ke the conditions of
prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a
truly rational morality moral sanctions would have to vary with the
variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling
finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be
monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply
experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude
scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid
conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth
present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless. To
correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of
a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but
this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a
specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform. Genera and species
might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the
authorised direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no
predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle,
to each of the particular types of life generated on the way: as in
estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech
and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of
one language or age upon another. It is only in so far as, in the midst of
the flux, certain tropes become organised and recurrent, that any
interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from
generation to generation. Physical integration is a prerequisite to moral
integrity; and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organised
and determinate to aspire t