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We now turn to the influence of the Scientific Spirit on Morals.

Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-Scientific Spirit has almost necessarily been from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental. To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed the suggestion that moral intuitions are only results of hereditary experiences. “I believe,” he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, “that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” Mr. Darwin took up the doctrine at this stage, and in his “Descent of Man” linked on the human conscience to the instincts of the lower animals, from whence he held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he taught, would have grown up in any other animal as well endowed as we are, but those other animals would not necessarily attach their ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct. “If, for instance, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers.” (Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 73.)