whose lamps are empty and untrimmed, and who, on a sudden call, can only stumble about in darkness. Evolutionary ethics are not discredited because there are those whose imperfect moral development craves inducements and restraints of. a more imperative nature than any system which appeals merely to reason and good feeling can supply. "But why," our correspondent may ask, "do you bring in good feeling? My complaint is precisely that, while the evolutionary system professes to dispense with feeling, it does not and can not really do so." We know this is a common idea, but it is not a correct one. Feeling arises when habits have become so consolidated that their origin and justification, if not forgotten, are at least overlooked, so that they seem to be, as it were, self-justified. Feelings and prejudices are of kindred nature: where there is feeling there is, generally speaking, prejudice; where there is prejudice there is always feeling. In feeling we have the stored-up energy of repeated perceptions, and it acts as a fly-wheel to carry us past many a dead point of balanced calculations. The evolutionist shows that moral actions are those which specifically tend to produce happiness—to make life as a whole not only worth living but capable of being lived, if we may be allowed the expression. We all want life, and we want it more abundantly. Evolutionary ethics show how life in general is promoted and enlarged by certain acts, how it is impeded and straitened and undermined by others; nor can there be any reasonable doubt as to the validity of the classification thus established. Mr. Spencer does not say to each individual, "You will in every case find your personal happiness promoted by every moral act you may perform, and the more moral you are the happier you will surely be." He might, however, say: "In performing any moral act from a moral motive you will be sure to reap a certain satisfaction—the satisfaction that comes from having placed yourself in harmony with a law that you feel to be universal in its application; but whether," he might add, "your happiness as a whole will be promoted will depend upon how far in your particular case such satisfaction outweighs any loss or suffering which the performance of the act may entail. That is not a question that can be settled on general grounds; it depends on an equation in which your own moral nature as at present developed is the most important element." In order to determine whether an act is a moral act, what we have to do is to fix its relation to life as a whole, its specific tendency to promote or diminish happiness. To trace its thousand possible incidences in individual cases would be beyond human wisdom, and would be of little value if accomplished. To appeal to right feeling—to come back to a point that ought to be made very clear—is to appeal to a force that we know to have been accumulated through the performance of right acts—acts which, each in their own hour, have yielded up to the moral nature the satisfaction that comes from right conduct, and thus furnished a fund of virtuous impulse for future use. Far, therefore, from there being any incompatibility between the sanction of reason and the sanction of feeling, the two are but one sanction; the only difference being that one is special to the act at the moment under consideration, while the other is the great closed register of past moral judgments. Of course, it is open to any man to say: "There is no morality in my composition, no feeling or prejudice in favor of what you call right courses of action, no perception of anything as desirable that does not make for my personal gratification; and therefore to me your scientific morality is equally without meaning and without authority." A man who spoke in that way would probably libel himself; but, in so far as we assume that he speaks the truth, we
