en that is interpreted! Some teach that
we must love all our neighbours but make an exception of soldiers,
criminals, and lunatics. They allow the first to be killed in war,
the second to be isolated or executed, and the third they forbid
to marry. Other interpreters teach that we must love all our
neighbours without exception, with no distinction of _plus_ or
_minus_. According to their teaching, if a consumptive or a murderer
or an epileptic asks your daughter in marriage, you must let him
have her. If _cretins_ go to war against the physically and mentally
healthy, don't defend yourselves. This advocacy of love for love's
sake, like art for art's sake, if it could have power, would bring
mankind in the long run to complete extinction, and so would become
the vastest crime that has ever been committed upon earth. There
are very many interpretations, and since there are many of them,
serious thought is not satisfied by any one of them, and hastens
to add its own individual interpretation to the mass. For that
reason you should never put a question on a philosophical or so-called
Christian basis; by so doing you only remove the question further
from solution."

The deacon listened to the zoologist attentively, thought a little,
and asked:

"Have the philosophers invented the moral law which is innate in
every man, or did God create it together with the body?"

"I don't know. But that law is so universal among all peoples and
all ages that I fancy we ought to recognise it as organically
connected with man. It is not invented, but exists and will exist.
I don't tell you that one day it will be seen under the microscope,
but its organic connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious
affections of the brain and all so-called mental diseases, to the
best of my belief, show themselves first of all in the perversion
of the moral law."

"Good. So then, just as our stomach bids us eat, our moral sense
bids us love our neighbours. Is that it? But our natural man through
self-love opposes the voice of conscience and reason, and this gives
rise to many brain-racking questions. To whom ought we to turn for
the solution of those questions if you forbid us to put them on the
philosophic basis?"

"Turn to what little exact science we have. Trust to evidence and
the logic of facts. It is true it is but little, but, on the other
hand, it is less fluid and shifting than philosophy. The moral law,
let us suppose, demands that yo