sense of duty in man, so is it fatal to pure love in woman. Bring up woman in the positivist school, and you make of her a monster: the very type of ruthless cynicism, of all-engrossing selfishness, of unbridled passion.
There are eminent persons, I am well aware, to whom these conclusions will be extremely distasteful. Writers, whose names alone suffice to establish a claim upon our respectful attention, discourse to us of "independent morality." Professor Huxley, as I remember, somewhere protests with characteristic vehemence, "I will not for a moment admit that morality is not strong enough to hold its own." After all, however, the vital question is not what this accomplished physicist will admit, but what, from the nature of the case, is likely to happen. No doubt Professor Huxley, emancipated from belief in angel or spirit, still guides himself by the same ethical rules as before. I do not myself know anything of the early history of this illustrious man; but I suppose that, like the rest of us, he was brought up upon the Catechism. At all events I am quite sure that he is the product of many generations of Christian progenitors. What M.Renan happily calls the moral sap of the old belief—"la sève morale de la vieille croyance"—still courses through his spiritual being. His materialism takes credit for virtues springing from quite another source: "Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." He knows, far better than I do, the influence of heredity and of environment upon character. He is well aware how deeply rooted in the past are those ethical principles whereby human life is still largely governed, even among materialists. The question is. Can you uproot those principles and expect them to flourish upon a quite different soil? Morality in Professor Huxley, I can well believe, is strong enough to hold its own. But will it be strong enough in Professor Huxley's great-grandchildren? "It takes several generations for Christian morality to get into the blood," the missionaries in Samoa told Baron von Hübner. It will doubtless take several generations for Christian morality to get out of the blood. And then? Kant, a teacher whom Professor Huxley very highly esteems, held the existence of God and a future life to be necessary postulates of morality. Certainly, as a matter of fact, they are postulates upon which morality has hitherto rested. They have supplied the strongest incentives to duty, and to that self-sacrifice which the performance of duty usually involves. What is to take the place, in the generations to come, of those old spiritual dogmas? I do not know of any materialists who so much as profess to care for duty for its own sake. They are all agreed that personal interest or selfishness, of course enlightened selfishness, is for the future to be the foundation of ethics. It is from sympathy, they tell us, that the highest virtues must now spring. "Sympathy," they confidently maintain, "will impel us to seek the agreeable consciousness that results from the healthy exercise of the energies of our nature, and to promote it in others by
