ther in the scientific direction than he has seen fit to go. He should have placed his exposition upon a scientific groundwork, or have given the reasons for not doing so. His omission is the more surprising when we observe how far he has actually proceeded in the right direction.
It is sufficiently obvious that ethical method passes to a new stage of development with the establishment of the doctrine of evolution. If evolution be true, the foundations of old systems are subverted, and it is necessary to build anew. When he wrote his late elaborate book on "Methods of Ethics," Mr. Sidgwick could not see that evolution had much to do with the subject. If the doctrine had been developed in the universities, he would have probably found its bearings more important. He has found more in it for his second edition, and will be likely to discover still more for the third. Should he finally be compelled to admit that the relation is fundamental, it will be but another instance, of which the history of science is so full, in which what was at first insignificant comes to be supreme.
Dr. Bascom begins better. His first chapter is on "The Remote or Physical Conditions of Duty"; and if this starting point of a treatise on morality would have seemed surprising a generation or two ago, still more surprising would have been the considerations he has brought forward in this chapter. It does not require a very long memory to recall the time when evolution in any form and to any degree was visited with universal malediction. It was the one poisonous heresy of thought that could not be too severely denounced. But now we see the able President of an influential university planting this doctrine in the opening chapter of a text-book upon morals! If Dr. Bascom assumes rather than formally avows the doctrine, he is but doing what Professor Marsh says the whole scientific world must henceforth do—assume the theory, and go on. But let the author here speak for himself. He says: "The body has been brought up to its present serviceableness through so protracted a development, and the power of the mind is now so measured by it, and is hereafter to be so much extended by means of it, that a brief survey of this middle term between the spiritual and physical worlds becomes very desirable. . . . This power" (the plastic power of life) "has as many forms as there are kinds of living things. In the higher varieties of animals this plastic power which controls the structure, which receives and transmits tendencies, has been built up into a wonderfully complex and mysterious potency by the entire development of life from its first appearance on the globe. This is plainly true if we accept the theory of evolution with definite or indefinite increments. It is also true, though less manifestly so, if we believe in a series of distinct creations. . . . The first term in this plastic power is an organic one. This has every grade of complexity, from that shown in a globule of protoplasm to that manifested in the human body. In it functions and organs are developed coetaneously, are united into a life increasingly complex and single, are left susceptible to a thousand modifying circumstances, and are transmitted with a full entail of established tendencies." After pointing out the gradations of unfolding life through automatic action, instinct, and the higher complexities of mind, the author says: "Another consideration of utmost moment, in estimating our moral activity in its relations to the physical world, is that of inheritance. The power of to-day is not that of a century since, nor will it be that of a century to come. Nor are these forces, in their transition from one stage to another, inapproachable by man. On the other hand, the stream of descent is flexible at every point, as flexible as it can be and retain its general direction. Physical descent is made up of three laws. The primary and central one is, that all organic powders tend to pass from parent to offspring. There is a momentum in the waters of life by which they flow steadily along the slopes prepared for them. A second law, which directly modifies the first, and without which it would lose much of its beneficence, is, that organs and functions are subject to changes, which changes may be transmitted. A third law, of less significance, yet one of moment, is, that living forms easily revert to a long antecedent state. As the new conditions impressed upon living things, which
