Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/219

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34
RELIGION AND MORALITY

ethical one, the object of which is no longer the survival of the "fittest," but of the "best" in the ethical sense.

Whence came this ethical process Mr. Huxley does not explain, but in Note 19 he says that the basis of this process consists in the fact that men, as well as animals, prefer, on the one hand, to live in companies, and therefore smother within themselves those propensities which are pernicious to societies, and, on the other hand, the members of societies crush by force such actions as are prejudicial to the welfare of the society. Mr. Huxley thinks that this process, which compels men to control their passions for the preservation of that association to which they belong, and the fear of punishment should they break the rules of that association, compose that very ethical process the existence of which it behoves him to prove. It evidently appears to the mind of Mr. Huxley, that in English society of our time, with its Irish destitution, its insane luxury of the rich, its trade in opium and spirits, its executions, its sanguinary wars, its extermination of entire nations for the sake of conmierce and policy, its secret vice and hypocrisy—it evidently appears to him that a man who does not overstep police regulations is a moral man, and that such a man is guided by an ethical process. Mr. Huxley seems to forget that qualities which may be needful to prevent the destruction of that society in which its member lives, may be of