hics will follow the
same lines. In fact, it is following the same lines. There are few
educated people nowadays who would claim that morality cannot exist
apart from religion, they are content to say, as my correspondent does,
that in the absence of religion belief the higher aspects of morality
will suffer.

Our morality, we are told, is the outcome of all the human ages. I go
further than that and assert that it is the outcome of all the human and
of all the animal ages. There is no break in nature, and to the
evolutionist the development of the human from the animal is plain. And
it should scarcely need pointing out nowadays that nearly every one of
the fundamental qualities of man can be seen in germ in the animal
world. I only emphasise the point here because it is so often forgotten
that morality is fundamentally the expression of those conditions under
which associated life is found possible and profitable, and that so far
as any quality is declared to be moral its justification and meaning
must be found in that direction. The question of incentive we will come
to later; for the moment it is enough to insist upon the fact that
morality is fashioned, in its fundamentals, with reference to facts, not
with reference to speculative beliefs. Beliefs may influence morality
for awhile, but the persistent operation of social selection secures a
general conformity between conduct and the conditions upon which life
depends. That is the fundamental fact to be remembered in all
discussions of morality, although it is the fact that is most often
ignored. Ultimately life determines moral teaching, it is not moral
teaching that determines life.

Life not alone determines morality, but it determines religion as well.
What else is the meaning of all those discarded forms of religious
belief, those bodies of dead gods, that meet the student of history as
the remains of extinct animals meet the geologist in his unravelment of
the story of the earth's vicissitudes? They are the result of a lack of
adaptation to new conditions to which they could not accommodate
themselves. Once the gods lorded it over man as the gigantic dinosaur
lorded it in his day over lesser animals. And in the one case, as in the
other, a change in the environment brought about their doom. Natural
selection determines the survival of religions as of animal forms, and a
religion to survive must become increasingly utilitarian in character,
certainly there is