thief or liar, or a born poet,
because the proper nervous structure has been fixed in his constitution
by his ancestors; that any moral act, so long as it is conscious, is not
ingrained in character, and the more conscious it is, the more dubious
it is; and that "virtue itself is not safely lodged until it has become
a habit"--in other words, till it has become an automatic and
unconscious operation of the nerve-cells, such a doctrine, in its
extreme logical results, destroys all voluntary and conscious loyalty to
principle, and renders man a mere automatic machine.

On the other hand Mr. A.R. Wallace, in combating the theory that the
moral sense in man is based on the utility experienced by our ancestors,
relates the following incident: "A number of prisoners taken during the
Santal insurrection were allowed to go free on parole, to work at a
certain spot for wages. After some time cholera attacked them and they
were obliged to leave, but everyone of them returned and gave up his
earnings to the guard. Two hundred savages with money in their girdles
walked thirty miles back to prison rather than break their word. My own
experience with savages has furnished me with similar, although less
severely tested, instances; and we cannot avoid asking how it is that,
in these few cases 'experience of utility' have left such an
overpowering impression, while in others they have left none.... The
intuitional theory which I am now advocating explains this by the
supposition that there is a feeling--a sense of right and wrong--in our
nature antecedent to, and independent of, experiences of utility."[188]

3. Theories which confound the origin of man with that of brutes,
whether in the old doctrine of transmigration or in at least some of the
theories of evolution, involve a contradiction in man's ethical history.
The confusion shown in the Buddhist Jatakas, wherein Buddha, in the
previous existences which prepared him for his great and holy mission,
was sometimes a saint and sometimes a gambler and a thief, is scarcely
greater, from an ethical point of view, than that which evolution
encounters in bridging the chasm between brute instinct and the lofty
ethics of the perfected man.

The lower grades of animal life know no other law than the instinct
which prompts them to devour the types which are lower still. This
destruction of the weaker by the stronger pervades the whole brute
creation; it is a life of violence throughout. On t