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“Stern daughter of the Voice of God”

and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring for indulgence or want pining for relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will they find henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary experiences of utility?

Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of Morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such origin. The universal human expectation of Justice, to which all literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or rather such large experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of history can have known. Nor can “the set of our (modern) brains” against the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the consolidated experience of past generations, since the “utility” is all on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of Hereditary Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a stream to rise above its source. The lofty ideal of Goodness, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which have been the mainspring of heroic and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good nature and a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes, and distract him from his pursuits; but he has no longing to enthrone in their place a positive virtue, demanding his heart and life’s devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a “torpedo touch to aspiration.”