fore the
bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one's fellow; the moral
sense or conscience is the outcome of social relations, themselves the
outcome of the need of living..... While the lower instincts, as hunger,
passion, and thirst for vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring
or satisfying as the higher feelings which crave for society and
sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however gratifying for the
moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret that he had thus
given way, and by resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at
last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit,
that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses..... Morals
are relative, not absolute; _there is no fixed standard of right and
wrong_ by which the actions of all men throughout all time are
measured..... That which man calls sin is shown to be more often due to
his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack
of imagination, than to his willfulness." Clodd adds that if conduct has
been made to rest on _"supposed divine commands_ (!) as to what man
shall and shall not do," that is an assumption which at best serves to
restrain the "brutal and ignorant."

J. B. Warren, of the University of California, has well stated the
effects of the evolutionary theory on religion and morals:

"Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from that mental and
moral dignity that is always recognized as belonging to them, and to
place them on an essential level with the brute creation--even with the
lowest forms of vegetable and animal existence. According to that
theory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind so much as in
the degree of development. Mr. Darwin himself was troubled about the
value of his own convictions, on the ground that his mind was evolved
from that of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own mental
actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because of the essential
identity between his mind and that of the lowest creatures that live in
the mud of our swamps. Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this
theory to degrade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades the
moral nature and faculties of man, and undermines the very foundations
of moral and religious principle, in that it teaches that man is only a
better developed brute--the natural result being that man is no more
under moral obligation than the brute, or has no different b