ert Spencer, and
apparently, also, of Mr. Darwin, assert that in spite of the great
_present_ difference between the ideas "useful" and "right," yet that they
are, nevertheless, one in _origin_, and that that origin consisted
ultimately of pleasurable and painful sensations.

They say that "Natural Selection" has evolved moral conceptions from
perceptions of what was useful, _i.e._ pleasurable, by having through long
ages preserved a predominating number of those individuals who have had a
natural and spontaneous liking for practices and habits of mind useful to
the race, and that the same power has destroyed a predominating number of
those individuals who possessed a marked tendency to contrary practices.
The descendants of individuals so preserved have, they say, come to inherit
such a liking and such useful habits of mind, and that at last (finding
this inherited tendency thus existing in themselves, distinct from their
tendency to conscious self-gratification) they have become apt to regard it
as fundamentally distinct, _innate_, and independent of all experience. In
fact, according to this school, the idea of "right" is only the result of
the gradual accretion of useful predilections which, from time to time,
arose in a series of ancestors naturally selected. In this way, "morality"
is, as it were, the congealed past experience of the race, and "virtue"
becomes no more than a sort of "retrieving," which the thus improved human
animal practises by a perfected and inherited habit, regardless of
self-gratification, just as the brute animal has acquired the habit of
seeking prey and bringing it to his master, instead of devouring it {190}
himself.

Though Mr. Darwin has not as yet expressly advocated this view, yet some
remarks made by him appear to show his disposition to sympathise with it.
Thus, in his work on "Animals and Plants under Domestication,"[203] he
asserts that "the savages of Australia and South America hold the crime of
incest in abhorrence;" but he considers that this abhorrence has probably
arisen by "Natural Selection," the ill effects of close interbreeding
causing the less numerous and less healthy offspring of incestuous unions
to disappear by degrees, in favour of the descendants (greater both in
number and strength) of individuals who naturally, from some cause or
other, as he suggests, preferred to mate with strangers rather than with
close blood-relations; this preference being transmitted a