. From the first it was possible to discern that the new doctrine concerned not physical life alone. The Sabbath benediction under the light of evolution appeared in the future; the history of our planet traced a slow approach towards the golden age which had vanished from the past, every generation seemed to measure a step towards a clearer vision as well as a more complete development, and we might mark our approximation towards a better condition by the mere process of comparing dates. This, at least, was the first aspect of the new doctrine as it appeared under the guise of "the survival of the fittest." A principle which traced all development to accumulated variations from an original type added some inferences not indispensable to every theory of evolution. If the origin of new species was to be sought in the

eccentricity of individuals, a potential sanction seemed impressed on what had been regarded as transgression and mutiny. Variation being regarded as the instrument of creation, the direction of variation appeared a secondary matter. What was wanted was experiment. The action of Eve ceased to be a sin and became a duty. To adhere to the standards of the past was to arrest development. The burden of proof was thus shifted from him who would introduce the new to him who would retain the old. Because a relation, a custom, a moral attitude was right yesterday, it appeared, under the new light, likely to be wrong to-day. Our goal, then, must now be our point of departure.

Observe how this ideal has modified all that grouping of human relations which forms the framework of duty. We may say, with very little exaggeration, that whatever was a dogma to our fathers has become a problem to our children. We cannot take up a novel or a magazine without finding something called in question which half a century ago seemed as fixed as the stars. Perhaps the Ten Commandments were as little obeyed then as they are now. But their authority was then denied only by a few daring heretics, liable in extreme cases to civil penalties. Now we can hardly point to one which is not habitually and fearlessly called in question. Honor to parents, fidelity to the spouse, reverence to God-all have been denied to be duties; covetousness, theft, murder

all have been denied to be vices or crimes. Socialists in our day believe that it is right to take the money of the rich and give it to the poor-that is, to steal; Nihilists believe that it is right to put kings to death-that is, to murder; and a number of novel-writers and other writers believe, or at least say, that it is right for ill-assorted couples to separate and choose other mates-that is, to commit adultery. Is it advisable that a husband and wife should be united by a permanent bond? that the act which makes them one should be irreversible? or is change here to be always an open question? To debate this in the past was to start a daring heresy. Now it is to apply the principle of evolution. The whole question of sexual

relation has thus, for the fashion of the hour, entered the realm of experiment. When we turn those fictitious pictures of life which reflect the most important moral assumptions of a time more clearly than any transcript from expcrience, we find that a certain fearlessness in disregarding what used to be felt the limits of permissible frankness is now as sure to make a novel widely read, even if it be not remarkable for talent of any kind, as in former days it was sure to keep it from being widely read, even if it were remarkable for talent of some kind. Unreserve is the diviaing-line of science and literature, and the sphere in which it is fatal to withhold facts has in this respect encroached on the sphere in which it is fatal not to withhold facts. I remember the great writer, who chose to be known as George Eliot, answering a question of mine about John Stuart Mill's book on the subjection of women by asking me: "Do you not think Mill's views on such subjects are deprived of much of their importance by his want of attention to physiology?" I thought at the time that she was confronting a great change on its least important side. But the words were both a sign-post as to the direction which was to be taken by fiction and also the explanation of a fashion already discerned to commemorate the defeat of literature as much as the triumph of science.

The change by which the link uniting husband and wife has become a problem to investigate rather than a bond to reverence is not the only case in which the relations of the family have been transferred from the realm of religion to that of sociology. If we turn to the relation of parent and child, the influence of the new ideas is even more conspicuous. This relation was hallowed in former days by an association with that between the human and the divine. It is now as incoherent as the relations of civilized invaders to savage tribes. The notion of obedience being a duty at any age, is one that is not only weakened, it is, in the eyes of many who most represent the views of the age, almost exchanged for its contrary. Look, again, at fiction. All stories written for the young used to be more or less moral

lessons on this duty. There were bad parents as well as good in such stories, for instance, as Miss Edgeworth's; but, bad or good, their children, her readers feel, are under some sort of obligation to obey them. In any modern representative of this class of fiction, on the other hand, the question of obedience hardly occurs. The ways of children are studied and described as the ways of birds; they are interesting, not moral. We are called upon to observe them with a "wise passiveness." The very fact that children's dialect is so much more often put in type than it used to be has a certain significance. Imperfect utterance must always have had a charm for the fond hearts of parents, but it would have been thought in former days below the dignity of even childish literature to reproduce it in print. Now we must all be familiar with the endeavor, if we glance at children's books. Children are given us, we think now, rather to observe than to train. There is, indeed, a sense of responsibility with respect to those who bring them into the world which is something new and a vast moral improvement, but the children, once here, are hardly supposed amenable to direction or control, except such as they share with all the world, and sometimes not even that.

The deliquescing influence of evolution on the moral grouping of the past is even more conspicuous in national than in family life. The nation may appear a more artificial group than the family. None of the three great races of antiquity, whose influence we sum up under the names of Greece, Rome, and Judæa, were what an Englishman means by a nation, and the very fact that he cannot find a suitable term to name his own is an expressive exhibition of its comparative novelty, and, to a certain extent, of its precarious tenure. The sacredness of some sort of political unity is probably the oldest sanctity of civilization, but the passage from the city of antiquity to the nation of the modern world appears, to many of those whose influence an attempt has here been made to describe, part of a process by which all such limitations as are involved in national existence are to