In discussing the ground of ethical science some writers appear to hold that evolution explains all; but surely the illustrious discoverer of evolution never carried his theory beyond the material part of man. He never professed to trace the birth of ethics, idealization, science, poetry, art, religion, or anything spiritual in the anthropoid ape. There is here, apparently, not only a step in development but a saltus mortalis, a dividing and impassable gulf.

Our bodily senses we share with the brutes. Some brutes excel us in quickness of sense. They have the rudiments, but the rudiments only, of our emotions and affections. The mother bird loves her offspring, but only until they are fledged. The dog is attached to the master who feeds him, commands him, and if he offends whips him; but without respect to that master's personal character or deserts. He is as much attached to Bill Sykes as he would be to the best of men. The workings of what we call instinct in beavers, bees, and ants are marvellous and seem in some ways almost to outstrip humanity, but they are not, like humanity, progressive. The ant and the bee of thousands of years ago are the ant and the bee of the present day. The bee is not even taught by experience that her honey will be taken again next year. Still less is it possible to detect anything like moral aspiration or effort at improving the community in a moral way. Beavers are wonderfully co-operative, but they have shown no tendency to establish a church.

Of the science of ethics the foundation surely is our sense of the difference between right and wrong, and of our obligation to choose the right and avoid the wrong for our own sake and for the sake of the society of which we are members and the character of which reacts upon ourselves. This sense seems to me to be authoritative, whatever its origin may be. Different conceptions of right and wrong may to some extent prevail under different circumstances, national or of other kinds, giving room for different ethical systems, as a comparison of the ethics of the Gospel with those of Aristotle shows. Still, there is always the sense of the difference between right and wrong and of the necessity, individual and social, of embracing the first and eschewing the second. If the Christian system is found by experience to show itself essentially superior to all other systems and to satisfy individually and socially, it is supreme, and is presumably the dictate of the author of our being, if an author of our being there is.

The necessarian theory, which in this connection is still advanced or implied, largely accepted as it has been, I cannot help thinking is really traceable to an oversight. If in action there were only one factor, that is to say, the motive, the action would seem to be necessary and to be traceable in its origin apparently back to the nebula. But surely there are two factors, the motive and the volition. Of the second factor in actions which are matters of course we are not conscious; where there is a conflict of motives or hesitation of any kind, we are. Huxley at one time held that man was an automaton. I believe my illustrious friend afterward receded from that position. Yet on the necessarian theory automatons we must apparently be.

February 10th, 1907.