litarianism in the eighteenth century,
defined political and social sanctions through which the individual
could purchase security and good repute with action conducive to the
common welfare. But the nineteenth century has understood the matter
better--and the idea of an evolution under conditions that select and
reject, is here again the illuminating thought. No individual,
evolutionary naturalism maintains, has survived the perils of life
without possessing as an inalienable part of his nature, congenital like
his egoism, certain impulses and instinctive desires in the interest of
the community as a whole. The latest generation of a race whose
perpetuation has been conditioned by a capacity to sustain social
relations and make common cause against a more external environment,
_is_ moral, and does not adopt morality in the course of a calculating
egoism. Conscience is the racial instinct of self-preservation uttering
itself in the individual member, who draws his very life-blood from the
greater organism.

[Sidenote: Naturalistic Ethics not Systematic.]

Sect. 123. This latest word of naturalistic ethics has not won
acceptance as the last word in ethics, and this in spite of its
indubitable truth within its scope. For the deeper ethical interest
seeks not so much to account for the moral nature as to construe and
justify its promptings. The evolutionary theory reveals the genesis of
conscience, and demonstrates its continuity with nature, but this falls
as far short of realizing the purpose of ethical study as a history of
the natural genesis of thought would fall short of logic. Indeed,
naturalism shows here, as in the realm of epistemology, a persistent
failure to appreciate the central problem. Its acceptance as a
philosophy, we are again reminded, can be accounted for only on the
score of its genuinely rudimentary character. As a rudimentary phase of
thought it is both indispensable and inadequate. It is the philosophy of
instinct, which should in normal development precede a philosophy of
reason, in which it is eventually assimilated and supplemented.

[Sidenote: Naturalism as Antagonistic to Religion.]

Sect. 124. There is, finally, an inspiration for life which this
philosophy of naturalism may convey--atheism, its detractors would call
it, but none the less a faith and a spiritual exaltation that spring
from its summing up of truth. It is well first to realize that which is
dispiriting in it, its failure to