anced that once felt dissatisfaction of the higher impulse,
by an oft-repeated satisfaction of it. In Book I, Chapter V, Sec. 1, we tried
to show that even Darwin seems not to have entirely avoided this danger of
explaining the moral from physical causes; while at the same time we
acknowledge that he otherwise esteems the realm of the moral, and that he
even finds the lofty position of man above the animal world still more
decidedly expressed in his moral than in his intellectual qualities.

But such an intrusion of the physical into the ethical is by no means a
necessary consequence of scientific Darwinism--only an ever-present
temptation of it. He who once admits that even by means of development
something new can originate, that even under the full influence of the
evolution theory there appeared in the series of creation entirely new
phenomena with the {390} appearance of life and the organic, and of
sensation and consciousness, and still more with the appearance of
self-consciousness and freedom, which phenomena no evolution theory is able
to explain; and he who takes into consideration the weight of that other
obvious fact that, in the origin and the growth of each single man, a time
in which he acts with moral responsibility follows in gradual development a
time in which he had but the value and the life of a cell,--such an one can
explain the whole origin of mankind according to the evolution theory, and
yet see something absolutely new coming forth with the appearance of moral
determination. All conditions of the moral determinations of the will may
be and are naturally conditioned, as, indeed, in this world the entire
spiritual life of man is certainly bound to the conditions of his corporeal
life; all preliminary stages of moral types which preceded the temporal
appearance of moral beings, and which surround us still, those stages which
appear in the animal world, may have preceded and prepared the way for the
introduction of morally responsible beings into the world: the moral
determination of the will itself nevertheless remains something new and
independent--something which transcends nature.

If this fact is once admitted, then ethics also has free play to establish
independently and render valid its principles. And then we have no longer
any reason to treat of the relation of the different ethical principles to
naturo-historical Darwinism; for this relation is that of absolute mutual
peace.

*