xist. We have been taught to think
that in the absence of laws based upon moral ideas, and in the absence
of an effective police to enforce such laws, nearly everybody would
seek only his or her personal advantage, to the disadvantage of
everybody else. The strong would then destroy the weak; pity and
sympathy would disappear; and the whole social fabric would fall to
pieces... These teachings confess the existing imperfection of human
nature; and they contain obvious truth. But those who first proclaimed
that truth, thousands and thousands of years ago, never imagined a form
of social existence in which selfishness would be naturally impossible.
It remained for irreligious Nature to furnish us with proof positive
that there can exist a society in which the pleasure of active
beneficence makes needless the idea of duty,--a society in which
instinctive morality can dispense with ethical codes of every sort,--a
society of which every member is born so absolutely unselfish, and so
energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its
youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.

To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of
our moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than
virtue, better than kindness, better than self-denial,--in the present
human meaning of those terms,--might, under certain conditions,
eventually replace them. He finds himself obliged to face the question
whether a world without moral notions might not be morally better than
a world in which conduct is regulated by such notions. He must even ask
himself whether the existence of religious commandments, moral laws,
and ethical standards among ourselves does not prove us still in a very
primitive stage of social evolution. And these questions naturally lead
up to another: Will humanity ever be able, on this planet, to reach an
ethical condition beyond all its ideals,--a condition in which
everything that we now call evil will have been atrophied out of
existence, and everything that we call virtue have been transmuted into
instinct;--a state of altruism in which ethical concepts and codes will
have become as useless as they would be, even now, in the societies of
the higher ants.

The giants of modern thought have given some attention to this
question; and the greatest among them has answered it--partly in the
affirmative. Herbert Spencer has expressed his belief that humanity
wil