are to find the direction in which society is moving, we are to discover the goal toward which this movement tends, and this object of life, once formulated, is to give us our moral code.”
Again, however, the idealist objects. This, he admits, is a view higher, no doubt, than the preceding; but is it a clear and consistent view? Will it bear criticism? In one respect, as appears to him, it fails badly. However certain and valuable the facts about evolution may be, the theory that founds morality wholly upon these facts of evolution is defective, because it confuses the notion of evolution with the notion of progress, the conception of growth in complexity and definiteness with the conception of growth in moral worth. The two ideas are not necessarily identical. Yet their identity is assumed in this theory. How does it follow that the state toward which a physical progress, namely, evolution, tends, must be the state that is to meet with moral approval? This is not to be proved unless you have already done the very thing that the doctrine of evolution wishes to teach you to do, that is, unless you have already formed a moral code, and that independently of what you know of the facts of natural evolution. Why is the last state in an evolution better than the former states? Surely not because it is the last stage, surely not because it is physically more complex, more definite, or even more permanent; but solely because it corresponds to some ideal that we independently form. Why should my ideal necessarily correspond with reality? Why should what I approve turn out to be that which ex-
