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128 NEW BOOKS. relates to things that do not exist, being first created by the animal itself. Darwin may be wrong, but his explanation if correct would be an addition to our knowledge ; his critic explains nothing, he merely gives a paraphrastic description of the facts to be accounted for. As applied to morality, however, instinct stands for something very much less complicated than the elaborate contrivances by which certain animals provide for their own and for their offspring's sustenance, and something also much easier to explain. Our author occasionally speaks as if Darwin and his followers supposed that human beings came into the world with a complete code of morality organised in their nervous systems, and as if this code had been built up by natural selection and acquired habit without the intervention of reason. If so they would have pledged themselves to a gratuitous absurdity. The thing to be explained is how disinterested actions come to be performed. Given a primary root of self-devotion, intelligence may be trusted to elaborate it into the loftiest ethical system ever known. Without that element reason can do no more than machinery without propulsive force. Now Darwin finds this element in sociality and sympathy, qualities shared by us with some of the lower animals. The members of a flock like being together and are distressed by prolonged isolation. Call this tendency an instinct or an impulse, there seems no reason why it should not be correlated with certain nervous structures and transmitted by inheritance to offspring. At any rate those who deny the assumption are bound to account for the general correlation of consciousness with a nervous system and for the established facts of mental heredity points not discussed by the author. In the next place sociality leads to sympathy, or perhaps it would be safer to say synergy. Gregarious animals co- operate for a common end, and occasionally defend each other against attack, even at the risk of their lives. And here Darwinism comes into relation with utilitarianism. If right actions are those which either directly promote pleasure, or indirectly contribute to it, by maintaining the vital and social conditions of its existence, and contrariwise with pain, then morality, so far from contradicting evolution, is just what we should expect as its result. Signer Sciascia, on the other hand, holds that true morality is not utilitarian, and that Darwin's theory will not account for it. A good deal of the discussion turns on the implications of sympathy. It may at once be admitted that Darwin was not a psychological expert, and that something has been learned since he wrote. It seems xmlikely that when one animal defends another against attack, or when a child in arms defends its nurse (as I have seen one do) the action is caused by a representative image of painful consequences. Creatures living together imitate one another, and to imitate the behaviour of the party attacked would often mean to join in repelling the aggressor. However this may be and it is a point on which the author does not enter in the higher stages of consciousness the pains and pleasures of others are sympathetic- ally felt in the full sense of the word, and become motives to action just like the original pains and pleasures of the agent himself. Here, according . to utilitarian psychology, is the genesis of disinterested action ; and here, according to Darwin, is the connecting link between animal sociability and human morality. Signer Sciascia, on the other hand, urges that such disinterestedness is a veiled egoism, and that to be actuated by a regard for one's own feelings cannot be truly moral. This, however, is to confound the intention with the motive of action. It is asserted by the theory impugned that all wills alike are determined at the moment of resolution by the greatest traction of pleasure combined with the least